Age of Mythology

The Good
A fantasy-styled RTS where the Gods actually care about you, unlike other games where churches and other religion-based structures and units are there only to make your units happier or to keep a God happy enough not to blast you to pieces. Age of Mythology gives you a reason to please the Gods, and that's really what this game is about.

Age of Mythology is your standard RTS set in a fantasy universe, but with a twist of Age of Empires in it. You begin with your standard units - spearnen, archers, etc. - but as soon as you're pleasing your God(s), other units and powers come into play, such as cyclopses, wolfmen, even dragons and phoenixes, as well as four mighty powers that can dramatically change the course of battle. Meteors, underground passages, the ability to turn night into day, healing powers, and more are there for to use, if only once during a battle.

Your heroes are good fighters, and they also have special abilities that might heal other units in battle, or increase their attack power temporarilly. And if they die, they can be revived.

Three races to choose from, with their own set of Gods, makes for diverse gameplay. With three main Gods per race, and a number of Gods to choose during the four epochs, fighting an opponent - even if he chose the same starting God/race - will be unique, since chances are neither of you will have the same sets of units or spells.

You can build walls and buildings on any flat ground (or ground on a slight incline), rather than all other RTS games where you must place them on a tile. A small detail, buit it was neat to see.

The Bad
To be frank, the game is simply too small. With such a great base, it was diappointing to find that you were very limited in what you could do. First of all, the "large" map is the size of the "small" map on just about any other RTS game, so if you were hoping for a lengthy epic battle, you'll be disappointed, since the enemy is right around the corner. There is also no random map generator! What gives? That's almost the standard in RTS games now.

The opening cinematic shows a gigantic legion of fighters going after the enemy. What a load of crap. There is no possible way you can create an army that large. Why? Because of the way the population limit works. First of all, you can only build ten houses to increase your population limit. After that, the only way to increase your limit is by building town centers - but you can't build town centers anywhere, like most games. Instead, you have to find "abandoned settlements" and build them there, and most maps typically have four or so on the map. So, you'll be fighting for these most of the time, but let's say you find the four on the map and you manage to keep them. You're still not going to be able to build a legion of fighters. No, you're still stuck with a very small (at least small compared to the cinematic, or even an average army size in Age of Empires) army. Don't get me wrong, with strategy your small army can beat the enemy, but I wanted to see a large mythical battle, not just a tiny skirmish.

Another reason the town center thing sucks is - let's say you're playing a two-on-two game, and suddenly you're attacked by your two enemies. You fail to defend yourself and doom is imminent, so you do the only thing you can - retreat to your ally's base. But what can you do now? You can't just build a town center and try and rebuild, like so many classic battles in Starcraft and Age of Empires. You either have to find an abandoned settlement or...well, die. Your choices are so limited, it makes it pointless to try to retreat.

There also isn't that many different units. Each race gets their own set of units, but they're almost identical. Each race gets the standard fighter, standard ranged unit, a few units on horses, a few stronger fighters and a few siege weapons, with some boats. The only real difference between the races are the mythical units and - hold on here - there are two myth units per race. Two. Yeah. Two. Well, no, there are more myth units, but you can only HAVE two different types of myth units in a battle.

But, what does it matter, having such a limited amount of units when your armies are so small anyway?

The game has the base of a great RTS, but the sheer lack of size of the battlefield or range of units or potential population size makes this game disappointing and not fun.

The Bottom Line
It's a fantasy style RTS game where the Gods are of some use. Those that enjoy smaller battles will certainly love this game, but those, like me, who love battles that last hours at a time will absolutely loathe this game.

The Good
In the media there's a term known as "jumping the shark." It's where TV show, author, band, whatever, makes a creative decision that, while it may be well-received, marks the point where the artist/band/whatever begins their downward slide. Years later, people will point to that change and say "see? That's where things started to go shitwards."

Metallica jumped the shark when they released The Black Album. The Brady Bunch jumped the shark when they added the Cousin Oliver character. The Simpsons jumped the shark when they moved away from their core conceit of Springfield itself and began basing their shows on non-sequiturs and celebrity cameos. And guess what? Ensemble Studios jumped the shark when they released Age of Mythology.

Age of Mythology is a real-time strategy game similar to Age of Empires I and II, except instead of history it's based on the myths of the ancient world. You don't get to conquer the world as Alexander the great, but you do get to is destroy enemy armies with the Greek Cyclops and Hydra, and sink enemy ships with the many-tentacled Kraken.

The game's design is far simpler than Age of Empires II. You play as one of three civilizations; the Greeks, the Egyptians, and the Norse. Once you've selected a civilization you can then pick one of three primary gods to worship, each of whom will confer special abilities upon your civilization (for example: worshipping Zeus gives you stronger infantry and allows you to build Pegasi flying units). Each time you advance an Age in the game (there are four) you get to pick a minor god to worship, who will likewise give you special bonuses. This allows you to tailor and develop your civilization as the game progresses with far more flexibility than in Age of Empires II, where you start out with a pre-set civilization with fixed bonuses and abilities.

What makes the game really fun is that each god grants you a special "God Power" which lasts for a limited amount of time and can only be invoked once. Your early god powers are things like Zeus' lightning bolt (instantly kills an enemy unit) and Loki's Spy (allows you to see what the enemy is doing). At the end of the game you've got super-powerful God Powers like Horus' Tornado, which sucks whole enemy armies into a whirlwind of dust! The graphical effects for these God Powers are truly astounding, even by today's standards.

Since God Powers can only be used once, you've got to decide whether to use them early in the game to gain a quick advantage or hold on to them like a hidden ace up your sleeve. They can even be combined, for instance you can use Nepthys' Ancestors power (creates an army of undead skeletons) and Bast's Eclypse power (gives mythological units double attack for a couple of minutes) together for a surprise attack of souped-up undead warriors.

Each god also lets you build a special Myth Unit, an especially powerful mythical creature that complements your human attack force. Some Myth Units have special abilities, such as the Hydra that gains an extra head for each enemy it kills. The combination of Myth Units and God Powers drastically reshapes the way gameplay works, and shakes off the layer of complacency Age of Empires II had a times. Each Age of Mythology game plays out different, and you never know what to expect.

Other than the mythical element Age of Mythology keeps most of the rock-solid gameplay of the previous games. You can trade, fight, or boom your way to victory. You can wage huge battles or cripple your enemy's economy through raiding. This all worked well in the previous games, and what isn't broken doesn't have to be fixed. One of the few changes is that each unit you build takes up a different amount of population. Villagers only use one slot, infantry normally use two, cavalry use three, and myth units use four or five. This means you can either have a small but powerful force or a large army made up of cannon fodder...a great idea that has been long overdue.

Graphics are an impressive deal, with an advanced 3D engine coded specifically for the game that supports pixel shaders, millions of colors, and a simple physics engine that allows units to fly around the screen and buildings to collapse realistically. I prefer Age of Empires II's sprites to Age of Mythology's polygons but that is a matter of taste. The game supports ambient lighting and you can play by day, by night, or during an eclipse.

The game even takes a clue from Warcraft III and includes an in-built multiplayer game finder that immediately matches you up against equivalently skilled players, another nod to changing times.

The Bad
I'm not crazy enough to say that Age of Mythology is by any means a bad game. The production values are incredible, the unit balance is solid, the multiplayer is great, the addition of Gods and God powers is excellent, and the myths-based storyline is cool. But it is inferior to Age of Empires II. And not by a little, by a lot.

Once you're tired of blasting soldiers around the screen with meteorites, Age of Mythology's gameplay is shallow. There are fewer units, fewer buildings, fewer resources, fewer everything. In Age of Empires II you could delete your town center and rebuild somewhere else if you wanted, in Age of Mythology you can't. There's an obtrusively low population limit that limits everything you can do. The whole game feels...restricted.

And this brings me to another point; the game is newbie-friendly to the point of being retarded. Let's not confuse the issues here, accessibility always has been one of Ensemble Studios' main concerns and so it should be. But Age of Mythology is so dumbed down it almost cripples the game. Simplified interfaces and gameplay is one thing, but why have they made rushing impossible? And how come there are practically no formations or stance buttons? And where are all the hotkeys? Age of Mythology is tailor-made for the bottom-end newbie, at the expense of more experienced gamers.

And while there is a lot to be said about the game's mythological theme it sends the cheese factor through the roof. Personally I would have preferred a more serious approach rather than having goofy-looking giants and two-headed trolls and whatever else they got out of the latest AD&D module.

The Bottom Line
Age of Mythology is a fine game and I recommend it. Unfortunately, it marks the end of an era and beginning of a new, crappier one.

Bands, writers, and TV shows very rarely recover from jumping the shark. Will Ensemble Studios buck the trend? Ask me when Halo Wars comes out.

The Good
*2nd Review Update

So there I was, hearing rumors of an Age of Empires III that turned out Age of Mythology. Unfortunately for us AoE fans, Age of Empires III turned out to be a pile of crap. At least AoM wasn't disappointing at the least. Hah, they finally use "mythology" has a main theme. See this is what happens when people start thinking "Medieval RPG". Hey, nothing can go wrong with "Medieval RPG Thinking" :p

Graphics
So Age of Mythology did a total upgrade to old AoE II game play. From 2D to 3D and very stable I might add, which was still rare considering 3D graphics were quite new, very unstable for a lot of games.

I remember the first time I saw the intro cut scene. My jaw was in awe. The sight of mythological units was somewhat amazing. The fact that I've never seen a giant beetle unit is very much memorable.

New Factions
The game itself comprises of the different approaches, which is represented by the 3 different races:

The Good
I didn't expect much from this game when it first came out, so I would only pick it up much later when it hit the bargain bin. It turned out the game would've been well worth the full price-tag.

When I started playing AoM, I felt at home very quickly, having played games like AoE 1 and 2 and a few of their numerous clones. The game is easy to handle, no matter whether you've played any of the spiritual predecessors or not, and if you have, it's almost free of that "Gee, this is so simple in [insert game title], why can't you do it here?" you may have encountered in some other products. When you start playing in a particular pantheon, like the Greek or the Egyptian, a mini-tutorial will explain you how things work in brief, but sufficient demonstrations. The story starts out slowly, with your new alter-ego, the atlantean hero Arkantos, is sent on what seems to be a purely representative task - to aid the ongoing siege of Troy with a small task force from your homeland. Unsurprisingly, things turn out to be a bit more complicated quite soon, and in the struggle against his new adversary, Gagarensis the cyclops, Arkantos meets old friends and makes new allies in order to oppose Gagarensis in a wide variety of environments, from Greece to Egypt, from Atlantis to the Norselands. The melding of the different mythologies in these regions is very well realized, in my opinion, and with very few exceptions, the 32 levels are fun to play and offer a satisfying experience. The different minor gods you can dedicate your temples to open a number of possible strategies, even when playing in the same mythology, and the switch to a different pantheon, which occurs occasionally (usually related to where the current scenario takes place), keeps things interesting. Difficulty and balancing are sufficient, and playing on normal gives an average challenge, not too hard, but not too easy either, and thankfully only rarely frustrating.

The Bad
Like I already wrote above, this game is largely free of real game-stoppers, which is really good news, in my humble opinion. ;-) However, a few things are worth mentioning: In several of the levels, the "path" of minor gods the game has already chosen for you feels as if it's only there to make the game harder for you, for example having minor gods that favor ranged combat in a mission where some melee punch is what you really need. On normal difficulty, this usually won't stop you, but only slow you down a bit, still, I found it somewhat annoying on occasion. Also, a few (very few, thankfully) of the games' levels are HIGHLY frustrating, breaking the trend in an unpleasant way. Apart from the showdown-level in the end, where it's arguably a good thing to meet proper competition, two or three are in the middle of the game, which bothered me, especially one where you had to flee from a superior force with an ox-cart that moved like the speed of a slug. You'll know which level I mean once you get there. ;-) Another thing is that almost all (if not all) of the levels are completely prefabricated, meaning the AI will build nothing, not even buildings you have destroyed. Also, it seems to have infinite resources at least in some of the levels, which I never find to be a good thing. Also, the Norse are a bit of a pain to play, due to their only gaining favor when actually fighting, the rates of which are far too slow for my tastes, making them always short on favor. Furthermore, their mortal units are more dependent on gold than those of the other mythologies, which makes you miss the ability to mass-produce units which cost mostly favor even more. A minor annoyance, especially in the single player campaign, where they are the last pantheon to appear, in a time where the game is supposed to be a little bit harder, but an annoyance nonetheless. Especially for the multiplayers and skirmishers of you, the lack of a level/campaign editor has to be recognized on the negative side. While it may have good reasons an editor isn't present, it's missed anyway. Oh, and - lastly - these groups of persons will likely be unhappy with the rather limited size of the maps, too. While absolutely sufficient for the singleplayer levels, the smallish maps can't properly handle a higher number of combatants.

The Bottom Line
Minor drawbacks in mind, I still would recommend this game to almost everybody with even a passing interest in RTS games and/or ancient mythology. In these times, where developers and/or publishers often confuse their buyers with their beta-testers, it's always nice to see a game which is highly playable and polished out of the box. The campaign takes long enough to make the game worth it's price tag (especially the bargain tag it's likely to bear at this time), skirmish and multiplayer are interesting, too, at least for a while. With the "Titans" addon released recently (I haven't played this one at the time of writing this) which adds even more content, the single player hardly can go wrong with "Age of Mythology". If you're focused on multiplayer only, though, it might not be what you're looking for.

The Good
Several games have tried to become "Age of Empires 3". All have failed. (Empire Earth comes to mind...) O man, where to start! First of, the graphics are terriffic. While they may not be as good as Command and Conquer: Generals, they are still really good. The different civilizations are pretty varied. Although there is only nine different major gods you can choose from in the beggining of the game, every time you advance an age, you get to choose from two different "minor" gods, which gives you new abilities, technologies and units. Each of the three cultures, Egyptian, Greek, and Norse, are radically different. Each have different units, ways of gaining favor and different buildings. Some can get Calvary, others can get camels etc. This difference between civs is much more pronounced than other RTS. In other ones, most of the civs have pretty much the same units and techs except maybe one or two bonuses and a unique unit. AOM changes this, and makes each civ much different. The "minor" god feature also can have 2 players who start out the same major God, have at least slightly different bonuses. The "God Powers" are really cool. Each God has one that you get to use once. These do something pretty terrific that can change the course of the game. The powers varied from destructive to productive i.e. Meteor, which unleashes a meteor storm on your opponenets (duh) to being able to make a forest or gold mine appear. The game come with a campaign that lasts about 30 missions. (Although the ending is pretty bad. ) Also, if you don't know what a unit does, you can right click on the picture and it will automatically bring up the stats, what it's good against etc.

The Bad
The learning curve is kind of tough. When you build a myth unit, you may not know what to do. Some kind of silly stuff in the campaign, like people in those light armor suits or in "Egyptian clothing" in the middle of a tundra. Occasionally, when there's a close up cut scene ala Empire Earth, you will se some kind of ugly textures, although alot better than empire earth. Finally, units seem to move kind of slow. Even the Calvary, which zip around pretty fast in AOE. O, just remembered, the maps are small. I mean really small. Even the largest setting is dinky compared to AOE's map.

The Bottom Line
If you played AOE, you will like this game. Although the slightly steep learning curve may turn off some casual gamers, this is defenitely a must buy.

The Good
Slight technical improvements on the Age Of Empires II engine. The game is good. It's fine. In fact, it's just like age of Empires II.

The Bad
You're not going to ace any history tests because of this game. Unlike it's predecessors, it's not based on history but on fantasy. And that's pretty much the only difference. It looks and plays so much like AOEII that you would swear there were no changes, although there have been some technical refinements which consequently require more computer horsepower.

If it were viewed in a vacuum, Age of Mythology adequately represents the competency of the folks at Ensemble Studios. It has more visual whiz-bang than AOEII because you have colorful spells instead of simple hand-to-hand combat. When viewed in the real world where there are other choices, it seems like a dud.

The Bottom Line
It's just like Age of Empires II, only with magic spells.