Reviews

• Cơm thiu

  Aug 9, 2023

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• SparyAndPray

  Aug 8, 2023

  Reminds me of my childhood when i used to play the cracked version 😂.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 31, 2020

  If you liked Age of Empires III gameplay, you'll like this. Fair warning, you are basically paying for a slightly better looking AoE3 with two new civs. Now mind you, if this was any other game you'd probably be ok paying $15 for two new factions, or rather you wouldn't be ok with it but you would do it anyway. Consider that, and consider that you also get a discount on this if you own Age III. A note on Historical Revisionism: As someone with a BA in History, and who understands the current political climate, I understand and support why you changed the names of the Sioux and Iroquois to their preferred name. That doesn't bother me in the slightest, and it really has only positives for people of those backgrounds and cultures to support their representation. However, I find it problematic that you are attempting to erase the word Colony/Colonial from a game that is about the whole colonial system. You guys felt the need to apologize for creating this game in a climate that generally had no issue with these words, and you changed them to appeal to changing political climates. What you fail to understand, is that at least your campaign does a good job of explaining the brutal and unjust nature of imperialism and colonialism. The whole India campaign is an amazing scorch of British imperialism, as the Warchief section is a scathing and honest representation of US imperialism. By changing terms and pretending this game is something it's not, all you're doing is attempting to conceal history. Terminology matters when discussing history, changing terms makes no sense. In the academic community, we don't alter colonialism from our terminology, rather, we acknowledge it for what it is/was and write or study it. Also, be mindful this game greatly exaggerates all societies and communities, and while some portrayals can be considered unsavory in our 2020 world, just note that the European communities represented are also stereotypes. Why is this important? Because it's a VIDEO GAME!
• gamedeal user

  Mar 25, 2021

  Brings back the good old times when my only worry was doing the homework for the next day's classes.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 10, 2020

  The gameplay is great but the issues with the game are so bad it makes me doubt I will even buy the next one in the series. I also wish i knew the issues before i played the game now knowing the risks. Issues in the game: <*>Memory leaks. <*>Wiping people's c drives and not telling the community its an issue and only sticking a bug report on their website meaning unless you are looking for it then you don't know. In my mind, i can see why they did it but it's super shady and makes me have 0 trust in the game. <*>CPU usage can go to max no matter what machine I played it on I always saw this occur. <*>The game itself for what it is, in general, is fairly demanding. Tried using my work pc where i have to run multiple emulators for perf tests and even that pc had issues with frame drops every so often on max settings and ran into an occasion where all 32 gigs were used on the game. <*>Balancing in-game is a slight problem but for a release it's okay. <*>Ranked matchmaking seems very buggy right now. <*>Campaign missions will have buggy cutscenes or events in the script that will cause the game to crash. <*>Campaign AI in general will bug out and send all its units to the corner of the map or not attack when needed even if the script spawned the units for it. <*>AI seems to have 0 improvements which is a real shame meaning the game is not really a challenge. <*>Units get stuck on terrain. <*>Trees that don't disappear. <*>Pathing is an issue in certain scenarios. <*>Attack move doesn't work properly. <*>TC sometimes disappears. <*>Blank UI when loading into certain multiplayer games. <*>Multiplayer lobbies can be broken, an example is if people change their colors and you pick the free one it might still say it's taken. <*>Villagers bug out a lot for example they stop building houses after one is complete and one more is being constructed next to it. <*>Animals are buggy and sometimes get guided to the TC instead of being killed. <*>Progression instead of being replaced with something has just been removed and the progression system is still there with minimal rewards. <*>Censoring chat with no way of toggling it on or off. The issue with this is the censor will censor entire sentences that are not needing to be censored for example if you type "I am a noob" or "onager". Overall: The game should be classed as early access or delayed since I think it did more damage than good to the age community since i know a fair few people that play the age series that aren't going to buy age 4 for a few months based on this release even if they know its a different team working on it. Also as an entry game into the genre, i think this one had great potential but with the issues, i think it won't hit that potential anytime soon or at all. I might try it in a few months but to be honest I don't trust them with my computer and the solutions that people suggest to safeguard against the issues are not real solutions for example "install Linux" no casual player wants to get home from work or school and boot up either a secondary OS just for this game or a VM. I also work in the software development industry and can say this is below standard by a mile. QA failed to cover basic use cases, software developers failed in producing optimal code or didn't have enough time to profile the game to check for performance issues and refactor. Management failed to see the potential and didn't try their own product before release and possibly didn't listen to their team to extend the deadline being afraid to make the decision to talk to their publisher.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 15, 2020

  The AI still doesn't work on water maps. E.g. if you play on Ceylon, the AI stays put on their tiny starting island and stops doing anything because they run out of wood. As another example, if you play on Honshu, you can expand onto the second major island where you'll be safe for the rest of the game because the AI will never follow you there. The devs should've fixed this problem fifteen years ago. I'll update my review if/when the devs fix this problem.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 2, 2020

  The launch was... horrendous, to say the least. The game had more bugs than a rain forest. They have ironed out a lot of bugs already, but more work is needed until the game is truly stable. However, the game is in a playable state right now and I took my time until i wrote my review, as I believe that you can only rate a game after at least a couple of weeks of playtime. It is a decent remaster, the network component of the game is infinitely better than the laggy experience of the original, the Swedish and Incas are a fun addition and the changes to the previous civilizations were smartly implemented. My biggest pet peeve right now is the UX design of the multiplayer, you can't whisper or invite anyone from inside the game (unless you are in a chat channel with them or in their clan), you need to communicate with them outside of the game (Steam, Discord, etc.) I hope it will get redesigned and this was just a barebones implementation. The original game has a vastly superior online experience, thanks to the UI! All in all, it is quite a decent game, let's hope they fix more bugs and crashes and improve the menues ingame so the game's online population can strive and become larger. As I believe that the remaining bugs and grievances will be ironed out soon, I will give the game a positive review.. for now. If my expectations don't come through come early next year, I will edit this review appropriately. To battle!
• gamedeal user

  Jan 26, 2021

  This remaster does a good job of updating UI, graphics and fixing the home city mechanics that put a lot of people off of playing multiple civs in the previous release. Mostly everything enjoyable about the original core gameplay is kept present in this release. The new civs are pretty cool but not exactly revolutionary or game-changing in the ways Asian Dynasties/ Warchiefs were. Sweden is essentially a splice-up of other European powers whilst Cusco (Incas) is essentially a more AOE2-like warchief civ. Overall the content actually added by the release is minimal but functions and is the first in a long time. The team has made some strange artistic decisions in the name of historical accuracy. For a game that was not particularly historically accurate (or even intending to be) much of the effort in re-releasing this game has gone into changing the way colonialism and native Americans are represented in the game. The names of most of the first nation civs have been changed to endonyms e.g. Iroquois being changed to the Haudenosaunee which is not exactly an issue by itself. However, it brings up the question of why other civs haven't been changed to reflect their own endonyms. Why are the Indians not Bharat? Sweden Sverige? or Germany Deutschland? This seems like a very Americentric design approach based off of recent historical revisionism, there is not really an effort to change the depiction of any Asian or European civs and the effort gone into changing the (admittedly crude) representation of native Americans is ultimately jarring as it cuts and rearranges elements of the game. Elements of audio are awkwardly cut and changed with new voice acting that is honestly pretty poor in performance. Ultimately some of the changes to civs actively make them worse to play. Perhaps the biggest problem with the revisionist element of this remaster is the fact that near all mention of 'colonialism' is erased from the game. The Discovery Age is now the 'Exploration Age' whilst the Colonial Age is now the 'Commerce Age' and plantations are renamed 'estates'. From a historical perspective there was not really such a thing as a 'Commerce Age', these changes just seem to shy away from and deliberately misrepresent the Early Modern period of History, scrubbing out any reference to anything that could be deemed controversial. Andrew Jackson being simply referred to as 'American General' is very strange also as it goes against the team's previous ethos of 'accuracy'. It really just feels like an attempt at concealing history and as such the changes really only took away from my experience of the game. They were unnecessary and kind of patronising, especially to anyone with an interest in the time period. Most things I enjoyed about this game were already present in the original release and its expansions but it has had a much-needed graphical and performance upgrade. I'd recommend it on the basis that it breathes new life into the game.
• gamedeal user

  Apr 9, 2021

  After 1000 hrs I can say despite the tumultous nature of the time I am super happy with this game. It needed some more polish before release but Im happy that they went through the release cycle. There are less hacks, less balance issues (no OP abus, no old han or bust, no 10/10 sepoys always wins) and while sure sweden and inca needed adjustment Im really really happy with the state of the game and how well the developers supported the game. They really listened and after 15 yrs of lack of support this past year was a very welcome one! Thank you Tantalus and Forgotten Empires games and really look forward to the 10th and future work done by you! :) Thank you AOE3 DE Dev Team! UPDATE: Thank you @TremoR - Thanks to Tantalus and Forgotten Empires for the work on AOE3 DE
• gamedeal user

  Oct 16, 2020

  Where to even begin... The cons and some comparisons to the original: They have sacrificed core mechanics of the game in favour of historical accuracy despite never being a historically accurate game in the first place. The native civs can no longer tame animals, which was one of their coolest features, and the North American natives can no longer mine and are required to construct an additional building to be able to acquire coin. Changing things in the game to be more accurate and considerate towards people who were presented in the game in a way that was ignorant or even disrespectful is fine, great even, such as changing the names of the civs to what they actually call themselves, but changing core mechanics and lazily introducing them is not. This is an absurd and unnecessary change that is an insult to veteran players. A major pet peeve of mine is the change from colonial era to commerce era. Are you trying to tell me that a game, that is built around the theme of colonialism, around the era of colonialism and who's entire gameplay is based around building a colony can't have the colonial era in it because it is too offensive. Was colonisation an awful thing for many people, YES, absolutely, but it happened and its what the game is based around, the game isn't making it out to be some glorious thing. This change of course does nothing to the actual gameplay so I'm not going to give up on the game just because of that but it is extremely idiotic and useless. Home city progression has been almost completely removed. You can still level up your home city, however, it only unlocks the customization options for the visual appearance of your home city and no longer unlocks shipment cards, as you now start with all of them. While this works great for multiplayer as you no longer have to grind of out matches to get the cards you need to stay competitive, it is awful for singleplayer. There is no more sense of progress or goals to work towards and the main replayability of singleplayer is simply gone. This is the change that makes me just not want to play the game, I used to love unlocking and experimenting with different makeshift shipment decks as I worked my way up to the more powerful ones, but that is no more. The UI is a complete and utter joke. The visual design of it looks as though someone made a bunch of text boxes in Microsoft Word and copied and pasted them onto the edges of the screen. The original AoE 3 had a UI design that was full of character and had amazing satisfying sounds to match. The definitive edition UI is completely soulless and had ear-piercing horrendous sounds mixed in with some rehashed sounds from the original version that somehow sound worse. To add on to this, the deck editing menu is nigh unusable, its essentially just a massive blob of the possible shipments you can use with very little sorting options. The original deck editor showed you what building the card type, what era you could get the shipments in and the progression trees all at the same time, allowing for easy location and identification of each card. In the definitive deck editor you can sort by age or by card type thats it, enjoy, and the cards are in a seemingly random order with no visual separation making it a long unsorted messy list of shipments that fit said categories. This only what I've discovered and thought worthy of mentioning in my mere 2 hours of playing the game. I've hear many other people mention how poorly optimized the game is but I have had no issues with performance as of yet, so be cautious in checking if your pc can actually run the game. The pros: The two new civs seem unique and interesting, haven't played with them enough to say for certain but I'm not really picky with how strong or standout they are, just happy to have new content. The graphics are a decent upgrade, nothing ground breaking but they generally look nice. Having achievements is nice, there aren't a lot of them but something is better than nothing at this point. It's cheaper than the original AoE 3, which is nice. yeah, that's about it, it's a shit show. The Meh: The sound revamps are overall higher quality and are likely more accurate but they take away a lot of the nostalgia of the original and are also a lot less satisfying (in my opinion). The long list of changes to the native civs are great for recognising and respecting these cultures and for the most part don't really affect gameplay, however they ruin a lot of the games nostalgia (which is admittedly a sacrifice I think we can make) and a lot of it is lazily done, such the community plaza, where villages walk in circles for some reason and it looks ridiculous. The fur trading building used to get coin is gathered by villagers as if they were plucking berries... from the side of a building... built next to a coin mine... which they aren't allowed to gather from... but the fur trade drains coin from the mine? Very historically accurate, thanks devs. It's just looks stupid and is clearly not very thought out, but once again, doesn't affect gameplay so it's not that big of a deal. Things they could change to make this better: Major problems: A big one would be to revert the any and all mechanic gameplay changes (not balance changes). I can understand if they don't want to do this because they have committed to it and don't want to insult the very people they changed it for. Add the option to have level unlocked shipments and restore the progression mechanics in singleplayer Make the deck builder the way it was in the original or add more features to make it less of a nightmare Minor problems: Add the option to use legacy sound effects Allow for more in game UI customization Make the main menu UI less of steaming pile of dogshit Summary I'm pissed off. I've played more hours of AoE 3 than can possibly be counted, accumulated over the span of over a decade and to see it's legacy end with this disappointing mess makes me extremely sad. I've been beyond hyped since the first Definitive Edition was announced as I was hoping that AoE 3 would get one, and I was even more hyped when AoE 3 was confirmed to get one. I am not hard to please when it comes to remakes, I would have been satisfied and given this game a positive review if it was simply a graphics upgrade with nothing else but they went ahead and made changes that no one wanted, removed content and sucked the soul, the character and the passion from the game, all in one fell swoop. Some additions after seeing the comments: People are thinking that I'm railing on the devs for giving in to offended people, I'm not, I'm fine that the changes to the names and appearances of the nations, buildings and other things make the game more inclusive. What I am not ok with is compromising the gameplay for the those reasons. It's likely my fault for giving off that impression as my paragraph on the whole colony renaming ordeal made it out to be a lot more serious than it really is. I don't want to hate the game, I don't want to see it fail, I want to enjoy it. In it's current state, however, I don't see myself playing much of it and I would love to see that changed.