After how rudely Timi and Microsoft treated Age of Noob, and the very poor review that he had given the game, I was expecting bad. But I was not expecting it to be as bad as it is.
The campaign feels completely nonsensical. It throws a whole bunch of proper nouns at you that have no bearing in history, it basically tells you to care about them rather than using any writing skills to show why you should care. It throws a whole bunch of fantasy nonsense around, like a mystical sword and magic powers.
The scripted cut-scenes are buggy as hell. Voice lines don’t always match up with the text on screen, and the dialogue is pretty clearly not written by a native English speaker, misusing words and feeling stilted. At times voice lines just paused and the next line failed to trigger for many seconds, leaving an awkward pause.
But all that could be forgiven if it had engaging gameplay. Unfortunately, the worst problem is the gameplay. The campaign gameplay doesn’t really feel like an RTS so much as a point-and-click adventure. You don’t control villagers, you just click on a button to build buildings where the game’s script wants them. You don’t have any semblance of micro in combat, you seem to have different minigames for combat depending on where in the game you reach it; but none of the minigames feel like they give any meaningful control. I haven’t been able to figure out how to exit the campaign into any other form of gameplay, it’s like an unskippable tutorial, but since there’s no actual RTS gameplay in the tutorial I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be learning. I eventually unlocked something it calls “island tactics”, but this again doesn’t really feel like a game. I’m sure it gets more difficult and requires learning at some point, but right now I it’s just small featureless grid with a few bunches of units on it, then you press “battle”, then some animations play and you win.
In summary, this game really does not feel like an Age of Empires game. It doesn’t really even feel like a game. It is extremely disappointing that Microsoft has allowed their brand to be tarnished by association with this shovelware. World’s Edge and Microsoft should be ashamed to have sold out their brand for this. Forgotten Empires and Relic should be ashamed to be associated with a brand sold out like this, tarnishing their products in the process.