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Hot key customization is limited and missing several genre staples, such as the ability to jump straight to an archery range or stable. Did we really need both a campaign where the English fight the French and one where the French fight the English? Maybe the presentation makes it impractical to capture live footage in India, China, or Iraq, but itвЂ™s underwhelming to finally play a new Age game after 16 years, only to be forced to revisit the conquests of Genghis Khan while intriguing new empires like the Abbasid Dynasty and Delhi Sultanate wait in the wings.ДЄoE IV does have a lot of clever modern touches, like units dropping their voices to a whisper while hiding in ambush forests. The Mongol Empire and Hundred Years War campaigns tread similar narrative ground to what AoE II covered, and all four feature a limited number of civilizations. Sometimes it works despite graphics that could charitably be described as accommodating to older computers, itвЂ™s thrilling to watch two massive armies smash into each other as you unleash a line of trebuchets on a heavily fortified castle.Д«ut sometimes it just becomes a slog.

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The campaigns often feel more interested in funneling you through big moments than cutting you free to harry and conquer organically.

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The two campaigns I finished devolved into a series of largely identical castle sieges, a feeling further enhanced by bland, empty maps that were just perfunctory backdrops for clashing armies. Joan of Arc and Genghis Khan were very different people, but AoE IV makes them feel like just two more units. The style is initially compelling, but once you discover that all four campaigns use the same detached narrator, the novelty wears off.

While itвЂ™s possible for players to amass powerful defenses, youвЂ™ll also start trading blows much faster than it takes a standard AoE II match to really get rolling. New and returning victory conditions, including the elimination of key enemy buildings and the control of sacred sites on the map, encourage knockout blows rather than lengthy slogs. Your economy is easy to get rolling and requires far less babysitting than in AoE II, and your soldiers are generally smart enough to behave themselves and make reasonably intelligent decisions.

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Gone too are the medieval vibes of AoE IIвЂ™s interface AoE IVвЂ™s is simplified to the point of blandness-but it is easy to always tell what unit or upgrade youвЂ™re purchasing. Players can no longer micromanage their units away from arrow fire or trap raiders with instant walls, and archers canвЂ™t defeat the siege engines ostensibly designed to counter them by dancing around their projectiles. Gone are many of AoE IIвЂ™s most byzantine features. However, much is left unexplained or quickly covered with tool tips-with the lack of a raid defense tutorial being an especially glaring omission. Its four hefty single-player campaigns cover the years between the Norman Invasion of 1066 and the 1552 culmination of the Russo-Kazan Wars, while five economic and military tutorials offer a multiplayer crash course.

The series returns to a medieval setting and launches with eight relatively varied civilizations, compared to the staggering 39 that AoE II has amassed. But Microsoft believes the games will complement each other, filling two different needs in the RTS community.ДЄoE IV certainly feels like a modern take on AoE II, albeit with pinches of Total War and the more asymmetrical factions of AoE III, which sees some civilizations manage their growth in fundamentally different ways. ItвЂ™s so beloved, in fact, that a small but vocal minority of its players have been rooting for AoE IV to fail so as not to split the fan base. Fans have been both clamoring for a new entry and worrying that a new entry wonвЂ™t do the series justice.ДЄge of Empires IV feels like an attempt to capitalize on AoE IIвЂ™s momentum while welcoming new fans to the series-and to a real-time strategy (RTS) genre thatвЂ™s suffered a dearth of major releases-while sloughing off 22 years of accumulated nuances and oddities that have made AoE II both beloved by fans and intimidating to newcomers. Released in 1999, AoE II is now seeing tournaments with 75,000 viewers and $87,000 prize pools, thanks to a vibrant Twitch and YouTube scene, and the release of 2019вЂ™s Definitive Edition. That it even exists is partially because Age of Empires II has enjoyed a massive resurgence. Age of Empires IV is the first mainline Age of Empires game in 16 years, and a wait of that magnitude creates expectations.

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