Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition

Amazing game! The classic RTS never dissappoints!

Best RTS and best AOE out there.

Remember first time seeing this game - it was one of campaign missions with train and it seemed so entertaining to build your goals around defending and interacting with railroad. Tried playing it before for a bit, however since steam revolution products appear way down the line in story, those first missions played left so so impression. But years later finally backlog queue reached Age of Empires 3 and my journey from Mediterranean to India started anew. Let’s talk graphics first - while 3d transition from 2d was quite painful for lots of series, it was true for early 2000s, when 3d was still quite fresh. It was even more of a case for titles that have lots of units but don’t have realism as focus - strategies, which is why some remained in 2d or had just serviceable 3d design, decent enough for a time. But AOE3:DE was not released at that age, it was in 2020 with supposedly updated graphics compared to original 2005 version, however looks are surely not its strongest aspect at all, AOE2:DE seems to be winning with their 2d and considering how many dlcs they receive compared to 3rd game… guess it’s what majority thinks. Audio is fine enough, serviceable music, good in-game sounds, unfortunately for one reason or another none of them ended up as iconic as 2nd or even 1st games. Gameplay stayed kinda sameish with few new features like trade routes and stations along with native settlements. Otherwise mechanics are same - build up your base, hire units, develop economy, go through ages to get access to more units and upgrades, scout map to find resource nods and gather there, destroy your enemy or with different set rules, win via economy domination or so on. There is direct control over every aspect, units have strength and weaknesses depending on enemy type, so trying to destroy siege equipment that has protection from ranged attacks with archers is not ideal. Unfortunately this essentially unchanged core is still for some reason less engaging than Age of Empires 2, maybe nostalgia and much better looking 2d graphics compared to 3d of this title are the main reason for that or some issues with pathing and attack priorities that are sometimes not the best here. Several campaigns take you through different time periods and places - late middle ages Mediterranean, North America from discovery to civil war, Tokugawa Japan, Ming dynasty China and Sepoy rebellion in India. And they are very mixed bag of how they were made, some are close to regular strategy match with not exactly balanced starts, some are hero quests that come more often than not as quite tedious. So with such execution stories that are being told lose lots of possible attraction, even considering that those are not exactly with stellar writing to begin with. And there were lot more campaigns even in old Age of Empires 2, with Definitive Edition adding a bunch. Not a bad entry in series, but there are just others that are better.