Title: Age of Empires II HD
Genre: Strategy
Developer: Hidden Path Entertainment, Ensemble Studios
Publisher:Microsoft Studios
Release Date10 Apr, 2013


Now this is a game I played back in school, because our history teachers believed it was an educational game. Yup. How to learn about William Wallace? Look, here's something! Well, they're not entirely wrong. It does tell you about civilisations and some of the heroes associated with those cultures, and the single player campaigns somewhat emulate historical events in the game setting.

Really though, you end up learning that Britons happen to have insane range so you can derpaherp build loads of archers, or the mayans have funny monks wearing skirts and feather caps that can convert an entire army, and that easiest and standard ai is easy, but moderate is actually pretty hard. And if you hate building houses, then why not be the huns? Also build lots of castles. You can never go wrong with castles.

Honestly, this game can provide so much entertainment. As a strategy, you start with a town centre, and your aim is to advance as fast as possible. You collect four different resources in order to do so: Food, Wood, Gold, Stone. You can choose different paths in order to win, and each game can be around two hours or less. Longer if you're going for a passive victory or want to build an absolutely huge army, or have a big world map.

You can win by killing everyone around you in the end game with your amazing killing machines and units, killing them early game before they are able to advance far enough, collecting all the relics scattered around the world map and putting them into your monestary, or being the first civilisation to build a wonder, which costs a lot of resources. You also have other conditions for victory, such as regicide. Better protect your king!

Sometimes the logic in the game can be a bit off, such as the fact you use houses to increase your population limit, but you can't actually put people in houses to hide. Other than that it's an addictive game. There's something very satisfying building up your nation, successfully defending against others and reaching the end game where all the action really starts to happen. I know I've spent hours trying out all the different nations when I was younger, and playing with or against friends.
A few issues I have with the game is that you can't select all your units if you have a very big army. Say you have fifty archers, you'll have to select three groups to move rather than the whole lot. Mix this with other types of units, and you find it's quite hard to direct everything when it comes to an attack. So lots will just be chilling out instead of doing anything.

Looking for Idle villegers can be annoying, though you do have an idle button which will let you scroll through any of those slackers.

And the amount of times I lost my scout because I couldn't spot them on the map after I directed them somewhere. So sad.

I wouldn't mind an auto explore feature with the scouts, since there is sometimes so much to focus on, that you're probably going to end up with him chilling in some forgotten forest somewhere.

Pros

Addictive

Does kind of give you a brief insight into history

Archers are funny

So are monks (Wololo)

Oldie but goldie

Sheep and turkeys are the backbone of any nation

Cons

Keep losing that stupid scout

Hard to control lots of units at once

Visually hard to track things on the map, since you have to either scroll or click on a specific place, no zoom/overview feature. At least one that I'm aware of

Ai difficulty jump from standard to moderate seems a bit steep

TL;DR


Definitely recommend. I'm probably biased because I played this in my childhood. It's my precious. But anyone with a preference for fast paced strategy games, should give this one a look. It's a classic! (Do I even need to mention that?)

If you'd like to read more reviews from me, follow/join my steamgroup