The game is fun. I’m an AoE3 player, but also played a bit of AoE2 and this game is pretty much what I would have liked to see.
Does this mean it’s a great game? Well I’m hesitant to say that. My main (and pretty much only) concern is the price. I’m sure it will be worth it eventually but with only 8 civs right now? Honestly, I’ll probably just wait until they add a few more and/or until there’s a sale.
With that said, I do think it’s a really enjoyable game with only a few setbacks.
I, for one, don’t dislike the graphics. The buildings look awesome and while the units tend to look a little cartoony, it’s not at all distracting.
Graphically my only problems are the huge shining yellow things that happen every time I set a gather point (that’s really overdoing it in my opinion) and the fact that the fog of war seems to be a layer above everything else, namely the little blue circles that you get when you send a unit somewhere. If you send it to undiscovered places you simply have no feedback. Also please add the little square we had in AoE3 when you used the map to move units.
I also played on the water maps and all I can say is that it was the most fun I had on water. AoE2 and AoE3 doesn’t even come close.
I love that we can zoom out. It’s not much, but it is enough for me to actually see where I am in my own base so I don’t get lost and waste time by trying to find certain buildings. That said I think the fog should be decreased a bit since if I zoom out it already appears pretty much everywhere.
Combat feels awesome and I have pretty much never seen counters work so well. I love the counter system, it’s way more intuative than in AoE3.
Advancing through the first age is really quick if you know what you’re doing and I love that however, I feel like as soon as you start upgrading things, everything grinds to a halt. Every. Single. Upgrade. Just. Takes. So. Long. In the first age it seems like you wanted to make the game snappy and it really works, but then I have to spend minutes on researching upgrades, most of which (economic) don’t seem to make a huge difference. In AoE3 there either weren’t so many upgrades or they just didn’t take this long, because it feels like I spent much less time upgrading.
That is all, if i didn’t mention something, you can assume I didn’t dislike it.
See you, sooner or later, because I will eventually be buying the game.
Edit:
I’d also like to add that the game didn’t lag at all, there wasn’t a single crash, and loading the game is pretty quick even with my slow HDD. Even if it’s not perfect yet, it’s miles ahead of AoE3 in terms of stability.