I enjoyed plenty of phone and tablet games back in the day, when it all started (god I feel old). When there were both amazing free and paid games. But then they started including ads, and microtransactions, and then battle passes, and then unskippable ads and promotions, and then progression got locked behind paywalls, etc.
I’m sure there are a few good games out there, but the few attempts I tried a few mobile games again it feels like I always run into having to pay to progress sooner or later. It’s most definitely nothing like the golden ages back around 2010.
But a real Age of Empires game? Hells yes. This was announced not long after the AoE2 and AoE4 ports to console & controller had shown to be successful (at least critically—no idea how they’re doing commercially). So I thought that they had cracked a way to do satisfying RTS gameplay on a mobile device. It’d be great to be able to play a quick Skirmish on the bus, or while spending time away from home without my computer.
So when a few aoe creators showed previews of the game back in February this year, I was rather surprised and very disappointed to see that the game has absolutely zero resemblance to an Age game. That the worst fears of it being a shitty rip-off were completely true. Thanks to those previews, I was not surprised on release this week—though the extent of just how bad even the narrative side of this is was still overwhelming.
For anyone who see the preview back in February, this is not exactly surprising, but it certainly brings home the reality of the situation—that the preview did not unfairly represent the actual game.
This deeply upsets me, because the Age of Empires franchise is one I really care about. 1, 2, 3, 4, and Age of Mythology are all excellent games, and every one of them belongs in the top 20 RTS games of all time. Microsoft might not be developing this game (that’s getting outsourced to Chinese company TiMi with a history of producing trash mobile games), but they are tarnishing their brand by allowing it to be associated with this game.
But it gets worse. They are apparently also silencing critics of it. Back when February’s announcement came out, some select few creators were allowed to put out videos about the game using exclusive footage of the game, and were told they’d be paid for their role in promoting the game. But they retained editorial control over the videos. YouTube channel Age of Noob put out one such video, and while tempered in its tone, it was largely negative.
Yesterday, the YouTube channel Age of Noob put out a video saying he never got paid, as well as more specifically saying how bad the game was. Today, he put out another one saying he was forced to take down that one (in vague terms—it would not even be clear he was talking about AoE Mobile, if you hadn’t seen the first video). In a pinned comment he also said that after making the second video, he found out he had been removed from the Age Franchise Partners programme.
If this is how Microsoft is willing to treat their biggest game franchise (well, biggest one that they didn’t buy after it was already huge), and the creators that help promote it, that is incredibly disappointing.
Who the fuck validated the bright idea in a management meeting : let’s outsource the mobile project to that Chinese company which produced those trash games ? Those people need to be fired like yesterday. Crazy how a company can sabotage itself…
It’s honestly shocking. They went for a decade with heaps of trashy mobile games advertising using stolen AoE art assets. When they finally announced a mobile game, I assumed it was because they thought they had cracked how to do a good mobile game that would do justice to their franchise. I guess the reality was more “oh, look how many companies are making lots of money ripping off our IP. We could rip off our own IP and make all that money!”
That was a really good review. I only know about this game because my xbox advertised it, and I assumed it was some new xbox game. It’s sad to see mobile ads on my xbox as 95% of the games are trash.
I got a good chucke of of the minireview review for it.
Age of Empires Mobile is a fantastic real-time strategy game… oh, wait. Scrap that. This mobile version of the beloved RTS franchise has nothing to do with the original PC games. The gameplay is different, and the monetization is extremely pay-to-win. Unfortunately.
I played at release and haven’t followed it since then. At the time, I remember it being highly criticized and not popular with the community. It has been over a decade, and I could be misremembering.
Yeah I’m not really sure either. I get the sense that either it got better over its lifetime or over time people came around to it à la the Star Wars prequels. But I don’t really remember it. I played it a little early in its life but don’t remember anything about it.
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