I prefer playing games on consoles, as a rule of thumb. I’ve said this often enough, but to repeat the reason for it: I spend so much time working on PCs that I struggle to sit down and play games on them without something kicking in my brain and telling me I should be working instead. The advent of PC handhelds like the ROG Ally and Steam Deck have helped me enjoy my Steam library more, as they’re not great for work, but there are also plenty of games that don’t do well without a keyboard and mouse. Long story short, I never thought I’d get to really enjoy Age of Empires II as a console-like game. For that reason alone, I’m so happy that it’s on PlayStation 5.
It’s not just that it’s available on console, though. The full game is there, and Age Of Empires II has, thanks to DLC and the new Definitive Edition, never really taken a break in its 25-year history. Developers have continued to add to it, and the package, today, is monumental in scope. There are dozens of solo-player campaigns to play through, and the PR blurb claims that there are 200 hours of gameplay in there. I think that’s underselling it by a fair margin. Especially if you then dig into online multiplayer and the skirmish mode.
The PlayStation 5 release of the Definitive Edition comes with The Three Kingdoms expansion, which is all-new and exactly what the name suggests: You get three MORE campaigns, letting you follow the stories of the three main protagonists of the ancient epic Romance of the Three Kingdoms in China. That in turn means three more civilisations, each with unique units, technologies, and heroes. On top of that (but wait, there’s more), there is actually two more civilizations in this pack, the Jurchens and Khitans, who were people that lived on the fringes of the Chinese empire (the Manchurian region for the Jurchens, and the Khitans were “proto-Mongols” who, at the height of their power dominated Siberia, Mongolia, and Northern China). They, too, have unique features to learn and master.
So just to be clear, this release of Age of Empires II features the base game, a whole bunch of expansions – Three Kingdoms, but also Lords of the West, Dynasties of India, and Dawn of the Dukes – all remastered into 4K and with a remastered soundtrack. I am struggling to articulate just how much game is in this thing. I’m not usually a person to go out and crow about how great it is when any single title is fundamentally endless and can become a hobby all by itself, but, when you consider just how good Age of Empires II is, it’s difficult not to lose yourself in its breadth and depth.
All of that would be for naught if the developers didn’t find a way to make it all playable on a controller, and as a whole, the RTS genre has a patchy history here. Mice offer you extreme precision, whether you want to select one single unit in a crowd, or an entire army to control at once. The keyboard, meanwhile, has as many “buttons” as you need to fill with commands and shortcuts. A controller, in contrast, is excellent for a wide range of applications, but precise manipulation of a cursor is not one of them. I also have nightmares of trying to remember all the buttons and combinations of earlier efforts to bring RTS gaming to consoles back on the PS1 through Xbox 360 era…
I’m happy to report that Age of Empires II is incredibly intuitive, and the developers have done a masterful job of making the interface and flow of the game run beautifully. Radial menus are cleverly used to take context from the building or unit that you have selected, keeping the amount of information you need to wade through at any one point quite straightforward. Age of Empires II itself also benefits from being a game of mobs, so you’ll very rarely need to select individual combat options. There’s even a useful feature where you can pull up a series of pie charts that allow you to control how your non-combat villagers behave automatically. I don’t know if this is a feature in the Definitive version on PC as well, but on PS5, all you need to do is click an analogue stick down, and select the split of activities for your villagers to organise themselves into (for example, 10% collect ore, 30% collect wood, 60% collect food). Then the villagers will do that automatically (so, in the example above, one villager in every 10 will set out to mine for ore). This means the only time you need to directly control the villagers is to task them to build new structures, allowing you to focus on the actual management of your forces and environment.
Another feature that I really appreciated was the ability to control the speed of the game. If you are finding the default speed a little too much with the controller, you can toggle it down. It means that games take longer as units move at 75 per cent or half pace, but that gives you more time to think and manage the controller inputs. I actually like my RTSes to be more slow-paced, so I defaulted to the slowest anyway. It gives Age of Empires II a kind of “real-time 4X” vibe, then.
The underlying game remains so compelling, 25 years later. Going through the motions and building up resources to promote your civilisation to the next age, so you can access more powerful units and buildings, is a brilliant, streamlined loop, which is made particularly effective in Age of Empires due to finding the right mix of balance and depth. While more modern strategy games tend to (at least try to) offer a bit more than “build up faster than your opponent and then swamp them”, and Age of Empires II does have that quality to an extent, the sheer range of units, factions, and options means that two evenly matched players will enjoy a tense battle where there will be some real jostling for position before one side can get enough ascendency to start using swamping tactics. And considering that, over the years I’ve seen some incredible turnarounds when a player with a clear lead fumbles the ball a bit. You want that in a strategy game. It’s proof that strategy matters when it’s not just a matter of supremacy being able to win through sheer numbers.
I love being able to play Age of Empires II on my console, and for it to play so well on the hardware and with a controller. As someone who consumes anything to do with Romance of the Three Kingdoms with enthusiasm, I’ve loved this latest expansion in a very long line of excellent expansions, too. Now we just need to get a remaster of Civilization 2 as well, and I’ll spend the rest of the year just playing the same games I spent my entire teenage years with.
