Finally the moment I have been waiting for... I have always loved AoE and started playing it when I was around 10 years old. But after a few games I am thus far let down...
Intro:
As far as testing goes I have only disconnected once and the servers are very stable. Staying where I stay and being far from the servers I was surprised that the latency was not noticeable at all.
There seems to be a lack of content and options within the home page of the game and when searching through the various options and tabs available. This might be due to this being the stress test but if this is not the case I will be very disappointed... So far you can only join multiplayer.
There are only 4 factions or civilizations to choose from, my favorite being English as they have the units I used to love in AoE 2. Their longbowmen are very similar to the British longbowmen. Once you get into the play section of the game I would recommend playing custom with some friends, searching for a game takes a long time and you don't have an option of selecting a map.
As far as the custom game creation goes I am extremely disappointed. Compared to previous AoE games there is very little customization of your game options and I hope this is not the case for when the game releases.
Some Game Play
Now that that is over let us get into the gameplay.
Progression (6/10)
Starting off you get 6 villagers to gather resources. This is quite nice but it does make it hard when you have to gather 2 different types of resources to do the first age upgrade. The second one is a lot easier as by this time you have around 20-30 workers. Resource gathering seems very slow for me despite the upgrades you can do.
Buildings seem very limited, I was expecting something more like AoE 3 with some special buildings for the civilization. Although they do have this when aging up you can only build 1.
Aging up is actually very unique, similar to AoM you can select between 2 choices of buildings, the faster you build your building the faster you will get to the next age. I really enjoy this.
Final age is a letdown. There is only 1 building to build and then the wonder. I hope that they have more when the game releases.
Combat (7/10)
The combat is not smooth at all, it looks as if units have targeted favorites and they ignore buildings when you want them to actually attack them. Combat is really slow, but this has always been an issue for AoE.
Finally they have allowed archers to scale walls with some kind of superpower and can shoot from there, this has always been my biggest letdown of any RTS games, walls are meant to have archers on them. Formations and stances are lacking making battle tactics very simple and boring.
AI (3/10)
They are stupid... there is no words for the AI, one of the games I played they walked right past my wall to another area I did not close up yet. The reason I seen this as an issue is that you can freely attack the troops and create a killing point or bottle neck to funnel them in. Their siege machines just stood there and didn't attack...
Bugs
You would expect there to be bugs, but having the game so close to release with so many little irritating bugs is a huge letdown. They will have to do another free testing before they can release this game or be ready for have patches and updates every day.
Overall
The game compare to its previous released games is really sad, I has the feel of AoE 2 and a slight bit of AoE 3. The only major thing that sets it our from the rest if the walls allowing for archers to be on top of it. Other than that it feels like a remastered version of them both... not impressed.
I was hoping that this would finally take first place over a game I absolutely love, Rise and Fall, but it hasn't. If you want to play a really awesome RTS game I recommend playing Rise and Fall.