Recent reviews by Catology

Here is my obligatory change to positive in light of Sony's backing down. It's just a shame that consumers have to treat companies like pavlovs ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ dog, using positive and negative reinforcement, just so we can get treated ethically as consumers.

Honestly just some banger software, the inbuilt tracking is great, and it provides cool tools to mess with your avatar. Obv, you gotta get a model first, but the stock models are aight for giving you an idea of how the software functions

Honestly so far it seems like a really solid DLC. The civs arnt completely busted like Mexico was. Plenty of SP content too. Just a generally fun DLC.

Is this remake flawed? God yea, but it generally recaptures what I loved so much about age of empires 3.

Addressing some things people dislike:

The Name Changes
Honestly, I personally do not care about the name changes as much as others. Does it seem pointless? Yea lol. Does it actually change the game that my colonial militia are now called revolutionary militia? No lol.

Now sure I suppose it can be fair to be a bit annoyed at these name changes, but I personally think some of these reactions to them to be a bit over-exaggerated? It's hardly like these changes were a secret either, so if you hate them so much, why buy the product to begin with lol.


Minor change
Some people are fairly upset over some minor changes such as all cards being unlocked at once & the new ranking system. I think both of these complaints are a bit daft considering the aoe3 community, that still played the game, like me, actually had been asking for this for ages. Having to unlock cards created a very inequal playing field amongst players in multiplayer, making it unbalanced as hell. As for the ranking system, this one takes more into account what you actually do during games, and doesnt arbitrarily throw you down 30 ranks because you lost 5 games in a row because half of your team DCed due to the peer to peer connection.

As it stands, both of these changes are pretty good as it allows aoe3 to have a better competitive element than the old one.

The lag
Okay this is a negative I can get behind. Although I have yet to experience crashing, occassionally (typically once per game for me) you will have a period where your frames just tank. This really can hurt games like this where you really do have to be aware of your surroundings and manage alot at once. This game does need a lot more optimising, with this being said, the game is still very much playable. I'm running a middle-end PC made 7 years ago and I generally can play this fine.
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THE GOOD!
Graphics
Honestly, I like them. Some people say they look cartoony and "like a mobile game" (because non-hyper realistic is apparently automatically a mobile game) but honestly the keey the old style alive and make the game just feel a lot more lively. Age of Empires 3's visuals were never really the selling-point, but this graphical overhaul just seems to be appealing and true to the original.

Politicians
When you age up in age of empires 3, you must select a politician that'll grant you certain things (be it units, resources, buffs and more). Originally there were only 3, and usually you'd only ever go with the quatermaster/400 wood politician, but now with the politician rework, there are a lot more viable options. This adds A LOT more strategy to the game, whilst still keeping true to old game mechanics.

The new additions
There are new additions to the game that are just generally kind of cool, like the Swedes & Incans. Two entirely new civilisations to play with! Both do need some minor balancing updates, but other than that, they're pretty neato to have.

Oh yea, the historical battles have a lot of potentially considering age of empires 3 covers a rather large time period, so holy crap, imagine what we could potentially have! Be it napoleonic war, history battles, the plains of Abraham battle, and more!

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TLDR

Graphics cool

New stuff cool

Balancing needed

A lot of optimising needed

Who cares about the name changes? yea its cringe but it doesn't make the game itself any less fun lol.

Some people are getting too ticked off over minor things that weren't really a secret to begin with... so why did they buy it knowing they'd hate it...

7.8/10

To be honest, it's sorta fun for the first few hours. Afterwards, it really does turn into just a grind-fest. So let's just delve into it:

Cons:

-The colony size limit.
You'll be given a limit to where you can build until much later on, meaning you can't really build anything too interesting if you still wish to be efficient with your farming and crafting. This land limit happens to be a bland square too, meaning it heavily restricts your building styles early on as well, as it really isn't beneficial to build on a coast, or anything other than a plains. It's just benificial to build a square wall, with everything else being squares.

-Technology/research & the useless items
The technology tree is just such a grind at the moment. Most of the items in the game have no other use than to be used to craft more useless items in the hopes of eventually down the line getting something of use. In other words: it's just a load of unnecesary artificial difficulty. When researching something in a game, you should feel a sense of accomplishment when you finish researching it. Not a sense of "ugh finally.. what's next then..?". There's so much missed potential here too, like for example how swords are literally used for nothing but crafting, instead of being able to maybe make melee soldiers or even melee better yourself.

-Poor production interface.
I find that it's also more of a hassle to automate the production of something with these useless items as well, due to the fact that you need a dozen in order to make one actually useful item. Because of this, if your production of one thing falls apart, quite literally your whole colony will too. It's very hard to keep track of whether or not you have a surplus of anything later on due to the sheer amount of random useless crap you have to produce. It would be greatly appreciated if there was a production interface of sorts to help players manage what their deficits and surpluses are.

-Minor things yet to be implemented.
The game has alot of very minor things that are yet to be implemented, that i believe would be nice to have in the game. Small things that make you constantly go "why isn't that in the game". Such as how there are only 1 type of planks you can craft at the start, despite there being two types of logs. The previously mentioned lack of melee. Stuff like that. Trust me, when you play the game, you'll find alot of minor things that'll bug you.
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Now for the pros:

-The concept
The concept itself is rather cool. To build up a city of dudes is interesting, as you have to divert your attention to not only making the city, but defending it from zombies. Think of it like if sanctum, age of empires and minecraft had a child.. The concept would be this. In all honesty though, I can't think of any other pros that distinguish this game other than the concept itself.

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TLDR:
The game has a huge amount of potential, and given some time, I believe it'll be very much worth the 20$ price tag. For the time being though, the artificial difficulty, the lack of content and the general grind (which can be attributed partly to the artificial difficulty and lack of content) really does not make it feel worth it. I personally feel like the game should be worth 10$ in its current state, but I do eagerly look forward to potential updates that can remedy my issues with it.

Boring constant fetch quests and such. Just simply dull.

Fairly fun, HIGHLY recommend that you get a friend to play this with, cause you can't really get much out of the public servers

Crashed. cant get it running since.

I dont know man.... I played a bit... Seems alright would buy it on a sale though...

12/10 best stealth simulator ive seen so far!
Like have you seen how I took down a hole sky scraper without being noticed. They really nailed the damn stealth idea.