Tag Archives: relic

Thoughts: Age of Empires 4

aoe4_elephants

“The next generation of real-time strategy gaming!” proclaims the marketing blurb for Age of Empires 4. This is technically true, since aside from assorted mediocrities like Grey Goo and Company of Heroes 2 I don’t think anyone has taken a proper big (or at least medium-sized) budget stab at the classic RTS since Blizzard released Starcraft 2 back in 2010. Unlike those failures, Age of Empires 4 has the support of a big franchise name, a big publisher — they don’t get any bigger than Microsoft — and it’s being developed by Relic Entertainment, who are in theory a seasoned RTS studio thanks to their experience with Dawn of War and Company of Heroes. But if Age of Empires 4 is indeed the next generation of real-time strategy gaming, then I have to say it looks a hell of a lot like the twenty year-old Age of Empires 2.

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Thoughts: Homeworld Remastered

homeworld_drones

The Homeworld Remastered Collection is a packaged rerelease of space strategy classics Homeworld and Homeworld 2. I didn’t like Homeworld 2 the first time around, and so this is largely going to be a review of the remastered version of the first Homeworld.

Gearbox strikes again.

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Thoughts: Company of Heroes 2.

what

Company of Heroes 2 is a game that vexes me mightily. It is almost totally devoid of surprises, a game made to order to satisfy a set of increasingly tired RTS clichés that doesn’t do anywhere near enough to iterate and improve upon its predecessor. It seems that Relic were right to depart from the formula they’d established with the original Dawn of War and CoH and experiment with a smaller, squad-focused setup in Dawn of War 2 – judging from their return to their old WW2 stomping grounds here, it seems very much like they’ve run out of ideas on how to innovate when they don’t have space aliens and laser guns to fall back on.

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Thoughts: Space Marine.

justincase

Or: How I finally became convinced all level designers working in mainstream video games need to be lined up against a wall and shot.

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