Age of Empires Online is a serious departure from past Age of Empire games: it's cartoony, and features many MMORPG aspects to round out the game's strategic gameplay. The game is still complex and meaty, especially for a free-to-play title. Many games of this type reach into your pocket as soon as they can. In contrast, AoE Online could be giving away too much to properly sustain itself. There's much to enjoy before spending a single Microsoft point.

You build a city with workshops, stores, storage buildings, and even shrubberies if that's your thing. The art style looks like it was lifted from Disney's Hercules and The Emperor's New Groove. From this city and neighboring ones, you can accept campaign-style quests from citizens to accomplish certain objectives on a given map—eradicate all the buildings of an enemy who has already built a maddening, massive network of defensive towers that relentlessly shoot arrows, for instance, or meeker ones, such as "build four farms in under eight minutes."

True to its RTS roots, success in single-player stems from the ability to manage your economy by properly directing your hunter-gatherer villagers to collect resources, and then turning these resources into well-directed armies. For someone sufficiently out of practice with RTS games to have a skill level somewhere between "incompetent" and "knows what to do but more often that not isn't doing it," I found the early quests, at least, to be pretty rote. Fortunately, there is an "elite mode" that can be toggled on each quest that will increase the difficulty.

Dealing with individual units will be familiar to AoE fans; the pathing and related strategy has changed little since AoE II. But for someone coming off of a game like Starcraft, the units have AIs that can be hard to get accustomed to, which isn't a bad thing—for example, units can be set to "guard" a certain area and will automatically attack an incoming horde effectively, returning to their assigned positions when done fighting.

The units have a wide radius of awareness for enemies and will run out to meet them from a far distance. That's good for preventing bad guys from piling up on top of you, but a constant flow of mobs means your armies will drift away from any static defenses you have set up, requiring you to shepherd them back.

And the pathing, despite having been refined over many years, can be frustrating: when directing one band of units to run past another, the running group will spend what feels like an eternity pathing through the standing group, rather than around them.

Upon completing quests, you can receive a number of different rewards: experience, money, empire points, building materials, and sometimes points proprietary to a destination city (for instance, "Crete points"). Empire points are the most difficult to collect, with most quests rewarding between two and four points, and experience goes toward increasing your level, which gives you points to spend in the tech tree.





Currency spending is sometimes nested together in a way that seems overly complicated. For example, if a player wants to make a crafted pine staff, they need a religion recipe store. They buy the blueprint for this store from another store with gold, and once they build the store, buy the recipe with empire points. Once they have the recipe, they need quest rewards, luck, or gold to get the materials.

This isn't an unprecedented number of layers to crafting, but it makes having to buy the store, at least, seem unnecessary. But buying and placing buildings is meant to be part of the fun—as you level, you gain access to more buildings, making your city bigger and more intricate, and since other players can visit your city, a good layout is more than a matter of personal pride. My RTS reflexes alone are plenty mockable; I don't need the victors to drop by and see my city all ashambles too.





Equipment is another vast layer of the game you can really dig into. Every unit and building in the game has multiple equipment slots that players can gear, which, that's an enormous amount of gear to collect. Like the tech tree, the benefits of gear carry over into your quests and PvP matches, and it can be crafted, but there are limits on how many crafting halls and workshops players can have going at once (premium players are allowed more). Players can buy, sell, or trade with one another to get ahold of the materials or gear they need.

This brings us to the premium/free-to-play divide: only players that pay for premium civilizations get access to the best gear (rare and epic items), as well as access to the highest tiers of the tech tree. So when it comes down to PvP, the reason that most people play AoE, it looks at first glance like those who don't pay up will always end up getting worked in battles.

But this isn't, or isn't meant to be, true: the matching system, which developers have named Live Trueskill, takes into account whether players have access to premium content when matching for PvP (both 1v1 and 2v2, ranked and unranked). Having the best possible techs and gear may make the game more fun for some, and at a cost of $20 per premium civilization, it's not an outrageous cost. But it's never necessary.

Within the game, players will also be able to buy "booster packs" that offer new play styles or stories. For example, the game is launching with a "Defense of Crete" pack, where players can co-op defend their cities against waves of enemies, priced at $10. A bunch of premium features are also available in a "Season One" package, including the premium Greek, Egyptian, Celt, and pro Persian (read: starts at level 20) civilizations, Defense of Crete, and cosmetic extras for $99.99. The next such package will become available in roughly six months, for another $99.99, and so on for as many seasons as the developers can go.

With a game where multiplayer PvP is so popular, one of the issues that still needs to shake out is civilization balance. The game seems fine to us now, but balance issues are something that emerge only after enough play time has been logged that players have worked out all the possible exploits and shortcuts of the system. While it looks like a good matching system was a major focus during development, players should probably expect ongoing fine, or major, tuning, both across civilizations and the premium/free-to-play divide, especially given the amount of equipment and techs available.

As players can work each civilization to level 40, and then PvP beyond that, there are a few dozen hours of rich, interesting gameplay to be had here, for free. Microsoft has maybe done a crazy thing here, but it's one we hope can be sustained.