Full review at: https://thegamehoard.com/2019/02/19/age-of-solitaire-pc/
Building up a kingdom with some structured solitaire feels like a fine way to scratch an itch for goal-focused single player card games, but Age of Solitaire stumbles a little in the execution. The solitaire on offers plays as well as you’d hope, the card arrangements easily ensuring variety and the tools and special abilities you earn along the way allowing for some strategy in clearing them, but the goals don’t seem to value victory as much as one would like. Winning a round isn’t as important as the objective of finding hidden objects during it, and while this could be an interesting twist on the game style, it’s not made quite as fulfilling since the structure still focuses more on traditional solitaire designs rather than making finding those items challenging. If all you need is some solitaire, Age of Solitaire won’t disappoint, but its reward system seems a little at odds with the traditional card game design.
For the few hours the game lasts, the solitaire on offer has just what it needs to be enjoyable, but the progression and goals are where this doesn’t quite live up to the potential of a structured solitaire game. The extra skills do make the regular solitaire more interesting than if you were just playing with cards, but the goals bring things down a bit too much. Finding the hidden items almost seems to passively happen rather than being the main drive of your card combos, the arrangements laid out as if they were still working on a point based or victory focused system instead of trying to hide objects. As mentioned earlier, this wouldn’t be much of a problem if your performance and victories were still rewarded in some way, and it could add an extra consideration to your play, but the current design is just about playing regularly and maybe doing the objectives rather than pursuing them actively, and if you don’t succeed, then you just keep going round after round until you do.
The structure in these kinds of games usually adds an extra layer of challenge to make solitaire more interesting, but Age of Solitaire doesn’t make it compelling enough to rise above the baseline of the genre. It’s got some lovely art assets, most of what it needs when it comes to card layouts and abilities, and a framework that could have worked, but it didn’t apply the right amount of pressure to make it all come together into something more than just decent structured solitaire play.
