Product Details
 | Age of Empires 2: Age of Kings |
| Price: | $43.98 |
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Product Description
Age of Empires II: Age of Kings puts you in control of a powerful ancient civilization and challenges you to become the dominant power! Use the Map Editor to design your own campaigns See if you can conquer a worthy opponent online!Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #4551 in Video Games
- Brand: Microsoft
- Model: 559-00105
- Released on: 2002-03-07
- ESRB Rating: Teen
- Platforms: Windows NT, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me, Windows 95
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.25" h x 5.25" w x 7.50" l, .55 pounds
Features
- You will take an ancient people through a 1000 year span, and develop trade, armies and technology to lead them to greatness
- Amass and equip an army like none ever seen, and use strategy to have them conquer enemies
- Construct means of commerce and diplomacy, while discreetly employing intrigue and regicide
- Command one of 13 civilizations - including the Franks, Japanese, Byzantines, Vikings, Mongols, and Celts
- Battle alongside heroes of the day - Joan of Arc, William Wallace, Genghis Khan, Saladin, or Barbarossa
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Review
When it comes to vast, kingdom-spanning ambition, you
can't do better than Microsoft's Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings.
Microsoft went all out to create this real-time strategy game, and it
fairly hums with gorgeous graphics, sophisticated AI, and challenging
scenarios for the novice and experienced player alike.
The point
of the game is to shepherd your fledgling civilization to world
domination, using war, trade, and exploration. You start with the bare
minimum to get going, and you've got to balance your people's needs with
your desire to be a little Napoleon. The Age of Kings gives you a
ton of new units and technologies to enrich your strategic options.
Each scenario is placed accurately within history, but you're also free
to create your own.
The multiplayer format is robust, allowing up
to nine players to share a world. When battles commence, you can take
control of every aspect of your workers and soldiers, sending them
running for shelter in the town center, ordering them to defend a
watchtower, or setting their combat stance to "aggressive" for
free-for-all sword smashing fun. When you're not fighting, find your
idle peasants with a mouse click and send them back to work chopping
trees, rounding up sheep, fishing, or mining gold and stone.
As
you acquire more resources, you can improve your soldier's gear and
skills, start to trade more efficiently, and make life better for
everyone in your empire. You can choose from 13 groups to manage, from
the Japanese to the Teutons and Franks. Each group has unique units and
special characteristics, making this a game that changes every time you
play it.
If all this sounds complicated, it is. New players may be
intimidated by the range of choices, but the teaching scenarios are
very helpful in conquering the controls. Age of Empires II is a
sophisticated, gorgeous successor to the wildly popular original. It's a
real feather in Microsoft's cap--a world-building game that will hold
you captive. --Therese Littleton
Amazon.com
Product Description
Age of Empires 2 spans 1,000
years, from the fall of Rome through the Middle Ages. Players control
the destiny of 1 of 13 civilizations. The game keeps the epic scope of Age
of Empires' gameplay while evolving the combat and economic
features. Developed by Ensemble Studios, Age of Empires 2
features the expertise of Bruce Shelley, codesigner of Age of Empires
and the hit strategy game Civilization.
GameSpot Review
It would be incorrect, but
not entirely unreasonable, to claim that Age of Empires II: The Age of
Kings and its isometric 2D playing field seem just like every other
first-generation real-time strategy game ever made. Take away the
historical context depicting a millennium of military progress since the
Dark Ages, and you'd have a game in which you'd stockpile resources,
grow your population, and augment your technology, all to amass an army
with which to defeat your enemies as quickly as possible. But even as
this model has remained historically relevant for as long as history has
been documented, so too is it not liable to stop being the premise for
computer games anytime soon. And if Age of Kings is any indication of
how such real-time strategy games will continue to improve, then we
couldn't be more fortunate.
Although Age of Kings runs at higher
resolutions and looks cleaner and sharper than many of its similar
predecessors, you'll find that there's nothing foreign about its
appearance. Villagers, buildings, trees, the black fog of war, and
everything else on the map will be immediately recognizable if you've
played a real-time strategy game before. But even if you've played them
all, you'll note several differences in Age of Kings' presentation that
make it stand out against comparable games. For instance, all the
buildings and units in Age of Kings are shown more or less to scale -
town halls and castles nearly fill the screen and loom high above your
people. There are four different styles of architecture in the game -
Eastern, Middle Eastern, and Eastern and Western European - and although
they appear identical in the Dark Ages, by the Imperial Age all four
look entirely different and authentically beautiful. Unlike the
architecture, your villagers and military units look the same no matter
what civilization you choose. Fortunately, almost every one of them
looks good, and there are plenty to choose from, such as swordsmen and
archers on up to mounted knights and terrific war machines.
Age of
Kings can look a little bland and washed out before you fill the screen
with buildings and military units, but this same sparseness makes its
interface clean and effective. The clearly depicted controls at the
bottom of the screen and the familiar mouse functionality make this game
very easy to pick up and play. Best of all are the descriptive floating
help messages that thoroughly describe every unit and technology
available, which you can toggle off once you begin to remember them.
Your units move quickly and easily from point to point, and selecting a
mixed group will automatically assign them to a logical formation, with
tougher units in front and more vulnerable units in pursuit. Grouped
units will also travel at the rate of the slowest member of the brigade,
a feature that ultimately lets you coordinate attacks far more
effectively than in most any other real-time strategy game. And as your
soldiers fight and win, they quickly seek out the closest and most
appropriate target, thus eliminating any tedious micromanagement and
affording you the time to oversee something more complicated and
tactically viable than a head-on assault. With floating help turned on
and all your little units running around at once, Age of Kings can start
to look a little cluttered. But it also looks its best at times like
this, when the screen is so full of buildings and people you can begin
to imagine how their historical equivalents once prospered.
Even
so, you'd think with only four styles of architecture and one generic
set of units, the 13 civilizations in Age of Kings would seem identical.
And while some of them seem similar, it's to the designers' great
credit that most of the civilizations manage to feel very different from
one another in spite of any visual likeness. For one thing, each
civilization's units speak in their native language, and while they
don't say too many different things, it's great to listen to them
anyway. Each civilization also has its own unique unit that emphasizes
or augments that civilization's strengths, and this also helps
distinguish each one from the other 12. For instance, to emphasize the
Byzantines' defensive power, their units for countering infantry,
archers, and cavalry are cheaper to produce; and to suggest the Turks'
scientific achievements, they can research gunpowder technologies at a
lower cost than any other civilization. Such cultural distinctions are
often subtle but become more noticeable later in the game, when the
skillful player who takes greater advantage of his culture's offensive
or defensive inclinations will soon find himself in the lead.
Then
again, to build up your civilization to its strongest potential is by
no means a simple feat, despite whatever luxuries the game's elegant
interface provides. The original Age of Empires was criticized for
combining the pretensions of a complicated turn-based strategy game like
Civilization with real-time gameplay mechanics that were borrowed from
Warcraft II. But Age of Kings makes good on the original's promises by
providing a huge, branching technology tree and a correspondingly
profound depth of gameplay that rivals virtually all similarly themed
turn-based games. You must constantly reevaluate your priorities when
gathering the game's four resources, since those priorities change as
new technologies become available; and you must constantly make key
tactical decisions based on the order in which you research particular
technologies. You need to keep moving forward without spreading yourself
too thin, although you're afforded some breathing time to get started
early on since you can garrison your villagers within your town hall to
defend against a preemptive attack. And yet throughout the game, Age of
Kings' pacing is so fast and so exciting as to rival Blizzard's
real-time strategy hits. Consequently, under no circumstances should you
be prepared to win a war in Age of Kings without a fast hand on the
mouse. But similarly, you're not going to win unless you think.
There
are also several different ways to play the game. You can use the
random map generator to quickly create a custom-tailored, finely crafted
map for up to eight players, or build your own map from scratch. You'll
find a consistent challenge in taking on one or several computer
opponents set to the default difficulty or above, although you'll soon
learn of the computer's propensity to use guerilla tactics and fall prey
to particular tricks. You can start with a ton of resources and just
have at it in the deathmatch mode; you can set out to kill the enemy
king in a regicide match; and you can play one of Age of Kings' five
historical campaigns. These campaigns focus on such legendary leaders as
Joan of Arc, Frederick Barbarossa, and Genghis Khan in a series of
linked missions interjected with voice-over narration describing these
figures' tribulations and victories. All five of these, including the
William Wallace tutorial campaign, are fairly short and only begin to
approach the sense of style and cohesion pioneered by Blizzard's
real-time strategy campaigns.
No matter how you play it, chances
are good that you'll enjoy Age of Kings if not for its careful
historical detail then because its context never takes precedence over
the game's playability. And if you've ever liked any other real-time
strategy game in this classical style, then you'll clearly see why this
one deserves so much credit, even in direct comparison to the finest
examples in its category.--Greg Kasavin
--Copyright ©1998
GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in
any form or medium without express written permission of GameSpot is
prohibited.
Customer Reviews
Gaming excellency
I had been a die-hard fan of
AOE for about a year and a half before AOE2 hit the shelves. I didn't
pick it up until about March but I loved this one twice as much as the
first and here's why: (1) Unlike the first, AOE2 offers you the ability
to garrison units which is great for an ambush. (2) AOE2 also offers
players the ability to place units in formations such as the box,
staggered, etc. (3) New scenarios which actually help players learn to
craft and fine-tune their skills. (4) The ability to save a multi-player
game. How many times have you been in an awesome two hour game when
something comes up; no more. (5) Great new customizable scenario
building tools that make it more fun then ever. (6) Castles, Unique
Units, and all the other new buildings and techs. (7)Trading from the
market- a simple way to trade for that 200 gold for the easy castle from
the feudal age. (8) Recorded games- a great way to fine-tune your
skills by learning from a master. (9)More Random Maps for total
playability. (10) Right-Click farming, ah, that is what get's me on this
game. Before you had to click a villager click the build, etc. No more!
Just right-click the farm, saves you plenty of much-needed playing
time. Age of Empires 2 outdoes its predecessor by far and becomes highly
addictive and playable day after day after day.
An improvement over the original, a credit to its
genre.
For those who feel that this
game lacks a depth and is not a significant improvement over age I, I
must emphatically disagree. The diversity of units, their strengths and
most importantly their vulnerabilities, make strategic considerations
very important. Even the weakest of units, the peasant, can become an
effective defender when garrisioned in a building. Buildings are harder
to knock down, and the ability to garrison missile troops and peasants
within them make the importance of well planned and diversely equipped
invasion forces critical. A force of infantry that is not supported by
siege engines will eventually run out of steam when faced with fortified
castles and garrisioned town centers. Cavalry raiders can be
effectively crushed by cheaper pikemen and camels. Armies made
excusively of expensive missile troops can be completely smashed by a
single shot from a catapult, or by relatively cheap groups of
skirmishers and light cavalry. The effectiveness of countering
strategies makes a planned assault and defense critical to game success.
Control
of your military units is far more refined than the mob mentality that
prevailed in age I. The addition of easy to use formations makes
marching multiple unit types (cavalry and archers, for example) far
simpler to manage. And the ability to set stances (defensive,
aggressive, no attack) prevents your units from fervently pursuing
villagers across the map, or attacking things that they cannot hope to
destroy. Add features like patrol routes and guarding, and one can
easily see that this game is not just a matter of building more units
than the other guy (though that certainly helps!) The path finding is
also VASTLY improved...
As for the visual and auditory, the
attention to detail is simply astounding. Individual villagers of each
culture speak in the native language of their civilization.
Architectural styles are beautifully rendered, and buildings appear to
scale with the units around them. The landscapes are lush and
atmospheric, as is the local plant and marine life. The game is simply
gorgeous, a pleasure to look at and listen to.
Only a few
complaints. Managing farms and automating villager functions is still a
hassle. Naval combat, while impressive to behold, is not much different
from the disorganized mess it was in age I. The formation improvements
used in land combat were not applied to ships for some inexplicable
reason. And it sure would be nice to be able to automate the
attack-and-retreat tactics that come so naturally to horse archers.
Still,
most of my gripes were minor. Overall, I am completely impressed with
the game, and plan to play well into the next age...
HINT!
Amazing Game! Keeps me awake
in class. To those complaining about being unable to keep up with the
computer because it can fight while simultaneously building more troops
and its economy--here is the solution. Use F3 to pause the game and then
direct your troops/buildings/villagers to their tasks at your leisure.
Then unpause the game and let them go to work. This takes away a lot of
the anxiety and time frustration of trying to be 4 places at once. It
also makes it possible to take notes occasionally.
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