TIMELY RETURN
It doesn’t do everything smoothly, but AGE OF EMPIRES III: DEFINITIVE EDITION the easiest way to get into this classic RTS series. still offers
Honestly, Age of Empires III comes from an era of 3D games that don’t exactly beg to be remastered. It’s a game where increased resolutions serve to highlight the half-baked animations that were previously hidden among pixels. So a remaster of this is like watching historical reenactments in 4K only to find that they’re performed by animatronic soldiers. Yet while there’s not much gained in this definitive edition, not all is lost either.
Series fans will know the drill in Age of Empires III: plonk down a town centre anywhere on a map, build villagers, and scurry around extracting food, wood, and gold from the earth that you use to build armies, improve your technologies, and wipe out your enemies.
One of the most joyous things about Age of Empires has always been the faction variety and the tradition continues here. You have 16 civilisations to choose from, and each has a host of unique units and quirks that make them distinctive.
There are two all-new civs in the definitive edition, both with some interesting bonuses: Sweden gets cheap mercenaries and charming wooden torps (quaint little huts) that gather resources, while Inca can garrison military in many of its buildings and use priestesses to woo enemies over to your side.
Age of Empires III requires cohesive strategy, fast clicking, and the mental motivation to learn a thousand hotkeys. It’s demanding and intense, but also deceptively simple, and a whole lot less fiddly than its predecessors.
You now only have three resources to worry about instead of four and you no longer need special buildings to store resources, cutting down on menial micromanagement. There’s an enjoyable card system too, which lets you set up a deck between battles, then call in supplies from your home city on a timer.
All this makes for a fast-flowing game that condenses centuries of progress into battles that last between ten minutes and an hour. It’s a satisfying journey across hundreds of years surrounding the colonial era, punctuated by flashy new units that reflect your progress.
WHAT IS IT?
A modestly remastered version of an old-school real-time strategy game
DEVELOPER Forgotten Empires
PUBLISHER Xbox Game Studios
REVIEWED ON Intel i7- 4790k, Radeon 5700XT, 16GB RAM
MULTIPLAYER Yes
The problems with Age of Empires III start when you zoom in.
LINK ageofempires.com/ games/aoeiii