Age of empires 4 battle
The people who will play this game know how castle walls are designed.
The production says History Channel, but it doesn’t really amount to much of interest or depth. The historical lessons the game offers up are far too rudimentary for Dads. It feels weird, because I don’t know who it’s for. But instead of having to waggle at a muddled UI to find just the multimedia entries, you have to build armies of dudes and wage war to unlock them. Beyond that there are even documentary shorts that make the entire affair feel like some sort of modern Encarta 95. Everything has the feel of a History Channel production, right down to the exact right timbre of the narrator. Battles begin with slickly produced drone flyovers of historical battlefields, narrated descriptions of the battles are read out as illuminated ghost soldiers are drawn in as spectral regiments. Even now if you throw him a nugget, you’re in for a 15 minute aside about some fucking 16th century ordeal.Īge of Empires IV wants to tell me about History. We watched Excalibur and he’d explain the Norman conquest. I’d spend turn after turn mounding my little Twizzler nib-like armies on Russia while he explained the rise of the Grand Duchy when we played Risk. Who needed the History Channel? We’d build Revell B-24 Liberators and he’d lay out the major campaigns that defined the European theatre. From the early Viking conquests right through to World War II, we covered the battles and the political intrigue. How did I learn about European history? It sure as hell wasn’t from the American school system. History was the shit your father spouted at you when he dragged you from battlefield to battlefield, or when you’d sit at the kitchen table and play Feudal (which honestly rips) with him during his weekends. And as I mentioned, history games were one of those things that your weird proto-fascist grade school friends were interested in.
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At least one of these kids that I’m directly referencing went to an Ivy and then immediately got a job at a conservative think tank (dude, we learned how to play AD&D together in the 4th grade, I trusted you, dude, what the fuck?).įor the longest time I thought Age of Empires was my father’s game, so I never picked it up. These were where the kids who went so hard in Civilization and Caesar II that they became truly terrifying when Crusader Kings dropped. The grand strategy games like Europa Universalis were for your friends who were probably secret fascists or were at least definitely going to flirt hard with a particular Randian flavor of libertarian politics.
MOBAs were games for younger kids despite spending more hours than I’d rather recall attempting to get 56kbps networking stable enough to play Warcraft II, my patience for multiplayer battles dwindled as I got older. Even by the time of Age of Empires II, the RTS space had begun moving on from there the franchise was left further and further in the past. And, in talking with friends, and taking the temperature of the genre, it seems that’s been the case for most people. And I mean a real ass Real Time Strategy game.
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It’s been a full 20 years since I’ve really played a Real Time Strategy game.
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Dune II brought something special to the colossal MS-DOS PC that dominated a full wall of our living room that I hadn’t seen before, Command & Conquer expanded on it, then Warcraft arrived, and eventually I was in college still trying to find ways around my friend’s mathematically perfect arrangement of Photon Cannons to zerg the shit out of his base in Starcraft (the first one). I was exactly the right age to get on with the first real wave of RTS games. What if I tried connecting with my father and bonding over a computer game? Turns out, I don’t even think he ever really played Age of Empires So I thought, let’s take on a big challenge, because I’m really bored. After any number of years as a games critic, you have to start making the job fun and invigorating by baking in challenges for yourself in reviewing games or you’ll get bored. I asked to review Age of Empires IV because I wanted to understand my father and the games he likes better. Empire was in the title, and it was soundly a strategy game about Europeans being bellicose at other Europeans over resources.
And the game I thought was Age of Empires, wasn’t. It’s halfway through the Norman campaign that I realize: I’ve never actually played Age of Empires with my father before.