User Score. Your Score. Rate this:. Share this? Summary: Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition completes the celebration of one of the most beloved real-time strategy franchises with remastered graphics and music, all previously released expansions and brand-new content to enjoy for the very first time.
Buy Now. Buy on. Critic Reviews. Score distribution:. Positive: 28 out of Mixed: 20 out of Negative: 0 out of Player 2. The odd-ball of the AoE family is back and is better than ever. All this publication's reviews Read full review.
Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition is just what we want when we talk about "definitive edition": new graphics but classic style; technical upgrade and all the content to date and new games mode. A solid remaster of a good old-fashioned strategy game. Its biggest problem? It will forever lie in the shadow of its famous predecessor. PC Gamer. Age Of Empires 3: Definitive Edition has been polished up considerably graphically. There is also a lot of content available. Unfortunately, the original design flaws have not or hardly been addressed.
This is a game that generally wants to do too much, makes it too complex and doesn't give enough in return. This is a nice remaster of a game that we would rather not play. It's just far too difficult to parse the strategies available for each civilization, let alone devise new ones, as you sort through the pile of possible cards while referencing each nation's tech tree. The only solution is pouring in hundreds of hours to find out if you enjoy the weird "real game" behind Age of Empires 3's multiplayer.
Series and genre dabblers will probably be better suited with the more conventional Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition, but the twists on the core Age formula are too compelling for RTS addicts to pass up. The ins and outs of more complex Age tactics are explained in a series of excellent Art of War tutorials that double as challenge missions for your micromanagement skills. Battles are all about play and counter-play between the units: Spears take down cavalry, cavalry charges wipe out muskets, and muskets shoot spears.
Nothing about that core gameplay has truly changed in the Definitive Edition: the unit movements and pathfinding feel just as jerky and physics-defying as I remember them, for better and for worse. Boats especially still slip, spin, and slide around like soap in a bathtub rather than huge sailing ships. There are a bare handful of minor gameplay changes in AoE3: DE, and a ton of balance changes, but nothing too radical.
The AI is notably improved, but it's still prone to doing stuff like marching unarmed villagers right into your army or base. At its highest levels, however, I was surprised at the challenge.
The original had nothing like it. Single-player story missions are generally all fun but forgettable in classic RTS fashion. The main story is as goofy as ever, a bland pseudo-historical thriller involving the Holy Grail, the Fountain of Youth, a magical bloodline, some stuff that was probably blatantly stolen from The Da Vinci Code, and more historical errors and outright historical fiction than you can shake an arquebus at. There are also some absurd moments of pointedly ignoring the real-world horrors that happened during colonization and contact between cultures, and students of history today aren't going to react very well to that.
Major changes have been made to the Native American-themed WarChiefs expansion campaign, and the story has a bit more pathos than it used to as a result. The Asian Dynasties expansion campaigns try harder, and the Indian campaign is interesting, but the Chinese campaign in particular is pure fantasy. The campaigns are a fun enough way to spend some time, 30 to 40 hours depending on difficulty setting, but still aren't exactly compelling.
It's doubly frustrating because there was potential for a great historical campaign here. That's a decision long past criticism, but the remaster does address some of the worst historical mistakes. On first start, a message from the developers talks about fixes that center around the Lakota and Haudenosaunee civilizations, and to a lesser extent the Aztecs, correcting names, adding their real language and more authentic artwork, as well as removing historical inaccuracies such as mining by the two North American nations.
The Asian civilizations are still led by "Monk" heros who have confusingly out of place mystical powers. The new Incan faction speaks a language that sounds a lot like proper Quechua, but the Aztecs speak the same gibberish they spoke 14 years ago—it certainly doesn't sound like Nahuatl. The saving grace in this are the new Historical Battles, which cram some of the best gameplay ideas of the last 15 years into the Age of Empires 3 mold. They're based on proper historical events, and include some truly choice, weird, deep cuts from the battles of the early modern era.
For the lone Age of Empires 3 fanatic that gasped and cheered at the mention of Africa: I see you. No, there's not more than that. I'm sorry—but someone is sure to take the unit models and use them for a mod. It's inevitable that this Definitive Edition won't age as well as the others in the series. All of that said, it's inevitable that this Definitive Edition won't age as well as the others in the series.
Sprites tend to look good forever, but the character models in Age of Empires 3: Definitive Edition barely reach a par with Company of Heroes 2 , released some seven years ago now.
Some, I swear, are worse: The model for the panda bear is truly awful. It's like a painted balloon. Certain cards have prerequisites, too, so the system is similar to a skill tree in a role-playing game. In fact, Age III likens the home city concept to creating a character in an RPG, although the game's thin attempts to let you personalize your home city won't do much to make you grow attached to the place. But unlocking new cards can be pretty rewarding. You're limited to no more than 20 cards in a given match, but since it's possible to unlock many more than that, the game also invites you to build different decks to suit different situations.
For example, shipments of free caravels and galleons won't be of much use to you in the Great Plains, but they'd certainly help when battling in the Caribbean. All eight cultures have different cards available to them though many cards are shared in common , and ultimately you can use this system to add some panache to your playing style.
One possible side effect of this system, though, is that it encourages you to pick a side and stick with it. When playing online, you can't just pick a random civ like you could in previous Age games, and you might not even want to anymore since it's tempting to want all your experience points going in to one bucket.
Age III makes a number of other changes to the series, though these may seem less original if you've kept up with real-time strategy gaming. For example, new colonies start with an explorer, an unkillable hero character whom you should use to reveal the fog of war around your starting area and who can also collect treasures and earn you experience early on.
You'll find bandit camps, wild critters, and more guarding various trinkets that can help give you an economic edge in the beginning. More importantly, the explorer gives you something to do besides waiting for your resources to add up in the early going. If your explorer loses all his hit points, he collapses and may either be ransomed back for some coin or recovered by friendly units.
As mentioned, you may also ally yourself with various Native American tribes by building trading posts on their reservations. Perhaps in the spirit of political correctness, Native American buildings cannot be destroyed, but by crushing a foe's trading post, his ties with the tribe are severed. Native American tribes each have a handful of units and economic upgrades you may purchase if you like, diversifying your strategy. Trading posts may be used in other places. The Native American tribes may be friends or foes during a typical match.
Some foreign mercenaries may make appearances, too. In previous Age of Empires games, you could win a match by building and defending one of the wonders of the world, as opposed to just stomping all your opponents back to the Stone Age.
Annoyingly, you need to completely decimate the enemy's side to win a match. The opponent is free to resign at any time, but when playing against sore losers on the Internet, matches might easily drag on for longer than necessary because some uppity person insists on scattering a handful of peasants behind trees and in the corners of the map. There are ways to reveal the enemy's position very late in the game, but why Age of Empires III matches don't end at the destruction of an enemy colony, as opposed to with genocide, isn't particularly clear.
It's also somewhat frustrating that your home cities gain experience separately online and offline. Presumably this is to prevent cheating, but it still makes you feel like you're wasting your time playing skirmish matches offline when you could be gaining "real" experience playing against opponents online. It's actually possible to gain experience online playing against the computer, but only if there's at least one other player in the match.
Speaking of the computer opponents in Age of Empires III, they range from numbingly brain-dead at the "easy" setting to challenging at the "hard" and "expert" settings. In the Age of Empires tradition, the computer is incompetent in maps with a lot of naval warfare in them.
However, on land-based maps, it can set up an economy very efficiently at higher difficult settings , and it can harass you with greater numbers, both of which can more than compensate for the computer's lack of subtlety. Playing against the artificial intelligence is good for practice, but playing against real players definitely makes for a better experience.
That applies to the game's campaign as well. Beginning with an adventure that takes you in search of the legendary Fountain of Youth, the fictitious campaign in Age of Empires III consists mainly of just the sort of missions you've come to expect, along with the less-than-stellar voice work and awkward cutscenes to move the story along.
It would be unfair to dismiss the campaign outright, since it helps teach you the ropes and presents you with some unique situations, not to mention a high volume of different missions. But it's pretty standard for a real-time strategy game, and the swashbuckling high-adventure feel of the storyline seems better suited to Age of Mythology than to Age of Empires.
Were it not for the awkward unit behavior and frame rate issues, Age of Empires III would look truly amazing. Maps with water on them are especially dramatic, as you can see waves gently rocking massive warships, whose cannons make them shudder from side to side.
Ships, as well as buildings, break apart in chunks, with lots of fire and smoke all around, making for a spectacular sight. There are plenty of subtle animations to appreciate among the other military units in the game, and there's a good amount of variety to the environments, from the lush jungles of South America on up to the frigid Yukon.
The combat has some thrilling moments, such as when a cannonball sends infantry careening every which way, but until the big guns come in to the picture, it all looks pretty tame. It's worth noting that Age of Empires III does a good job of autodetecting the best graphical settings for your system, and despite all the visual wizardry going on, it runs reasonably well--even on fairly modest systems.
The game sounds great, too, though in real-time strategy tradition, you'll hear the same unit acknowledgments over and over at least they're mostly spoken in their native languages. Cannon fire is particularly dramatic, and when one force or another wins a skirmish, it's exciting to see all the men stand and cheer.
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