Age of Empires Online Review

Adding to the repetitious nature of questing, almost as much as the numerous quests that are repeatable by design, are the mercenary groups sparingly scattered on almost every map. These small bands aren't aggressive in the slightest, but because their camps invariably contain loot chests, it's a good idea to kill them all before leaving a quest. This sounds fine in theory, and having several chests in your inventory waiting to be opened is always exciting. But locating your real enemies rarely requires much exploration; thus, you frequently complete all of your quest objectives without having uncovered the whole map. Rather than head out to claim your reward, you then send units into any areas that are still shrouded by the fog of war to make sure that you haven't left any loot chests behind. Finding and subsequently killing mercenaries isn't challenging in the slightest; it's just busywork that you feel compelled to undertake.

It's a real shame that so many of Age of Empires Online's quests are underwhelming, because every now and then you're afforded a look at how good the game can be. Challenge levels, which are sprinkled throughout the campaign, not only make for interesting and occasionally difficult diversions, but they also serve as effective training tools for one-versus-one and two-versus-two multiplayer battles in which speed is key. Challenges pit you against the clock rather than an enemy, and they demand strategies that you might not give much thought to otherwise. One of the first, for example, requires you to build 10 farms for your town in less than 10 minutes. Sounds simple enough, but it's not nearly as straightforward as you might think because you need wood to build farms, villagers to gather wood, food to create villagers, and farms to grow food. You have to use the resources at your disposal as efficiently as possible, and after completing a few iterations of the same challenge, you feel great being able to do so in half the time. Later challenges work in much the same way, but they afford you longer time limits to complete significantly more complex objectives; gather enough resources to move your town past the bronze age, build battering rams, and demolish an entire town on the other side of a map, for example.

Satisfying challenges can also be found on the island of Crete, though visiting it for anything other than a single demo level requires you to hand over a one-time fee of $10. For that, you unlock a customizable Horde mode of sorts in which you must defend areas of Greece's largest island from increasingly powerful waves of enemies. There are nine different maps to play on, and you can choose to go up against 10, 20, or 30 waves on any of five difficulty settings. The rewards you earn for successfully completing a Crete challenge scale accordingly. These include money, experience points, loot chests, and faction points that can be redeemed for powerful weapons and armor. Like many campaign quests, Crete challenges are easier to complete if you play them cooperatively.

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.

Finding folks to play with cooperatively generally isn't difficult; you can either have the game find a partner for you automatically (which can take a while) or use the dedicated looking for group (LFG) chat channel to ask for help. Sadly, getting into competitive games isn't handled as well. You have to be playing with a premium civilization if you want to do battle with friends, and ranked matches are only available to paid-up players who have reached level 25. You can jump into unranked battles using a quick-match option regardless of your level and civilization status, but--perhaps because not enough players are looking to play competitively--it's often impossible to find suitable opponents.

More often than not, you find yourself pitted against an enemy whose civilization is either significantly higher or lower level than yours, and the subsequent battles are short lived and not much fun as a result. You might think that being at a higher level wouldn't offer that much of an advantage, but it impacts practically every aspect of the game. The specifics vary, depending on how you choose to spend your technology points and equip your loot. But as a high-level player, your buildings might have more health and armor, your military units are probably cheaper and quicker to build, and your villagers might be significantly more adept at gathering resources. As a premium player, you might even have an army of units that is constantly regenerating health. When you get matched up against an opponent of a similar level and skill, competitive play is a lot of fun. Those battles are the exception rather than the rule, though.

Star Tech bonuses at the end of each tech tree are reserved for premium players.

Whether you're playing competitively, cooperatively, or just grinding your way through repeatable quests to earn experience and faction points, Age of Empires Online does very little on the battlefield that other RTS games haven't done before. In fact, great visuals aside, the RTS portion of Age of Empires Online wouldn't have looked conspicuous or especially innovative 10 years ago. Where this game does innovate with some success, though, is in its implementation of features more commonly associated with massively multiplayer online RPGs than with RTS games. If you think it's exciting to see how a new bow or spear looks on your character in an RPG, imagine how exciting it is to see that same change on dozens of archers or on a cavalry the next time you lead them into battle. Similarly, just as adding new abilities in an RPG is always exciting, so is unlocking a new siege weapon or other military unit here.

Even if you refuse to part with any money while playing it, Age of Empires Online does a lot of different things reasonably well and is definitely better than the sum of its parts. It'd be even better if it didn't so clearly have a few parts missing. There's no easy way to trade items with other players, for example, because there's no auction house equivalent, and the dedicated trade channel doesn't let you include links of items that you want to sell. (If you try to link one, you get a message telling you that "Item links are only allowed in the trade channel.") There's also no Skirmish mode in which to test multiplayer strategies against the AI; it won't be available until it's released as a premium booster pack sometime this upcoming holiday season. It has been said that the best things in life are free, but that's clearly not the case with Age of Empires Online. If you come looking for a free-to-play game, you're likely to feel frustrated a few hours in; if you come willing to part with $20 to $30, though, you're almost certain to feel like your money was well spent.