Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition – PS5 Review

Age of Empires II is a port of the 2019 real-time strategy game originally published by Xbox Studios but that was a remake of the original Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings which dates back to 1999.  And, of course, this has made its way to PSN thanks to the recent thawing of exclusivity rights now that Xbox are happy to put their games on the PS5.  Neat.

Rather than having a complete story to play through, Age of Empires II has a series of smaller campaigns each focused on various historical figures from the tutorial missions that have you playing as the Scottish led by William Wallace as they take on the English to campaigns featuring Joan of Arc, El Cid, Attila the Hun and even the likes of Liu Bei and various Persian, Bengali, Georgian and other campaigns thanks to all the included DLC missions (although hilariously the PSN shop actually has Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition – Standard Edition as one of the purchase options).

There are loads of campaigns and missions to play through but they’re all unrelated.  It’s almost like Pinball FX where the main package is really just a hub for dozens of unconnected missions.  And that’s absolutely fine by us but, of course, the big question is how does it all play on a console?  Well, Xbox owners have been playing this for years but, as an RTS, this is traditionally more of a keyboard/mouse affair.  Thankfully, World’s Edge (the American studio formed to oversee the remaster) have done a good job mapping everything to a joypad.

The tutorial does a good job of guiding you through the process of creating a settlement, assigning your workers to gathering various resources (a process that can be automated very easily), building your armies and then going and kicking off in your opponent’s manor.

This, as you’d expect, involves using every single button on the DualSense as well as various circular selection menus on the screen.  It’s a lot but it’s manageable enough.  There are also two control schemes available – normal and advanced – and they both work quite well.

In terms of the gameplay this is very much a ’90s RTS as you know and love them and if, like us, you cut your teeth on games like Command and Conquer on the PS1, you’ll feel right at home with Age of Empires II as it really follows the blueprint set out by Westwood’s iconic series.  You’ll be setting up economy-based buildings, constructing defensive walls and towers, trying to keep your housing in one area while your Mills, Lumber Yards and Mining Stations are in another, all that fun OCD stuff that many RTS players do.  You’ll build small armies of heavy-hitting melee units, ranged fighters and siege weapons and eventually you’ll hit the road, taking out each enemy army by blitzing their gate, fighting off the counter-assault and ultimately destroying their Town Hall.

And it’s actually all pretty good fun.  The feeling of smashing through enemy lines is just as rewarding as it was in Red Alert II, albeit without the Prism Tanks and Kirovs.  But you’ll need to really fight for those victories because the AI is absolutely no slouch here.  It’s very easy to get thwarted in this game.  Sure, the AI very rarely seems to win a decisive victory.  They never quite get it together to come and wipe you out but the constant guerrilla attacks and sneaking long-range bombardments are like being hassled by a gang of angry mosquitos.  It’s hard to build your siege army when some prick is chipping away at you from just outside of your line of sight.

It gets even worse when you’re given a space to take over and settle in and you’re an hour into building a decent little empire when suddenly the AI are attacking you using siege ships.  Establishing a dock and a navy is almost impossible if they do it first as they’ll just keep attacking it constantly, ensuring that you never really get established.  The AI has no problem creating a stalemate just to piss you off.

That’s really the main issue with the game though because you can spend ages getting set up, only to realise that you probably made some bad choices (that you couldn’t have realised were bad) like 30-60 minutes ago and so you end up bailing and rolling back to an earlier save.  The game kind of encourages that as it has keeps two autosaves going allowing you to go back to two different points in the game to see where you were the least screwed at the time.  And, while we’re complaining, your units’ pathfinding can be terrible often.

But, generally speaking, the game is enjoyable and rewarding.  The historical setting is a bit of a limitation because even though you can advance through various ages (Dark, Feudal, Castle and Imperial) you can’t ever go as far as any sort of modern combat.  It’d be nice to nuke the Mongols or drop an orbital space laser on the Persians but you’ll just need to be happy with trebuchets and warships.  But that lack of historical scope has some good and bad aspects to it.

The bad side of it is that compared to something like Command and Conquer: Generals, where each faction has their own distinct units, weapons and tech, it’s a bit odd that all the different countries here have the same tech tree and, aside from a little bit of text-based stories, pretty much the same characteristics.  Sure, you might get a French voice talking about Joan of Arc or something like that but that’s about as good as it gets.

On the plus side though, it does make things all a bit more accessible.  It doesn’t take much time to get from the Dark Age to the Imperial and so this does have that ’90s simplicity going on which might make it more appealing to some players but that doesn’t make it easy.  And in the end, we found progress to be slow and frustrating at times but if you’re up for a long, but fairly repetitive old-school RTS, this should serve you well.

What we did appreciate are the visuals which are neat, detailed and scale up wonderfully on a big TV.  The design of all the buildings, and the way they crumble, makes this an appealing game to look at.  Sure, it’s not ever all that spectacular but it all looks very nice.

But ultimately we’re not sure that the game’s slow and repetitive gameplay loop will keep people hooked long enough to play every campaign, let alone face the horrors of playing online against bastard humans.  But if you want some of that, the game supports cross-platform play (you’ll need to set up an Xbox account for that or, of course, use your old one that you had one the Xbox 360 – still pound-for-pound the greatest console of all time).

In the end we enjoyed Age of Empires II for quite a while but eventually it just got a bit much.  Of course, crunch-timing through a big game for review purposes can just be like that but, now that we’ve published, we probably need a good month away from it for now.