Age of Mythology: Retold

The cyclops Gargarensis has vowed to shatter the gates to the Underworld and release the Titan Kronos back into the world. To this end he has assembled a vast army and set about this task in Greece. Arkantos, hero of Atlantis, sails to the Greek colonies to lend his aid in the Trojan War. Learning of Gargarensis and his plans, Arkantos forges a coalition with the Egyptians and Norse to stand against him.

Age of Mythology, a magic-and-legends spin-off from the venerable Age of Empires real-time strategy series, was released in 2002 and remastered and re-released in 2014. Following the pattern set by its forebear, Age of Empires II, the game has now been remastered and re-released yet again. We are now in the age of not just the remaster, but the remaster of the remaster.

Age of Mythology: Extended Edition was fine, maybe a bit minimalist as remasters go, with better water effects, tweaked textures and greater support for modern resolutions. But it was also bit underwhelming, with the feeling it could have been much more comprehensively updated. The team evidently agreed and after the barnstorming success of Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition (itself a remaster of a remaster), they came back for another go-around.

Age of Mythology: Retold is now the definitive version of the game. Age of Mythology has always flown a bit under the radar, despite being an enjoyable and characterful real-time strategy game with four distinct factions (the Greeks, Egyptians, Norse and Atlanteans), a splendid interface, a reasonable difficulty curve and superb graphics, which take the painterly, 2D approach of Age of Mythology II and adapt it into 3D with subtlety. I always found Age of Mythology to be a more satisfying arrows 'n' spells strategy game than WarCraft III, whilst some of its updates to the Age of Empires formula are superb. The weakest thing to come from the game is arguably the Tale of the Dragon expansion from Extended Edition, which felt a bit undercooked.

The game itself is pretty standard as far as RTS titles go: you start with a base, in this case a town centre, from where you can train workers who construct buildings and work as resource-gatherers. There are four primary resources: wood, gold, food and faith. The first three are used to build mundane structures and units (a mix of archers, cavalry, infantry and siege weapons) whilst faith is used to train "myth units" (sphinxes, dragons, cyclopses, hydras, frost giants etc) and one-off "heroes" (like Odysseus or Achilles). Resource-gathering is a surprisingly flexible system, with multiple ways of getting resources. For example, food can be hunted (peasants kill chickens, bears or pheasants and use them for food), farmed or gained from the sea by sending out fishing boats, whilst gold can either be mined directly, gained through trade at a marketplace or setting up a trade network between your town centres using caravans.

As usual, you amass armies which you can take into battle. The composition of these armies is interesting, with a rock-paper-scissors mechanic complicated by the deployment of counter-units (pikemen who are marginally effective in infantry battles but devastating against cavalry), so assembling a well-balanced force is essential. Early in a game, units can be fragile, so making sure you get unit upgrades from an armoury to improve armour, attack and resilience to specific damage types, like bludgeoning or piercing is also important. As each game proceeds, you can upgrade to a different age, which unlocks new units and building types.

This is all standard, but Age of Mythology nails the details very well. This was one of the first RTS games that allowed you to automatically task newly-built units (so right click on a gold mine to make all the villagers built after this point automatically go over and start mining), resulting in a very smooth and intuitive playing experience.

In terms of gameplay, Age of Mythology is hugely enjoyable, but it does focus a lot on attack. Whilst some games give you impressive options for defence and turtling, like StarCraft and its bunkers, photon cannons and siege tanks, Age of Mythology's defensive structures tend to be less effective, with walls and towers coming down very easily to enemy action (disappointingly, as the game's wall-building system may be one of the best in any RTS game ever made, allowing you to built elaborate fortifications very easily). The game is at its best when you are constantly engaging the enemy, reinforcing as needed and keeping them on the back foot. Tactically, a fine balance is needed between known when to keep up an attack and when to fall back for reinforcement.

In terms of story, the game has a very silly but enjoyable narrative which mixes up the Norse, Egyptian, Greek and Atlantean legends and stories in a manner that's contrived but fun. The story can't hope to match WarCraft III's beautiful cut scenes and in-game plot twists, but it does know when to butt out and not interfere with gameplay (a lesson other RTS games could learn from, even now) through endless cut scenes and major reversals you can't do anything about. Age of Mythology remains a pretty fair game in that sense.

Retold eliminates many of the previous negatives about the game. AI is dramatically improved, eliminating some of the dumber enemy moves and improving the responsiveness of your units. Pathfinding is dramatically improved.The one-shot god powers have been replaced by cooldown abilities instead. The game leans a bit more into the differences between the factions, making them feel more distinctive. For a game that's almost a quarter of a century old, Age of Mythology feels quite fresh and modern in most respects even before the Retold improvements are accounted for.

Those improvements are significant. The biggest change is the lighting, which is now gorgeous, and the basic elimination of draw distance limitations, making in-game cutscenes (when you are most likely to be gazing across the battlefield) much more attractive. Improvements in textures and rendering make the units and buildings hold up extremely well even at 4K and zoomed-in, but the game remains very undemanding by modern standards, meaning potatoes can run it relatively well (things only start to chug if you set up skirmish matches with the unit cap increased to preposterous levels). There are also welcome improvements to the UI, which is now more intuitive, and the ability to automate resource gathering. You can now set ratios so every new villager you create is automatically assigned to a task (so set an equal ratio and new villagers will automatically be assigned to each resource in turn), though this can also be turned off. Gameplay and balance changes are minor but noticeable: walls feel a bit sturdier than in the base games, and units now automatically use their special abilities rather than requiring direct player intervention.

Content wise, Retold includes the original campaign, divided between the Greeks, Egyptians and Norse, and the Golden Gift mini-campaign for the Dwarves, plus The Titans expansion for the Atlanteans. This is a sizeable amount of content, with a playthrough of the singleplayer campaign content lasting a reasonable 35-40 hours. Two additional, paid-for expansions are also available. Pillars of the Gods is set in China and Yasuko's Tale is set in Japan. Both add an 8-hour-ish campaign and a new faction apiece, obviously the Chinese and Japanese. The Tale of the Dragon expansion is forgotten about here (probably for the best) with the new expansions being much better-written and voice-acted, with more compelling stories and gameplay, not to mention narrative ties to the original campaigns. More content is incoming, with an Aztec-themed expansion due this year, and the occasional addition of new gods, heroes and units for the existing factions.

Age of Mythology: Retold (*****) takes one of the RTS genre's underdogs and turns it into the game it was always meant to be. Twenty-four years after release, Age of Mythology finally realises its potential. The game is available now on PC, Xbox Series S / X and PlayStation 5.

Note: Part of this review was previously published in 2018.

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Age of Empires II Definitive Edition Chronicles: Battle for Greece

The Aegean Sea and its coasts are the battleground between the two great powers of antiquity: the vast Persian Empire and the Greek city-states, led by the two rivals of Athens and Sparta. Armies march, huge navies are constructed and the powers clash over a century of warfare, with the dominance of the ancient world in the balance.

Back in 2019, Microsoft released Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition, a comprehensive remake of the classic 1999 real-time strategy game. The result was probably the best video game remake ever created, which not only updated the original game's graphics, controls and userface whilst fully retaining the spirit and style of the original, but also added a massive amount of new content. This was then expanded through no less than six new expansions: Lords of the West, Dawn of the Dukes, Dynasties of India, Return of Rome, The Mountain Royals and Victors and Vanquished.

This latest, seventh expansion marks a shift in format. Chronicles: Battle for Greece follows in Return of Rome's footsteps by adding civilisations from the ancient world to the game. Whilst Return of Rome remade some of the campaigns from the original Age of Empires game, Battle for Greece is a wholly new campaign built from the ground up. It adds the civilisations of the Achaemenids (the Persian Empire), Athenians and Spartans, but the game eschews the traditional expansion format, with 5-7 missions for each civilisation, largely separate in time and setting. This time around the game has a fully voiced, expansive, 21-mission sequential campaign which moves between the three sides. There are fully-animated cutscenes (though heavily stylised, Blizzard's cinematic department can sleep easily here, but still very nice), full voiceovers and a story that unfolds across the game. The feeling is more like Age of Mythology (which recently also saw a comprehensive remake via Age of Mythology Retold) than any prior Age of Empires campaign, with a strong narrative and character focus.

The story is appropriately epic, spanning almost the full century of the Greco-Persian Wars, which saw the Greeks square off against the Persians (not for the last time) before fighting an internal conflict, the Peloponnesian War, over which Greek city would come to dominate the rest. This is a much more zoomed-in campaign than normal, with minor battles and campaigns being featured alongside the much more famous ones like Marathon, Salamis and Thermopylae.

Most of the 21 missions are huge, taking multiple hours to complete apiece with numerous twists and turns. The expansion took me 27 hours to complete on moderate difficulty. Some missions have timers, some missions require you to undertake operations without a home base, and some have you relying on allies to provide troops whilst you fight with them in the field. The few times you do get a town centre and can play a "normal" game of Age of Empires both feel like a relief but also an acknowledgement of the game's limitations; those missions are usually the easiest and most straightforward. Some of the missions are intricate puzzles with you having to work out how best to hit targets in the optimal order. One memorable mission has you having to win a democratic election (this is Greece, after all), meaning you have to keep the people happy, which you can do by fair means (hosting lavish games, winning glorious victories) or foul (smearing your opponent's name through rumour-mongering). Most of the missions are inventive, showing once again how to get surprising results out of what is still, under the 4K sheen, a 26-year-old game.

The game can also be frustrating. The campaigns do feel like a 2024 design hosted on a 1999 foundation, but those foundations sometimes shine through: a few too many missions have you completing the last mission objective only to be "surprised" by a final twist objective, usually some variant of "fight off this massive enemy army which has appeared outside your city with no warning, somehow." It's the type of cheap mission design I'd hoped we'd have seen the last of somewhere around 2005. The game's traditionally eyebrow-raising pathfinding and AI awareness issues are also present and correct. The expansion has changed a lot about how the game works, especially naval forces, but underneath it's Age of Empires II through and through.

The narrative focus could be of interest to people who perhaps find the traditional Age of Empires II campaign a bit remote and hands-off. The stories here are more personal and more engrossing, reflecting the massive events happening through individual ambitions and failings. It's a strong success, leading to one of the strongest expansion campaigns we've seen for the game. However, the campaign does feel a little on the long side, with some very bizarre difficulty spikes that can be deeply frustrating. The expansion also ends on a cliffhanger, confirming there will be a follow-up focusing on the life of Alexander the Great.

Age of Empires II Colon Definitive Edition Subcolon Chronicles Subsubcolon Battle for Greece (****) is a good time, and an easy recommendation for Age of Empires II fans who want more Age of Empires II (even granted this game has more content for it than almost any other video game ever made, after a quarter century of expansions and updates). Those who've perhaps not tried out the game before may find the narrative focus of this expansion are more compelling way of playing the game, although the mission design often assumes experience with how the game already works. Some frustrations and annoyances ultimately do not derail what is a nice twist on the Age of Empires formula. The expansion is available right now.

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Wertzone Classics: Age of Empires II Definitive Edition

Remasters have become a good way for a publisher to make a fast buck. Take an old game, do the bare minimum of work necessary to get it working on modern hardware, throw in some old expansions and away you go. Back in 2013, Microsoft did that with Age of Empires II: Age of Kings, releasing a "HD Edition" which was serviceable but no more. Unhappy with the remake, Forgotten Empires Studios got permission from Microsoft to continue developing new content for the game in the form of new expansions and updates. Three expansions later, Microsoft gave Forgotten Empires the green light to undertake a much more comprehensive remake of the original game.

The result is Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition, one of the most comprehensive and impressive remakes of a video game ever released. The game fully retains the original look and feel, but the graphics have been sharpened up to a hugely impressive degree. An intuitive UI has been implemented, allowing for villagers to re-seed farms automatically (rather than waiting for you to tell them to do it) and for units to undertake queued-up tasks. AI has been sharpened up, with a more impressive, reactive enemy on campaigns and in skirmish games.

At the core, though, the game is the same as before. Like the original Age of Empires, the sequel takes you through a period of history, this time starting after the fall of Rome and extending to the Renaissance. In this thousand-year period, you take control of a civilisation and guide it to victory. This can be done in skirmish, multiplayer or various story-driven campaigns. Those used to the intricate storytelling and even characterisation of RTS campaigns in games like StarCraft II or Homeworld will find these campaigns to be somewhat stand-offish, with less focus on hero units and more of a focus on how to achieve objectives corresponding to historical events. However, there is a linking narrator between each mission of each campaign, which adds some nice historical flavour.

On each map you start with a Town Centre and can build villagers, who are your basic resource-gathering units. Resources are divided between four types: food, wood, gold and stone. As with the original game, a nice twist is that resources can be gained from multiple sources: for food you can send villagers hunting, you can search the map for herd animals to send back to base for slaughter, you can find berry bushes, you can build farms or you can send out fishing boats. Gold can be found in mines or gained by trading with an allied power. However, an immediate, monumental improvement over the original game is that you can now build a Market which can exchange one type of resource for another. Relying too much on this can be problematic (a resource's value drops the more you sell it, and another's increases the more you buy it), but it immediately solves the problem of losing a battle because you've run out of resources, which was frustrating in the original game.

The other big chance from Age of Empires is the addition of formations. Your military units will now automatically organise themselves in blocks with heavy infantry in front, archers behind and cavalry at the rear (ready to sweep out and flank the enemy). This a vast improvement on the original game, where units just hurled themselves into battle randomly in a disorganised fashion. It's still a long way from Total War - and units have an odd tendency to drop out of formation the second combat starts - but it's a big improvement for the franchise.

The gameplay loop of a slow buildup followed by huge amounts of carnage is extremely compelling, and arguably better-handled then any other game of its type. A lot of this is down to the robust way the game has of handling defence, allowing you build fortified walls to seal off areas of the map, forcing enemies into chokepoints and otherwise controlling the battlefield. Constructing the perfect defensive fortification with guard towers, cannon emplacements, fortresses and defensive artillery positioned just right is an unmatched pleasure. With the more comprehensive new UI (allowing you to queue villager construction phases) and better AI, meaning both enemy and allied players are less likely to get stuck on scenery or take weird routes to their destinations, the game's controls are now smooth and easy to parse, and it is almost gleefully fun to watch your cities and defensive redoubts take shape before your eyes. And, of course, immensely frustrating if the enemy AI or a rival player gets the upper hand and burns your achievements to the ground.

Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition may also redefine the meaning of the phrase "generous content." The package contains:

• All of the campaigns in the original Age of Empires II: Age of Kings release from 1999, including five campaigns totalling 31 missions. Between singleplayer and multiplayer, thirteen distinct civilisations are available to play.
• All of the campaigns in the original Age of Empires II: The Conquerors expansion, including three campaigns totalling 18 missions. Five new civilisations are added.
• All of the campaigns in the expansions to Age of Empires II: HD Edition. These total three expansions (The Forgotten, The African Kingdoms and Rise of the Rajas) containing thirteen campaigns and 66 (!) missions. Thirteen new civilisations are added.
• Definitive Edition also contains its own expansion, The Last Khans, and a new campaign for the Forgotten expansion. The new material constitutes four campaigns and 21 missions, as well as adding four new civilisations.
• The game also has a "Historical Battles" campaign with one-off missions from a variety of campaigns. There are 16 missions in this mode, including some for civilisations which don't have a full campaign. 
• For those keeping score, Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition thus ships with 27 campaigns totalling 152 missions, and 35 civilisations.
• However! Since release, the creators have released two new expansions: Lords of the West and Dawn of the Dukes. These expansions have added a further six campaigns, 33 missions and four new civilisations. So with the expansions, the game now totals 33 campaigns, 185 missions and 39 civilisations.

For this review I decided to complete every single-player campaign mission in the game, which took a massive 231 hours. I also sampled the multiplayer and skirmish modes, and some of the co-op campaign features. Let there be no doubt that Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition offers more bang for your buck then any other real-time strategy game ever released. It's a monumental package that will keep you playing for months.

It's hard to really think of any negatives here. Most maps have several times as much gold than stone, which feels strange and probably a result of balance issues, where building a line of castles bristling with archers right into the enemy base was a viable tactic in the original release. The many newer maps having less stone makes this less viable and increasing the production cost of castles would have been a controversial alternative choice, but it still seems odd. There's also the old problem of the "aggro areas" around units feeling not particularly generous, sometimes leaving units being slaughtered whilst the rest of your huge army stands idly by a few feet away, not getting involved. Improve AI has made that less of an issue than it was in the original game, though.

Those extremely minor niggles aside, Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition (*****) now stands as a towering achievement for the traditional real-time strategy game. It's well-judged quality of life improvements elevate it past the mildly disappointing StarCraft Remastered of four years ago to become the definitive 2D RTS game. It is available now on PC via Steam and PC GamePass.

Age of Empires: Definitive Edition

The dawn of civilisation. Stone Age hunter-gatherers give way to Bronze Age farmers and Iron Age warriors. Across the world tribes are rising to greatness, founding villages that will become the first great cities and then the centres of vast empires.

Age of Empires, released in 1997, was a late addition to the real-time strategy genre, following on the heels of WarCraft (1994) and Command and Conquer (1995) and released almost simultaneously with Total Annihilation (1997). Whilst the other games in the nascent genre were fantasy or science fiction in genre, Age of Empires drew on history for its inspiration, and was particularly inspired by the historical, turn-based Civilization series.

Age of Empires is, at heart, an RTS as usual. You start off with a base - in this case a town centre - and can build worker units from the base. These gather resources, which can be used to construct further buildings, which in turn producer military units (archers, infantry, cavalry and ships) you can then take into battle. So far, so standard.

Age of Empires does do a few things differently, though. There's a huge amount of emphasis placed on support buildings which offer upgrades: send your 20 non-upgraded infantry guys into battle and they're likely to get slaughtered, but carefully choose from a selection of weapons and armour upgrades (you're rarely so flush with resources that you can upgrade everything) and they can turn into tanks capable of absorbing twice as much damage and dealing out more.

Resources are divided into several types: food is plentiful (effectively infinite, once you've researched upgraded farms) and wood is usually commonplace, but gold and stone can be much harder to track down and will require aggressive early exploration of the map and the securing and defending of resource points. Once you have a steady stream of resources, you have to protect them (sometimes a difficult task if you end up with half a dozen resourcing operations going on in remote parts of the map) and you also have to strike a balance between gathering resources and going on the offensive: the campaigns have a tight default limit of 50 units between both resource-gatherers and military forces, and it's not uncommon to have so many workers doing stuff that you realise you can't sustain an army of more than 10 or 15 guys. Go the other direction and you may end up with a nice, big army, but not enough resources coming in to replace losses in the field at a sufficient clip. There are some ways of increasing the population gap to sidestep this problem, though. One nice touch is that you can sometimes get the same resource from different sources: food can be acquired by any mixture of farms, hunters, berry-pickers and fishing boats.

The game is also notable for its slow pace versus its competitors: units take ages to build, and making your way through the tech and research tree can be slow going. The first two campaigns in the game do a good job of indulging this pace, but then the next few throw that out in the window and encourage a much more aggressive playstyle, which can be jarring. You can overcome the slow building issue by building more unit production centres (so construct four barracks rather than one), but this obviously stretches your resources even further.

Age of Empires does a lot right. The more complex resource management and pared-back military operations make this a somewhat more thoughtful game than its contemporaries, but also one where levelling up satisfyingly and getting a good loop of resource-gathering and then military deployment going can be tricky. The game is more challenging on this level than, say, Red Alert or WarCraft II, which both encourage and reward a far more speedy and aggressive commitment to warfare and much more simplistic resource management. There's also a nice historical intro and debriefing after each mission, setting events in a genuine historical context.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of problems. The Definitive Edition of the game, despite remastering the game's graphics beautifully, does not fix some of the old problems and introduces new one. Pathfinding is excruciating, perhaps the worst of all the classic RTS games, with armies in particular taking absurd routes to get to their destinations. There's little to no ability to control formations, so your slower, heavier tanks will simply fall behind your speedier skirmishers rather than staying in front of them to soak up damage. It does feel like almost every building takes twice as long to produce units as it really should, making for slow going at the start of each map.

There's also a plethora of bugs in the game. The most annoying is one that the game will sometimes "merge" a number of units standing near one another into some horrible mutant gestalt, like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly. The gestalt may break apart into its constituent members at some point, or stand there (presumably screaming in existential terror) until you put it out of its misery. Needless to say, it is incredibly irksome if half of your army decides to fold into a gibbering mass of limbs just before you launch your final assault on the enemy stronghold.

Another bug is related to difficulty. For some reason, the game defaults to the hardest difficulty on several missions rather than using the difficulty you've actually selected. This makes for unpredictable difficulty spikes where the game becomes so challenging it's borderline unplayable at times (and Age of Empires comes from that time period when "Hard" in games meant "actually really hard"), not helped by the pathfinding and units-merging issues.

The bugs, unfortunately, are prominent enough that they make playing and enjoying the game today much more challenging than it should be. When the bugs aren't happening and the player can get on with the game, there is enjoyment to be had. Unfortunately, this becomes more infrequent the deeper into the game you proceed.

Age of Empires: Definitive Edition (**½) is a beautiful-looking game and there's some fun to be had here (especially in the earlier campaigns), but a number of annoying bugs gradually escalate to make playing the game much more of a chore than it should be. The refusal to improve either the game's pathfinding or the sometimes-dunderheaded AI may have made a game that's true to its roots, but also one that's definitively been made obsolete by other games, most obviously the Definitive Edition of its own immediate sequel, Age of Empires II: Age of Kings, as well as the splendidly-updated Age of Mythology. Age of Empires: Definitive Edition is available for PC now.

Halo Wars: Definitive Edition

The year 2531. The United Nations Space Command and the alien Covenant are engaged in a war for control of vital resources. The UNSC starship Spirit of Fire investigates Covenant activity on the planet Harvest and uncovers evidence of a plot by the Covenant which could imperil all of humanity. The Spirit of Fire has to pursue a Covenant taskforce into deep space and attempt to thwart their plans without backup.

The Halo series began life as a real-time strategy game for Mac, before transitioning into a first-person shooter for PC before finally arriving on the original X-Box in 2001, the first shooter since GoldenEye to really work with a console controller. The series became a huge success, selling millions of copies of the original game and its sequels Halo 2 (2005) and Halo 3 (2007), and a spin-off, Halo 3: ODST (2009). In a sign of things becoming full circle, Microsoft decided to expand the franchise to other genres and commissioned a real-time strategy spin-off, Halo Wars, which was eventually released on the X-Box 360 in 2009. In 2016, the game was finally ported to PC as a "Definitive Edition," which is the version I have reviewed here.

Halo Wars gained praise on release as the first real-time strategy game made to really work on console. An intuitive interface allows players to build units, expand their bases, select forces and advance across the battlefield from a standard controller. Some standard RTS controls and ideas had to abandoned or simplified for the experience, but the transition was surprisingly successful.

As with most RTS games, Halo Wars opens with you having control of a single base. This can be upgraded with modules, such as supply depots (which generate supply, the game's sole resource), power stations (which generate power, which determines what upgrades and advanced units you can build), barracks, vehicle construction stations and aircraft construction stations. You can also add turrets to bases to help defend them. In an interesting twist, even a fully-upgraded base can't hold all of the structures you need, forcing you to expand early and explore the map to find areas where you can set up secondary bases.

The resource gathering is a particularly nice touch. Rather than send out a harvester of some kind to mine a resource, you simply generate supply points. The more supply depots you have, the more supply you generate, but of course you only have a limited number of expansion modules, so if you build lots of supply pads you may find yourself unable to build a vehicle factory or a barracks. This encourages early-game expansion and exploration. The supply mechanic isn't new, originating as it did in the Command and Conquer: Generals expansion Zero Hour many years earlier, but Halo Wars makes it really work as part of the mechanics.

You can build an extensive army consisting of infantry, aircraft, tanks, anti-air batteries and other units. The elite Spartan super-soldiers can't be built (at least in campaign mode) but can join the fray as special elite units for certain missions.

For a supposedly "cut-down" RTS, Halo Wars surprisingly enjoyable even for an experienced PC strategy gamer. The unit variety isn't the most extensive, but the focus on a smaller roster helps streamline the game and make it more enjoyable. It also allows for battles to be fought faster and more furiously, rather than you agonising of which of several very slightly different units to build.

The campaign is enjoyable, with a fairly straightforward SF story. As the game is set twenty years before the original Halo: Combat Evolved, no prior knowledge of the franchise is needed, making it a perfect jumping-on point ahead of the release of the upcoming Halo Master Chief Collection on PC (which will bring Halo: Reach, Halo: ODST, Halo 3 and Halo 4 to PC for the first time, alongside upgraded versions of the original Halo and Halo 2).

The game does have several problems, however. The game doesn't use many "standard" RTS controls, instead forcibly mapping camera controls to WASD and not allowing you to reassign them. This means many standard RTS controls - A for attack-move, S for stop - are not available in the game. The game is also on the short side: I polished off all 15 campaign missions in about 11 hours. The game feels like it really needs a Covenant campaign to make the game a more worthwhile single-player experience, and indeed the story feels a bit opaque at times, like we were supposed to be getting more information about the Covenant version of events but at some point this was cut.

The other problem is that the game can't help but feel a little familiar, particularly in missions fighting the organic Flood where you have to destroy their living technology. This feels very reminiscent of fighting both the Zerg in StarCraft and the Tyranids in Dawn of War.

Still, given it is now available at a very reasonable price, Halo Wars (****) succeeds as a short, focused and fun real-time strategy game which doesn't make too many concessions to its console origins. It's available now on Steam.

Age of Mythology: Extended Edition

The cyclops Gargarensis has vowed to shatter the gates to the Underworld and release the Titan Kronos back into the world. To this end he has assembled a vast army and set about this task in Greece. Arkantos, hero of Atlantis, sails to the Greek colonies to lend his aid in the Trojan War. Learning of Gargarensis and his plans, Arkantos forges a coalition with the Egyptians and Norse to stand against him.

Age of Mythology was released in 2002 as a stand-alone spin-off from the successful, mega-selling Age of Empires series. The first game in the series to use a fully 3D engine (albeit one cleverly modelled to resemble the 2D engine of the earlier games), it was a step forward in graphics and UI customisability at the time. Although the game was overshadowed somewhat by the close release of the superficially similar WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos, it was successful and ultimately sold over a million copies, an impressive feat for a real-time strategy at a time when the genre was starting to decline in popularity.

A few years ago the game was dusted down and re-issued as an "Extended Edition". This update touches up the graphics, has much better water effects and also allows for higher graphical resolution and widescreen modes. This version of the game includes the expansion, The Titans (which adds the Atlanteans as a fourth faction), and a five-mission side-campaign known as The Golden Gift, focusing on the dwarves (although they use Norse units and abilities). For a small additional fee, players can also download Tale of the Dragon, a nine-mission new campaign featuring a new, fifth faction, the Chinese. It's an impressive package, totalling 58 missions and taking approximately 40 hours to play through, which is a formidable amount of content for a real-time strategy game and excellent value, given the low cost that the game usually goes for in Steam sales.

The game is pretty standard as far as RTS titles go: you start with a base, in this case a town centre, from where you can train peasants who construct buildings and work as resource-gatherers. There are four primary resources: wood, gold, food and faith. The first three are used to build mundane structures and units (a mix of archers, cavalry, infantry and siege weapons) whilst faith is used to train "myth units" (sphinxes, dragons, cyclopses, hydras, frost giants etc) and one-off "heroes" (like Odysseus or Achilles). Resource-gathering is a surprisingly flexible system, with multiple ways of getting resources. For example, food can be hunted (peasants kill chickens, bears or pheasants and use them for food), farmed or gained from the sea by sending out fishing boats, whilst gold can either be mined directly, gained through trade at a marketplace or setting up a trade network between your town centres using caravans.

As usual, you amass armies which you can take into battle. The composition of these armies is interesting, with a rock-paper-scissors mechanic complicated by the deployment of counter-units (pikemen who are marginally effective in infantry battles but devastating against cavalry), so assembling a well-balanced force is essential. Units have a surprisingly high number of hit points, so making sure you get unit upgrades from an armoury to improve armour, attack and resilience to specific damage types, like bludgeoning or piercing is also important. As each game proceeds, you can upgrade to a different age, which unlocks new units and building types.

This is all standard, but Age of Mythology nails the details very well. This was one of the first RTS games that allowed you to automatically task newly-built units (so right click on a gold mine to make all the villagers built after this point automatically go over and start mining), resulting in a very smooth and intuitive playing experience.

In terms of gameplay, Age of Mythology is hugely enjoyable, but it does focus a lot on attack. Whilst some games give you impressive options for defence and turtling, like StarCraft and its bunkers, photon cannons and siege tanks, Age of Mythology's defensive structures tend to be less effective, with walls and towers coming down very easily to enemy action (disappointingly, as the game's wall-building system may be one of the best in any RTS game ever made, allowing you to built elaborate fortifications very easily). The game is at its best when you are constantly engaging the enemy, reinforcing as needed and keeping them on the back foot. Tactically, a fine balance is needed between known when to keep up an attack and when to fall back for reinforcement.

In terms of story, the game has a very silly but enjoyable narrative which mixes up the Norse, Egyptian, Greek and Atlantean legends and stories in a manner that's contrived but fun. The story can't hope to match WarCraft III's beautiful cut scenes and in-game plot twists, but it does know when to butt out and not interfere with gameplay (a lesson other RTS games could learn from, even now) through endless cut scenes and major reversals you can't do anything about. Age of Mythology remains a pretty fair game in that sense.

On the negative side of things, the game is very easy to, well, game. Some missions can be completed in minutes if you know where the objective is and if it isn't heavily guarded and difficult to get to. The AI could be better, and it's not uncommon for the AI to be so intent on getting its soldiers from A to B that it it sometimes doesn't stop to fight if you engage them and start slaughtering them on the march. The one-shot-and-done god powers means that the god powers are also not very useful in the game, and half the time can be completely ignored. There's also the feeling that some of the differences between the five sides are fairly superficial (only the Norse, who use soldiers to build things rather than peasants and have mobile resource-gathering carts rather than static stores, feel quite distinctive in that sense). Still, for a game that's sixteen years old, Age of Mythology feels quite fresh and modern in most respects. Even the graphics hold up well, only really dating when the camera zooms down for the in-engine cut scenes that open and close most missions.

More disappointing is the quality of the new expansion, Tale of the Dragon. The Chinese faction is far more generic than the original ones and the storytelling is utterly awful (lots of dodgy Chinese accents and amateur voiceovers abound). There are numerous bugs and errors introduced in this expansion not present in the original game (including the ability for your naval units to occasionally just sail off the edge of the map and die) that make playing it a chore. It's a shame as the new maps are wonderfully well-designed and there's a couple of variants on the standard designs which feel fresh (a massive plain allowing you build your perfect city, and another map where you have no buildings, just two enormous armies to go at it).

Still, this fresh repackaging of the original game is very successful and brings back to life an excellent and underrated RTS game. Age of Mythology: Extended Edition (****½) is available now on Steam.