“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.

To be completely fair to Relic, Age of Empires 4 is a better game than I was expecting them to make based on their recent (or semi-recent) track record. I think there’s finally been a general realisation that game development studios are a lot like the ship of Theseus; they’re constantly undergoing a churn in personnel as older developers leave to do their own thing or are “promoted” to management positions and new blood is brought on board. In recent years we’ve seen several studios who previously were known for releasing nothing but classics — Blizzard and Bioware are the ones who most immediately spring to mind — abruptly send their reputation straight into the toilet with a string of duds¹. Afterwards the question is always asked: how could this company release such a bad game when they clearly know how to make a good one? And my answer is always that these companies have been around for multiple decades at this point and the people who developed Warcraft and Mass Effect are long, long gone; all that’s left is the name attached to a mostly-new group of developers who, for whatever reason, can’t recapture that same magic.

Relic are another great example of this. Dawn of War and Company of Heroes were both incredible games. They were also released in 2004 and 2007 respectively, and while the company still had it as late as 2010’s Chaos Rising the writing was on the wall with Company of Heroes 2 in 2013: Relic no longer knew what they were doing when it came to the RTS, which was subsequently confirmed with the disastrous Dawn of War 3 in 2017. When Age of Empires 4 was announced with Relic at the helm a couple of years ago I groaned inwardly since it seemed like this would just be another beloved franchise for them to drive straight into a brick wall. Nothing I saw from the prerelease marketing gave me cause to doubt this assessment, and so I gritted my teeth and clicked the “Download” button on Game Pass more out of a sense of misguided obligation to see just how bad it was than because I actually wanted to play it.

I’d like to say that I was pleasantly surprised by how Age of Empires 4 turned out, but this is patently untrue. I was surprised, at least, because my expectations were rock-bottom low. Age of Empires 4 has not done itself any favours whatsoever by being based heavily on Age of Empires 2 — same time period, same buildings, (sort of) the same units, same technologies, same gameplay. This gives it a pair of extremely weighty problems right off the bat: one is that Age of Empires 2 is an RTS classic and it’s extremely unwise for Relic to invite such direct comparisons in this way. You’re going to be seeing a lot of comparisons to AoE 2 in this review, which I would usually try to hold back on after a twenty year gap between the two games but which are literally unavoidable in this case because Age of Empires 4 is in many respects a straight remake of AoE 2. And that runs slap bang into the second problem with this idea: there was already a very good remake released at the end of 2019 in the form of Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition, so it’s not like Age of Empires 4 can get away with updating the UI and graphics and adding some modern quality of life features and a modern multiplayer backend and calling it a day., because that’s already been done

Possibly the most surprising thing about Age of Empires 4, to me, is that it doesn’t do this. It might use AoE 2 as a baseline but it does try to carve out its own identity, which leads to some massive regressions from what you can find in AoE 2: Definitive Edition and all of those unfavourable comparisons that I’ll get into dissecting in just a bit, but also a couple of additions that I do think justify Age of Empires 4’s existence as a separate thing. By that very low metric Relic have managed to achieve a measure of success here; Age of Empires 4 might be constantly standing in the shadow of Age of Empires 2, but it at least manages to avoid being crushed underfoot.

It’s probably worth tackling Age of Empires 4’s skirmish and multiplayer first, whose foundation is largely unchanged from the formula that was established in the original Age of Empires a full quarter-century ago. The idea is that you start each game in the Dark Age with a town center and a few villagers. You set the villagers to gathering food and wood and your town center to building more villagers. You herd sheep back to your town center for a quick food boost, build houses and mills and lumber camps to support your constant production of villagers (and thus the total rate at which you can gather resources), get a barracks up to produce a few military units to fend off wild animals and raiding parties, and then focus on teching up to the Feudal Age. This unlocks more buildings and technologies and units, so you build all of them while creating additional outposts for resource collection. Perhaps at this point you’ll get involved in a short war with a neighbour but things are still very much in the raiding and harassment phase and it’s difficult to deliver the coup de grace even if you’ve crippled your opponent; at the very least it’ll take so much time that you’ll tech up to the Castle Age while it’s happening, which is where the real war game starts because you can build Keeps to quickly entrench yourself in a particular bit of territory. Whether the game progresses from there onwards to the final Imperial Age is a function of how many opponents you have and how much of a fight they’re putting up; once they’re all dead, you win.

Age of Empires has always been incredibly war-focused, and Age of Empires 4 is no exception. Just like its predecessors there are nominal Wonder and control point victories (here called Sacred Sites) but it’s far easier to just build a lot of trebuchets and systematically dismantle the enemy cities one town center at a time. It’s here that we also run into the first major point of divergence from AoE 2, though: unit variety. Under the hood the two games have much the same setup — the Barracks builds cheap melee infantry that use food and wood and expensive melee infantry that use food and gold, the Archery Range builds cheap archers that use food and wood and expensive crossbowmen that use food and gold, the Stables build cheap cavalry that use food and w- oh look, you get the idea. AoE 2 had some nice set dressing around this, though, where the line of expensive melee infantry progressed through the various Ages from Macemen, to Men-at-Arms with sword and shield, to the Two-Handed Swordsman, and then finally to Champions. I can remember that progression even now, and not just because I spent a fair chunk of my time in 2020 playing the Definitive Edition. It’s distinctive. It has flavour. It works.

Contrast this with the Age of Empires 4 approach. In the Dark Age, you can build Vanguard Men-at-Arms. Then in the Feudal Age, you tech up to Early Men-at-Arms. The Castle Age gets you just regular Men-at-Arms, and the Imperial Age Elite Men-at-Arms. While their visual look does update with every age advance, their equipment does not; they’re always armed with sword and shield, every time. It’s not quite the historical Total War problem of every unit being a variant of spearman in different-coloured trousers, but it’s close. And because the name doesn’t change, and the weapons don’t change, and the rest of the look doesn’t really update enough for you to notice from your lofty, godlike perch above the battlefield, this feels like you’re using the same unit for the entire length of the game. And since meaningfully different warfighting tech is the primary way the game reflects the progression through its various Ages back to you, advancing an Age feels far less impactful in gameplay terms than it does in AoE 2. The same story is repeated for the Spearman — available in regular, Hardened, Veteran and Elite flavours — the Horseman, the Archer and the Crossbowman; you can build a Horseman in the Dark Age and upgrade it all the way to Elite Horseman in the Imperial Age, but it’ll always be a dude on a horse with a spear.

Now, I do understand why Relic have done this. It’s been a long time since the last Age of Empires game and they’re trying to appeal to a whole new audience here, not the dwindling population of RTS grognards. If you’re completely new to RTS, the AoE 2 approach of having to keep track of four Age-specific units with different names and different looks that are actually all part of the same unit line and behave the same way could be seen as unnecessary overhead. Age of Empires 4 reduces the form to fit the function; a Spearman is always a Spearman and a Horseman is always a Horseman and they have the same weapon and same recognisable silhouette throughout the game. That’s much less information for a new player to have to absorb before they understand what is going on, and in theory makes the game much more accessible and readable.

However, I have two counterarguments to this approach. First is that in AoE 4’s case it massively oversimplifies things, reducing the basic unit pool down to just six: two infantry, two archer, two cavalry. There’s also siege engines, which sort of exist off to the side as specialised tools thanks to the way AoE 4 redesigns siege warfare, and civilization unique units — but how many of those you get is very dependent on which civ you pick. Otherwise you’re just playing around with the same six units for the hour plus that a skirmish match takes to play out. Related to this is my second counterargument, which is that Dota 2 and League of Legends have millions and millions of players who have managed to learn the intricacies of 100+ heroes per game; your average video game player is capable of grasping more than six things at once, if they take the time to learn, and the RTS space is one of the few where I’d expect a game to not cater to the lowest common denominator, since if you do you just end up with a product that feels too basic and dumbed-down. Just like Age of Empires 4 ultimately does.

The UI really doesn’t help here, either. In fact Age of Empires 4’s UI is one of the worst strategy game UIs I’ve seen since Rome 2. Distinctive unit and technology icons? Pffft, what if we just make them all stylised unit and technology iconography picked out in gold over a background that’s either brown (for units) or green (for technology), turning your building panes into a mass of unreadable crap. Group-selecting a bunch of units and want to select a certain type of unit within that selection? Good luck finding the one you want in the sea of identical brown icons. Researching multiple technologies at once? Hope you enjoy clicking back to your technology buildings periodically to see how things are going, because Age of Empires 4 doesn’t surface research globally the way Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition does. It just doesn’t feel good to interact with; Age of Empires has always had a problem where it’ll have techs like Iron Casting and Bodkin Arrow available for research, but the in-game impact of these things is +1 to a unit’s attack stat. It needs to work as hard as it can in order to convince me that I’m not just adding parsimoniously small numbers together — that this is actually a flourishing medieval culture that I am in charge of — but the Age of Empires 4 UI is so uninspired, and so simplified, that it actually enhances this sterile, mechanistic feeling rather than minimising it.

And that’s a real shame, because if you look beyond the broad sweep of the gameplay mechanics and start to drill down in the specifics of the eight cultures/civilizations that Age of Empires 4 launches with, you can start to see it pulling its weight. I think that the single most impressive thing AoE 4 does, period — in fact this is the primary reason I accept Age of Empires 4 existing at all –  is give every single civilization unique building and unit art for every single age. AoE 2 had a couple of sets of culture-specific building art (shared by multiple civilizations) that the Definitive Edition expanded upon, but Age of Empires 4 goes far further and the amount of work required to do so really cannot be understated; we are talking about 32 separate models for a Town Center, 32 separate models for a Barracks, 32 separate models for a Spearman — and repeat for half of the units and buildings in the game. (The other half require a little less work thanks to being available only to certain civs, or only in certain Ages.) I suspect it’s only because of the dumbing down of the unit rosters that this is possible at all, as if AoE 4 had any actually significant unit variety the number of potential unit/age/civilization combinations would become unviable.  As it is the civilization theming is extremely welcome, since it’s the only thing stopping Age of Empires 4 from sliding into the abyss; even the English and the French are immediately different, with the English buildings and units having very functional, baseline medieval styling compared to the French, who are all polished stone turrets and flamboyant helmet plumes.

Because there are a much smaller range of civilizations to play with (Age of Empires 2 launched with 13), Age of Empires 4 can also afford to extend this variety to more than building styles and unit barks. Age of Empires 2 kept the gameplay differences between the various civs relatively small — depending on which civ you picked certain units and technologies would be available (or not), you’d get a different unique unit built from the Castle, and also some subtle economy tweaks and bonuses that, while substantial enough to be felt while you were trying to boom your way to the Castle Age, I always thought weren’t really enough to make the differences between the Goths and the Franks or the Teutons and the Vikings properly meaningful. The Age of Empires 4 approach is far more daring; there might only be eight civilizations in the game this time around, but every single one of them has some Starcraft-style gimmick. The Chinese get multiple unique units and buildings and also Tax Collectors, who patrol between the various resource collection buildings hoovering up bonus gold income. The Rus have much stronger wooden fortifications and a special form of tower called the Wooden Fortress, as well as Hunting Lodges which increase the food gained from hunted animals and give you a gold payout every time one is killed. The Holy Roman Empire get a version of the Monk called a Prelate, who is available from the start of the game and can inspire Villagers to gather resources more quickly; they also have more special military technologies than any other faction I’ve played with so far — it turns out one of the reasons that Macemen and Two-handed Swordsmen were removed from the mainline melee unit progression is because the Holy Roman Empire stole them as technology upgrades for its own Man-at-Arms that (sigh) boost its attack stat. The Delhi Sultanate’s technologies have a high base research time but no resource cost, and garrisoning Scholars inside special buildings can speed up research considerably. And then there’s the Mongols, who flat out ignore several gameplay mechanics by starting at the max population cap (so they don’t have to build Houses) and who can move what few buildings they do have around the map at will. This means they don’t have much of a use for Stone, so they build Ovoos on top of Stone deposits and then any unit-producing building in the radius of the Ovoo can invest Stone to build duplicates of whatever is currently being trained.

This is all good stuff and arguably an improvement over the way Age of Empires 2 did it, and it’s thanks to the civilization design that I’ve actually had fun with Age of Empires 4. True, it’s a very limited sort of fun, where I fire up a succession of skirmish games to see what the next gimmick is before moving on to another one, but that I had fun with it at all is more than I was expecting from Relic, and so I think that this is the one true success that Age of Empires 4 can lay claim to. However, if that’s the case then it’s a somewhat qualified one since I’m not sure the more impactful civilization-specific traits were worth oversimplifying the shared ones for; nearly all of them are economy- or technology-focused, so they don’t really serve to counterbalance the now extremely-limited unit roster. In fact some of these civilizations don’t even have all six of the basic units available for the entire length of the game – six of the eight can’t build the Man-at-Arms line until the Castle Age, for crying out loud, as being able to build them earlier than this is now seen as a civilization-specific trait that’s limited to the English (who can build them in all ages) and the Holy Roman Empire (who can build them from the Feudal Age onwards). Most civilizations are limited to Spearmen only in the Dark Age, and it’s really really noticeable how little there is to do in the early stages of the game now beyond pumping out villagers and beelining for the Ages that will let you build more interesting things.

Speaking of, Age of Empires 4 also switches up how you advance Ages: you no longer do it via an expensive technology that provides no other bonuses, but instead invest the same amount of resources into constructing a unique building called a Landmark. Landmarks have wonder-style effects like periodically spawning free units or providing big boosts to nearby economy buildings; each civilization gets a choice of two per Age, with the one they don’t pick being permanently locked off (unless you’re the Chinese, who can build both as one of their civ traits). Landmarks take time and a lot of villagers to finish, but once they’re done you get the landmark bonus and advance to the next Age. I’m lukewarm on the concept of Landmarks as buildings, as I’ve only seen a couple so far that weren’t more than situationally useful, but I do like them because of how they change the warlike victory condition for skirmishes; instead of having to kill all of an opponent’s unit-producing buildings or all of their Town Centers — which is super annoying if they have a lot of far-flung outposts in corners of the map –  you instead just have to destroy all of their Landmarks, which is far more manageable and keeps games from spiralling into multi-hour hellwars.

The final big change AoE 4 makes to the basic Age of Empires 2 formula is in how it deals with siege warfare. Previously Age of Empires made it very difficult for regular units such as Spearmen and Horsemen to damage buildings, especially once a couple of Ages had gone by and you had some building HP and armour technologies researched; you could do it if you had time and an overwhelming advantage in manpower, but if you were fighting any organised opposition you needed siege engines such as battering rams and trebuchets to quickly destroy target buildings while your main army kept the enemy from smashing them to bits. Age of Empires 4 flips this around slightly, with all melee units getting a special “burn building” attack that they automatically use when told to attack one, and this can torch normal buildings very very quickly. However, if the player you’re attacking has built stone buildings — or god forbid, stone walls — then you’re going to have to call in the siege engines for two reasons. One is that stone fortifications have a much wider range of defensive mechanics available, from being able to install additional ballistae and cannon on Keeps and Towers to having a special Boiling Oil attack you can research (with an actual visible boiling oil effect when it fires) that makes getting into melee range of a Keep or Tower extremely dicey. And then even if you did, the other reason you need siege engines to tackle them is that stone fortifications do not burn, period; basic infantry literally can’t hurt them.

So, unlike AoE 2 where you could potentially get by without them (although it would be an extremely bad idea to try), Age of Empires 4 makes siege weapons compulsory. Fortunately it’s also smart enough to make the basics much more palatable, as Battering Rams are no longer built by the Siege Workshop but are instead constructed on the front lines by your soldiers. A Battering Ram is resistant to arrow fire and it acts like a transport, allowing you to stick up to sixteen infantry inside for protection while it smashes down the front door. All siege weapons have the same vulnerabilities to infantry/cavalry fire attacks that normal buildings do, though, so you need to be careful that sallying infantry doesn’t chop your Battering Ram into pieces. If you don’t fancy that risk then an alternative option is the new Siege Tower, which can trundle up to a stone wall — all stone walls now have battlements  that you can station archers and other troops on — and disgorge eight of your best fighters onto it, from which point they will hopefully murder any defenders and then descend into the settlement proper.

These basic tools of siege warfare always being available makes the siege weapons that you do build at the siege workshop more specialised. Springalds (a renamed Scorpion) are for smashing up other siege weapons before they can fire and do next to no damage to buildings, Mangonels retain their huge shotgun-like hail of shot and excel at wiping out clusters of troops, while the Trebuchet remains the choice for dismantling a set of fortifications from well beyond the range of any Tower or Keep armament. The Springald and the Mangonel are very definitely not things that you build for taking down a settlement; they have a niche on the battlefield, but only the Trebuchet (and also the Bombard, which has a slightly shorter range but does more damage) is designed for demolishing buildings. All siege weapons now need to set up before firing, too, making shoot-and-scoot Mangonels a bit less of a pain; carting them around feels a bit more like a proper medieval siege train than it does Tanks: Middle Ages Edition, and the ones intended for combat need to be properly micromanaged in order for them to survive an encounter.

I think that these changes to siege warfare are, in principle, a good idea. When siege warfare works in Age of Empires 4, it really works, with flaming arrows raining down from castle walls onto Battering Rams and Siege Towers that are slowly creeping forwards to do their damage, while a party of infantry gets ready to sally out to try and burn them before they can do too much damage. However, the underlying systems and polish aren’t quite there to properly support AoE 4’s particular vision of siege warfare yet; it’s been a remarkably bug-free experience so far, which is something that I value increasingly highly these days, but what bugs and glitches I have seen have mostly been focused around unit pathfinding on and around walls — things like siege weapons getting stuck in gates because I placed a tower slightly too close to the entrance², units getting lost on their way up/down from a wall, or simply stuck inside a gatehouse because there’s another unit blocking the door. Micromanaging siege weapons is also painful, especially because Age of Empires 4 really, really wants you to use Attack-Move — its compulsory and over-long tutorial explicitly makes you do this three times but doesn’t teach you how to do regular Attack orders at all — but the list of target priorities that the AI has is really, really stupid. If you have a group of Bombards in the middle of a city that are busy reducing the important targets to rubble, and a horde of angry infantry appear who are rather intent on making you stop, you cannot tell your own infantry to engage them with Attack-Move. If you do, then what will happen is that your troops will ignore the archers pelting them with arrows and the horsemen throwing burning torches onto your Bombards and instead start trying to blow up the nearest House, just because it’s tagged as an enemy and happened to be two feet closer to them. The Stand Ground order that should make them ignore nearby buildings is inconsistent at best, so I have completely given up trying to use Attack-Move inside of a city and instead have to keep the infantry back behind my siege line so that I can give them real Attack orders without them getting distracted.

Looking back on all of this, I have to say I don’t think the skirmish/multiplayer side of Age of Empires 4 is all that much of a misstep. The UI is awful and that will never change, and the troop AI really needs a lot of work to avoid so much micromanagement, and it could really do with more unit variety, and it has far fewer civilizations available to play than Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition — that last point is somewhat unsurprising, though, since Age of Empires 2 has been continuously expanded on for two decades now. If you asked me which of the two games I’d rather play, right now, then I would immediately answer “Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition”. That’s still a no-brainer, as it’s the far superior game and Age of Empires 4 still has far too much overlap with it. But if you instead asked me which I’d rather play in five years’ time, then that’s a much more interesting question because while Age of Empires 4 might be barebones in a lot of places and I don’t think it’s a particularly good game right now, it does at least provide a surprisingly solid foundation to build upon for the future. The core of what is here is reasonably sound even if the execution is lacking, and so if Microsoft don’t forget it exists and pay Relic to keep adding in new factions, and maybe at least bring the UI up to parity with AoE 2 (I still can’t believe AoE 4 is missing UI features that the Definitive Edition has, the blueprint for doing it right  is right there), it could eventually be a worthwhile alternative.

However, I also couldn’t shake the feeling throughout my time with AoE 4 that the skirmish and the multiplayer wasn’t where Relic’s primary focus was throughout the development process; Age of Empires 4 also ships with four single-player campaigns (as the Normans, French, Rus and Mongols), which is definitely a bold move considering that both Relic³ and the Age of Empires series do not have a particularly good track record where these are concerned. Age of Empires 4 continues this trend, riding that campaign rollercoaster down the hill and then straight off the cliff; there’s some decent design in some of the missions, albeit nothing I wouldn’t have seen in Warcraft 3 19 years ago, but whatever good might is present is hugely outweighed by stupid decision after stupid decision that make this the worst set of RTS singleplayer campaigns that I’ve played since… well, since Relic’s own Company of Heroes 2 back in 2013.

First, theming. Age of Empires 4 themes every single one of its campaigns, and in fact a large portion of the wider game, as a historical documentary. There are no characters to follow and nothing to get invested in, because everything that happens in every campaign is being narrated by the same tired documentary voiceover actor who is just reading whatever is put in front of her. Even in missions there are no characters with speaking lines; instead we get the narrator saying “Willikins the archer roused the English villages against the French” as you give your hero unit some movement waypoints. The entire game being related to me second-hand by a disinterested observer who is a thousand years removed from the events in question is an absolutely tremendous way to get me to not give a shit about anything I’m doing, and the kicker is that even by historical documentary standards Age of Empires 4 is absolutely terrible. There is an almost complete lack of detail, with only the broadest possible strokes of history outlined by the narration — inane statements like “Wallingford was the key to victory” are uttered with no further explanation or clarification as to why it was the key to victory. The Mongol army advances across Asia and “finds its way blocked by an army of forty thousand Rus”. Okay, who are these Rus and how did they get there? I still don’t know because the game didn’t tell me; as far as the game is concerned they just popped into existence one day as convenient targets for the first mission in the Mongol campaign. Age of Empires 4 is awful as an educational tool because it will teach you almost nothing about history; there are a few videos of crossbow and trebuchet demonstrations and so on, but the bulk of the content here is modern-day drone shots of famous historical monuments⁴ and battle sites with some crappy Animus graphics of soldiers superimposed on top. It is largely thanks to these videos — and there are a lot of them — that the Age of Empires 4 install size clocks in at a whopping 90 gigabytes of hard disk space, and all for content with far less educational or narrative value than the average episode of Time Commanders⁵.

Second, tone. Age of Empires 4’s campaigns do not follow a single person or army or military campaign, but instead consist of a series of isolated events spanning a hundred years or more. The Norman campaign, for example, follows the dynasty established by William the Conqueror as various challengers to the throne appeared from 1066 through to 1216. This is a weak through-line to follow at the best of times as you’re getting a chopped up, overly condensed version of history that’s made even worse by the awful, dispassionate documentary styling; however, there are points where it gets truly ridiculous in order to justify even the tenuous campaign theme that it does have, as you always have to be fighting on the side of the dynasty in question even if the members of that dynasty who were involved in this mission were demonstrably idiots. Here, this is a roughly paraphrased example of one of the mission briefings for the Norman campaign:

“This is King John. He was an idiot. Spent all of his money on expensive wars. Taxed the population heavily to pay for them. Pissed off the barons. Had to sign the Magna Carta to keep them happy. And then went back on it when it no longer suited him. The country is in open rebellion because he’s such a crappy failson of a ruler.”

“So anyway, in this mission you’re defending Dover castle to try and hold the crown for King John…”

Third, content. I have played the entire Norman campaign and the first two missions of each of the French, Rus and Mongol campaigns. I have come across exactly two missions so far that were not subtitled “The Battle of…” or “The Siege of…” Perhaps it’s wrong to be annoyed that Age of Empires 4’s campaigns are so war-focused when Age of Empires as a series has always been like this; however I really feel that nearly every single mission feeling like a throwback from the ‘90s where you group select a huge mass of units and steamroll the enemy is possibly not ambitious enough for an RTS made in 2021. For some of the missions you don’t even have to build the units yourself! The game just hands you an army and tells you to mash it into the opponent. For the rest it’ll start you with a fully built settlement and a sizable starting force that you just build up to unit cap and then go around razing all of the CPU settlements — you can even do this in the missions where you’re supposedly under siege by overwhelming enemy forces.  You almost never get to build an economy or advance through the Ages, which is a rather curious omission for a game called Age of Empires. It’s absolutely baffling to me that the campaigns would intentionally cut out the most interesting part of the game and instead just offer you battle after battle, which merely serves to accentuate the fact that the basic combat mechanics haven’t changed since 1996 and exposes some of AoE 4’s more egregious issues, like the unit AI and pathfinding.

Usually when I encounter a set of singleplayer campaigns this bad my usual reaction is to wonder why they bothered; a hell of a lot of time and effort has gone into making something that I literally cannot bring myself to play any more when the actually decently-fun Skirmish mode is sitting right over there and I still haven’t gone through all of the civilizations yet. Age of Empires isn’t like Battlefield, though; it’s an RTS and singleplayer campaigns are supposed to be part of its DNA, and also there are glimmers of good design in here that make me think it didn’t have to be this bad, if Relic could somehow look at every single high-level decision that went into making Age of Empires 4’s campaigns the way they are and then go back in time and do the exact opposite. The best that I can say about them is that they’re not offensively bad, just incredibly bland and boring and uninspired, like the RTS equivalent of Ryvita. It’s hard to get angry about Ryvita, although if you forced me to eat more than one I’d probably change my opinion in a hurry.

Fortunately that’s not a problem I have with Age of Empires 4. I might boot it up a couple more times to finish trying out all of the civilizations and then I’ll delete those 90 gigabytes of high-definition videos so that I can install something else. It’s definitely not a good game, but at least where the skirmish mode is concerned it’s not a bad one either. It’s not a worthy successor to Age of Empires 2, but neither is it the complete disaster I was expecting from Relic. Would I be happy if I’d paid the RRP of £50 for it instead of trying it on Game Pass? Absolutely not — but I will at least check in on it again in a year or two to see what’s been added, which is definitely not something I saw myself doing prior to release. Age of Empires 4 does a hell of a lot wrong, but did not piss me off sufficiently to put me off the idea of ever playing it again. This is not a quote I see Relic putting on the Steam store page any time soon, but by their recent standards it counts as a roaring success.

The post Thoughts: Age of Empires 4 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

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.

I dunno, my saying that does seem slightly unfair. Your typical rerelease of an older game won’t go to the effort that Homeworld Remastered does. It’ll just tweak the game so that it works on modern operating systems at modern resolutions, stick an “HD” on the end of the title, and then push itself out onto Steam and other digital storefronts, happy in the knowledge that it’s bringing in maximal profit for minimal outlay through the sheer power of nostalgia. As you can probably tell, I’ve acquired a rather jaded view of this whole business of selling old rope for money, and so Homeworld Remastered being released in its current state comes off as all the more disappointing, since for the first ten minutes I played it it seemed like it might be the one game to break that mould.

With Homeworld Remastered Gearbox have made a real attempt at making something worth buying, you see. Instead of sharpening all the textures up a bit and then calling it a day they’ve gone to extreme lengths to make this Remastered version look like it’s something that has a legitimate reason to be released in the glorious space-year 2015. The game has received a complete graphical facelift. Everything from the ships to the skyboxes to the beam effects has been overhauled and upgraded, to the point where Homeworld Remastered looks better than 90% of AAA games you’re likely to play this year.  The stylised, hand-drawn cinematics and the voiceovers that accompany them – such an integral part of the flavour and feel of the Homeworld universe – have been redone with the original actors, and even the music’s been resampled at a higher bitrate from the original recordings. All of this marks Homeworld Remastered out as something unique: you don’t expend this amount of time and resources on a rerelease of a series that’s over a decade old unless you have a genuine passion for it. It’s a real labour of love, and it shows. It looks incredible. It sounds incredible.

It is also, alas, totally broken.

In recent years Gearbox have acquired something of a reputation for pushing out cynically licenced games that are… how can I put this… somewhat technically challenged in order to make a quick buck on the strength of their licenced property. Homeworld absolutely doesn’t deserve to be lumped in with the likes of Duke Nukem Reloaded and Colonial Marines, but there’s no escaping the fact that it’s just as bug-ridden as either of those games were at launch, and that these bugs are things that did not exist in the “classic” version of Homeworld. They’ve been introduced during the game’s graphical upgrade, and the reasons for this become apparent once you do a little reading into the under-the-hood retooling Gearbox did in order to make that upgrade possible in the first place: the entirety of Homeworld has been ported lock, stock and barrel into the Homeworld 2 engine so that they only had to overhaul one game engine instead of two.

This is the sort of thing that sounds like a good idea from a development point of view. Homeworld 2 is the more recent game. It’ll be easier to make the needed changes in that engine.  And they’re basically the same game anyway, right? It’s not like Homeworld 2 was a radical change in direction for the series; it had many of the same ships shooting the same guns in a slightly more high-definition interface. Surely the second game’s engine isn’t going to be such a bad fit for Homeworld?

That’s what you’d think, anyway. And that’s clearly what Gearbox thought. Unfortunately for them (and for me), the second Homeworld did some seemingly-subtle mechanical streamlining that renders its engine an extremely bad fit. Take fighters, for example. Fighters in Homeworld 2 were no longer built individually; they were built as a permanently grouped fighter wing and behaved as a permanently grouped fighter wing. The Homeworld 2 engine has no analogue for the grouped fighter behaviour of the first Homeworld, where fighters would maintain formation in a dogfight and would pivot to face a capital ship as they were doing a drive-by strafing run a la Babylon 5/Battlestar Galactica, because Homeworld 2 doesn’t have a concept of the fighter as a single entity. The best it can do is to treat a single fighter as it would a lumped squadron; it’ll maintain formation with other fighters until they make contact with the enemy, and then the formation dissolves into a huge blobby mess as the squadron behaviour takes over and it’s every fighter for itself¹.

This is half of why fighters in Homeworld Remastered are so useless. The other half is to do with how Homeworld 2 models weapons fire via a pure chance-to-hit system. This, again, is very different from how the first Homeworld did it – my memory on this is a little fuzzy, but Homeworld 1 certainly gave the appearance of modelling individual projectiles and the path they took through space. If your projectile hit an enemy ship it took damage. Homeworld 1’s system made certain formations very effective, as your ships were in firing positions that were flat-out better as they allowed you to concentrate fire. It also made the Evasive fighter behaviour worthwhile; throwing in a group of fast Scouts in Evasive to distract the enemy was a legitimate tactic. None of this works any more in the Remastered edition, however, and it’s all thanks to the chance to hit rolls: it doesn’t matter where your fighter is or how fast it’s moving, all that matters is whether the thing shooting at it makes its CtH roll. If it does, you’ve got a dead fighter. As for shooting at other things, since most of the power of fighters was in their movement and positioning they’ve ended up being pretty devastatingly crippled in this new incarnation.

That’s just the most egregious example of something that worked well in Homeworld being totally broken by the transition to the Homeworld 2 engine. There are plenty of others, such as the game not being particularly sure if you’re allowed to dock your ships with carriers/the mothership any more. I couldn’t do it, but the AI apparently could, which lead to a comical moment when I captured the enemy carrier in mission 5, and after my engineers had hurriedly repainted it in my colours it evicted two whole squadrons of enemy fighters that had been lurking inside that I then had to kill. Because they’ve drastically altered the balance of the game through trying to fit the square peg of Homeworld into the round hole of the Homeworld 2 engine, parts of the campaign are now insultingly easy while others are even harder than when I went through them the first time². There’s even – hnnnng – autoscaling of the number of ships you face based on the size of the fleet you bring into the mission, which is the part of Homeworld 2 that I hated the most.

And then there’s the stuff that’s flat out bugged. The bugs I have encountered include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Resourcers disappearing into thin air. This has happened twice, and on both occasions the resourcers were guarded by a squadron of fighters behind my mothership well away from any battle lines. I heard no “We’re under attack!” chatter, and neither did anything show up on the sensor map. One moment the resourcers were there, and when I looked back they had vanished.

• Salvage not working properly. In mission 3 you’re asked to salvage an assault frigate as one of the mission objectives. I duly sent my salvage corvettes in to capture it, but the assault frigate remained stubbornly immobile once they’d attached themselves to the hull. I checked its stats: its movement value had set itself to minus 2 billion³. I had to restart the mission to get it to work properly. Later on I tried to salvage some resourcers only to have to exact same thing happen, so it wasn’t an isolated incident.

• The game not letting me use the carrier I captured in mission 5 as an actual place where I could build ships. I couldn’t select it in the new drop-down build interface, and so I ended up telling it to follow my resourcers around so that they could use it as a drop-off point, since this was all it was good for.

• Triggers not firing properly. The worst example of this was the thing that made me stop playing Homeworld Remastered: on mission 9 you have to kill a ghost ship that projects a field that takes over any capital ships that wander too close. The idea is that you’re supposed to use fighters and bombers to take it out, so I duly lured its protecting fleet away with some long-range shots from my destroyers and sent in the bombers – who proceeded to bathe it in plasma fire for twenty minutes without making so much as a dent. As far as I could tell the ship had an invulnerable flag that wasn’t turned off until a certain cutscene had happened – and despite reloading the mission twice I couldn’t get it to trigger, so I couldn’t progress any further into the game. Sucks to be me, I guess.

My experience with this remastered edition of Homeworld 1 has ended up being fairly abject, then. The irony was that I never thought that much of Homeworld 1 as a game; its visuals were stunning (at the time) and its story and atmosphere were engaging, but the actual gameplay always came across to me as awkward and stilted.  After playing this remake, though, and seeing just how possible it is to thoroughly stuff it up, I’ve come away with a new appreciation for all the things Relic got right that I didn’t notice until I saw a version of the game that didn’t have them. As I said before I think Gearbox really do care about the Homeworld series and they’ll hopefully put in the hours required to fix the game, or at least patch out the worst of the bugs. At the moment, though, I’d have to warn you not to buy this collection hoping to play through an updated version of Homeworld 1, as I did. You’ll only end up disappointed.

As for the rest of the collection, it’s actually pretty good news. Despite my deep and abiding hatred for it I played several missions of Homeworld 2 to see if that had any bugs, but that at least seemed to work flawlessly. Which is unsurprising, really; at the very least I’d expect Homeworld 2 to work in an overhauled version of its own engine.  The collection also helpfully comes bundled with the original versions of Homeworld and Homeworld 2, and it’s good to have those games available via a digital distribution channel. They still work pretty good on Windows 7, even – I played Homeworld Classic for an hour to confirm things worked the way I remembered and I wasn’t just imagining half of these bugs, with no problems beside the odd bit of stuttering and an odd aspect ratio. The only remaining sore point is the sad absence of Homeworld: Cataclysm (by far the best Homeworld game)  for which the source code has reportedly been lost.  As a whole, the Homeworld Remastered Collection is a very strong package. Just so long as you like Homeworld 2.

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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.

The first thing that will strike you upon starting CoH 2’s single player campaign is that Enemy at the Gates has a lot to answer for. It’s the only high-profile movie the West has made about the Eastern Front in the last thirty years or so, and so it’s gotten to define an awful lot of clichés about how the great videogame-playing masses perceive that particular conflict. This is why the campaign plays, to a large degree, in exactly the same way as the Russian third of the first Call of Duty did back in 2003; they’re both ripping off the only source material Western players are likely to be familiar with. So you’ve got the obligatory first mission in Stalingrad – even though it’s out of chronological order with what happens in the rest of the campaign, although honestly the campaign is just a poorly-ordered series of missions connected through flashbacks (always a bad sign for any narrative) so it doesn’t matter that much – where a cutscene shows Soviet conscripts being sent into battle without rifles and blocking detachments mowing them down when they try to retreat, and then playing the subsequent mission involves marching your men along a clearly-marked, linear route to blow up some AT guns, all the while trying to fool you that there’s a battle raging on around you with a smoke-and-mirrors AI performance.

This all sounds achingly familiar, but it’s a setup more often found in… well, in Call of Duty than it is an RTS. As far as the single-player campaign goes, Company of Heroes 2 has far more in common with the linear single-player campaign from Dawn of War: Retribution, and unlike that game CoH 2 doesn’t have the item system or the fantastic Space Hulk mission to fall back on. The result is something that’s almost astoundingly braindead, with very little tactical or strategic thought required: you progress down the path, you overcome the scripted enemy forces with the appropriate counters (more on this later) and you hit all the objective checkboxes. Most of the challenge comes from wrestling with the game’s awful pathfinding system, which makes vehicles do multiple-point turns reminiscent of Carrier Command’s Walruses when they have to maneuver next to other vehicles, or else will happily reverse a tank straight towards the enemy exposing its vulnerable rear armour. There’s the odd hint of imagination such as the attack across the icy river or the partisan mission, but even here the extra mechanics meant to give the gameplay a little spice turn out to be half-baked at best.  For example, the best approach in the supposedly stealth-based partisan mission was to just shoot the Germans in the face and then run away until my partisan snipers had reloaded; the Germans couldn’t run faster than me and they had no vehicles so there was no risk whatsoever. I don’t even know why you’d build the sniper hides or make use of the hold fire command in that one, since all they’d do is slow you down.

So the single-player campaign of CoH 2 is one that suffers from a horrifying disease I had previously thought was only limited to first-person shooters: Battlefield 3 syndrome¹ There’s a lot of explosions in the campaign missions, a lot of noise and spectacle and visual hooplah, but none of it really impacts the gameplay at all. When you peel back that impressive-looking shell to have a look at the game inside what you find is staggeringly shallow and often follows exactly the same scripted structure as the previous mission; you capture points and kill Germans until you’ve checked the next objective box, and then you weather a German counterattack, and then you check the next objective box. It’s so predictable, in fact, that I found myself doing something I haven’t done since Supreme Commander: holding off on completing mission objectives because I knew that doing so would trigger a massive German assault and I wanted to build up my forces and defences to the population cap to deal with it.  It’s an entirely artificial response to an entirely artificial scenario, and is pretty much the antithesis of what a strategy game should be. Strategy games should flow. Strategy games should demand a conscious response from the player. Strategy games should occasionally smack down the player and force them to change their approach. They shouldn’t be this boring. 

That tedium isn’t wholly down to the mission design, of course. I’m no expert in how the original CoH played, but it seems to me that there have been some under-the-hood changes to how certain units and weapons work. Tanks, for example, seem to be far, far tougher when engaged from the front, to the point where building anti-tank guns is utterly pointless since the tank will simply drive up to the gun and kill the crew before it’s lost more than a quarter of its health bar. Panzershrecks and the like are similarly ineffective; they might threaten the lighter stuff like half-tracks and armoured cars but the inescapable problem is that tanks now have enough health to kill anything that attacks them that isn’t another tank or massed infantry units. For the former, you have to make your tanks bigger and heavier than the enemies. For the latter, you use a scout car stuffed full of engineers with flamethrowers. This is a ridiculous combination that relies on the baffling decision to allow transported infantry to shoot out of the vehicle they’re being transported in. Flamethrowers are absolutely devastating to infantry because they ignore cover and kill instantly, but the tradeoff to fielding them is that they’re incredibly vulnerable to well-aimed rifle shots setting off an entertaining incendiary chain reaction. That’s a fine balance between lethality and vulnerability, but it’s completely short-circuited by transported units being pretty much invulnerable to anything that’s not a sniper until their transport is destroyed – and scout cars are fast enough that unless the car is destroyed in one shot, the flamethrower will be close enough to kill the attacking unit. It’s the tank problem all over again.

Most of my campaign missions were therefore played with just four units: two of the heaviest tanks I could build, and two scout cars with flamethrower-toting engineers riding along in the back. This combination was enough to smash 95% of what the scripted AI forces had on the map; even the heavy 88mm guns that should have been a threat to both of those unit types were rendered useless when I got my scout cars to drive round them circles and they couldn’t turn the gun fast enough to actually take a shot. It’s kind of entertaining to watch but it’s hardly what I’d call challenging, and it completely circumvents the infantry-infantry combat that’s always been the most interesting part of CoH. It’s only in the final mission that Relic finally toss some map topography at you that can’t be cleared by scout cars alone, and it proved that when given half a chance it was possible for CoH 2 to present an interesting and knotty tactical problem that required some thought to solve. Unfortunately the campaign waits for eleven hours to present you with the thrilling urban combat that should have really characterised a game about company-level warfare, and you spend most of those eleven hours just going through the motions.

Relic seem to be aware that their single-player experience is somewhat lacking, which (I imagine) is why they’ve extended the stock multiplayer levelling and unlocks system to single-player as well. It’s like they didn’t have confidence in the game’s ability to hook people without a steady stream of rewards and a flashy “Level up!” icon after almost every mission, and they haven’t even implemented this stuff with any of the creative flair that Starcraft II displayed since none of it actually affects single-player. It’s all bonuses and unit skins for multiplayer, trying to provide a psychological carrot that’ll keep the player involved and maybe induce them to keep playing the game. Judging by the activity I’ve seen on my usual barometers of internet popularity that’s just not happening; CoH 2 doesn’t seem to be achieving anywhere near the success its predecessor did, and while the dull single-player campaign probably isn’t much of a factor in that (I’m probably one of the few people who bought it who isn’t interested in CoH multiplayer) I’d say that the gameplay changes mean that it is in general a far less compelling experience.

So while there are some minor positive points in CoH 2’s favour – I do like the snow effects and want to see more of that kind of thing in other, better games – it mostly fails to excite any interest on either a narrative or a mechanical level, not to mention failing spectacularly in its hamhanded attempts to evoke the grinding horror of the Eastern Front.  Relic’s Warhammer licenses at least made the cartoonish, one-dimensional nature of their participants and plots into a strength. Here that treatment is almost insulting, especially if you know anything at all about history. People keep saying Relic should pick up the Homeworld licence again, but based on their recent output I’d say that they’re better off leaving it where it is; at least that way we’ll have one fondly-remembered old series that won’t suffer the indignity of a staid, unimaginative remake that’d be mediocre at best. Steer clear of this one.

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

Space Marine sums up, for me, every single thing that’s wrong with the way video games are made today, and the reason for this is that they’ve taken a concept which would be childishly easy to turn into a game that was at least moderately exciting if they showed the smallest amount of creative daring and instead created a game designed by focus group. What’s the sort of thing included in that other famous game in the same genre that sold millions of copies? That thing! Yeah! We’ll have lots of that, then, and not bother making an effort on anything else. I mean we took the piss out of that guy who accused Space Marine of ripping off Gears of War, and rightly so, but ironically his ill-informed drivel was more on the money than either he or we could have known at the time.

Space Marine’s main character is a Space Marine. No spoilers there, I feel. Said Space Marine is called Titus, a member of the Ultramarines chapter who is ostensibly a captain but whose company appears to consist of two guys, one of whom doesn’t like him very much.  This trio of genetically-engineered blandness is called upon to liberate the forge world of… somewhere… from an Ork invasion, and they do this using an array of extremely violent and over-the-top weaponry.

Now, this one paragraph tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the game. If you’re familiar with 40K and the way Gears of War-style games are put together at all, you can probably spot just from that where Space Marine has gone wrong. However, since that branch of human knowledge is, to put it diplomatically, just a little bit rarefied from the average person, I’ll break it down a bit further.

The first mis-step is in using the Ultramarines as protagonists. For those who don’t know, space marines in 40k are split up into chapters which each have particular characteristics. The characteristics are a sometimes a little one-note but they do serve to inject a little bit of flavour into the universe – the Space Wolves are Space Vikings, for example, while the Blood Angels are Space Vampires and the Imperial Fists are masochistic dicks. It makes them a little more interesting than simple hulking super-soldiers in stupid armour.

Not so with the Ultramarines, though. The Ultramarines are the Space Marine chapter on which all other Space Marine chapters are loosely based. Their defining feature is, quite literally, that they are generic Space Marines. There is nothing interesting about them whatsoever, besides the fact that they come in the starter box for 40K and so have the widest brand recognition. So right from the start the game falls flat on its face by giving me a squad of three generic space marines from the generic chapter with generic character traits. There’s the boring knightly captain with a flair for the unorthodox, the boring grizzled sergeant who has seen everything and done everything, and the boring new recruit who does everything by the book. It’s like they were trying to make this game as bland as humanly possible.

It doesn’t even stop there. The game is set on a forge world; this is an entire planet that’s been turned into one huge industrial complex to churn out the Imperium’s weapons of war. Which fluff-wise is sort of an interesting concept, I suppose, but huge industrial complexes – imagine a giant oil refinery that goes on forever – are very dull to look at. The environments are all drab brown shell-pounded earth, grey sepulchral concrete buildings and twisted metal ruins. Worse is that there’s been no imagination shown in the architecture. The Imperium of Man is supposed to be a semi-feudal society with heavy gothic influences; an Imperial battleship resembles nothing so much as a huge floating cathedral bristling with weaponry. Fighting on a forge world should have featured buildings that looked like an insane medieval architect had been set loose with far-future building materials and technology – enormous, towering constructions with interiors that resembled ornate vaulted naves with stained-glass windows depicting the cult of the God-Emperor. Something interesting to look at,basically.

Instead, I got to fight my way through a series of concrete boxes. Concrete boxes littered with other boxes in the form of crates and cargo containers along with the occasional waist-high metal barricade. There was one bit where my new Inquisitor friend opened a huge blast door to show me his secret superweapon, and I actually laughed out loud when I saw that it was a yet another series of metal walkways and gantries inside a particularly large and dimly-lit concrete box. The only sources of colour in the game are the ones which Relic had no creative control over: the bright blue armour of the Ultramarines and the garish red of the Ork flying machines. I mean, it’s hard to believe but they actually made a game that looks so dull and boring that the most visually interesting parts are those that have been lifted wholesale from the grimdark background.

Even the set-piece bits of the game that should have been all pulse-pounding excitement are corrupted by this lazy visual design. There’s a bit near the end where you ride on a Warlord Titan. A Warlord Titan. Right? That’s a gigantic hundred-metre tall battle robot with guns that have the same destructive power as a small nuclear weapon. I know the mental image you have of what this encounter might have been like. It probably involves the Titan stomping over a battle-in-progress dozens of tiny green figures scurrying around beneath it and being flattened under its feet, the Warlord occasionally stopping to dispense flaming plasma death on high-value targets before firing all of its primary weapons on your objective. That would have been awesome. For me, that would have singlehandedly justified Space Marine’s purchase price.

Now, what actually happens during this set-piece is that the Warlord is located inside a dark hangar. It trudges slowly forward inside this huge, dim, concrete box. The Titan itself does nothing; it was just a moving platform that shifted under my feet annoyingly while I was trying to fight a bunch of Chaos psykers and flying machines that were flitting around near the hangar roof. Once I’d killed them all a tiny window opened at the end of the hangar and the Titan blew up the thing Captain Titus wanted it to blow up. There isn’t a single interesting thing about this encounter and it’s almost entirely down to the ambience and the environment. They made riding on a Titan boring. That’s not just lazy, that’s borderline criminal.

People wonder why I get so upset when I hear a beloved old franchise like X-COM or Syndicate is going to get a 21^st century “update” or a “reboot”. This is why. This game. It’s the result of somebody high-up at Games Workshop and/or Relic looking at Gears of War and how it’s been inspired by certain elements of 40K and gone on to sell millions of copies over several iterations, and thinking “Well, if they can make that sort of money without 40K, then surely we can make even more money with 40K! Genius!” And so we end up with Space Marine, a game which, based on the couple of hours I spent playing Gears of War before I gave up on it, is pretty much identical in terms of visuals and gameplay except that instead of generic space marines fighting some guys in big rubber orc costumes we’ve got actual Space Marines fighting actual space Orks. That’s the driving force behind modern game development; any creativity or risk-taking tends to be sidelined in favour of aping whatever game happens to be making money at the moment. And yes, it has ever been thus, and it’s not a phenomenon limited to video games, but it serves to illustrate the dichotomy between what the consumer wants (a fulfilling entertainment experience) and what the people who own the companies that make the games want (to make as much money as possible for as small an outlay as possible), and if the former gets in the way of the latter at all it’s getting chucked out of the window in favour of producing a game like Space Marine: an almost wholly drab experience where the fun parts are rationed out in miserly instalments which are far too brief in comparison to the large amount of time spent trudging through a series of monotonous grey corridors. I’d avoid it, if I were you.

(Oh, and the multiplayer is fun in a consolely sort of way but it uses a P2P matchmaking system which will ensure its death inside of two months.)

The post Thoughts: Space Marine. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

…

…

…I don’t like it.

Well, okay, maybe that’s a little bit harsh. Retribution is perfectly good fun, but it’s telling that at no point during the campaign did I actually have to engage my brain to formulate that mythical thing known as “strategy”.

Let’s start at the beginning. Retribution is a standalone expansion for Dawn of War 2, for which they are charging an eyebrow-raising £30 – mint new game price, in other words. For that sort of money it has to offer something significantly more than what I can find in Chaos Rising or the original DoW 2. At first glance, it does appear to. Retribution adds the standard new army – in this case the Imperial Guard – but also campaigns for every army in the game. Sounds like a huge amount of new content worthy of the asking price, right? Yes, except for one significant catch: they’ve half-assed it.

It’s the only real way they could have done it, to be fair. The campaign in Retribution consists of a set of twelve-odd missions. Those missions are the same for every race. There’s minor variations, but if after completing the Ork campaign you boot it up again as the Tyranids, as I did, you’re likely to be disappointed to find yourself doing exactly the same tutorial map except with Eldar instead of Imperial Guard. This hurts the game in two ways: there’s the obvious replayability issue, but there’s also the problem that in order to accommodate six different armies the missions have been made as generic as possible. This means there’s less heroic last stands as found in the first two instalments, and more “Go here. Blow up thing. Go here. Blow up other thing. Blow up really big thing. Win game.” I expect more from my RTSes since the release of Starcraft II, and there’s only a couple of missions out of the twelve that show the kind of imagination I saw there.

The cut-and-paste nature of the missions leads me to my next problem: the plot. There isn’t one. Perhaps you see more of it if you play as the Space Marines, I don’t know, but after two games spent playing the blandest armoured juggernauts in the galaxy I needed a break, and went for the Orks. They’re pretty well voiced and very Orky, which is a plus (I’m probably going to be incorporating the word “gitfinda” into my vocabulary from now on) but the campaign storyline, for them, mainly revolves around Kaptin Bluddflag’s attempt to acquire a new hat. This is pretty funny to start with, but provides no explanation as to why my orks are now on an ice planet. Or a desert planet. Or a space hulk. They just bounce around the star map randomly until they wind up on a planet that’s coincidentally inhabited by the end boss.

Ah, the end boss. I’ll get to him in the minute, but first I have to mention the most unforgiveable change Retribution has made: they’ve ditched the slow, methodical tactical gameplay of DoW2 and Chaos Rising for PUSH THE BUTTONS PUSH ALL THE BUTTONS PUSH THEM PUSH THEM PUSH THEM. Heroes no longer have squads attached; while you can still build squads separately they have all the staying power of a snowcone in a volcano (at least until you get Nobz, literally the only buildable Ork unit with any staying power), meaning that heroes are now doing nine-tenths of the heavy lifting. They’re pretty good at it – Spookums in particular can be broken in an entirely awesome way so that he vomits explosives everywhere – but it reduces the gameplay to pushing ability buttons. Dug-in infantry? Push a button, problem solved. Armour turns up? Push a button. Big, all out assault by a hundred baddies? Push all the buttons at the same time. There’s no management of manpower, no laying down bases of fire, no advancing by squad, no holding back the assault troops to be committed at the right moment. Just all buttons, all the time.

This made the inevitable end boss encounter even more painful because – completely inexplicably – Relic decided to make him un-meleeable. This is insane. It means that two of your four heroes can’t even touch the bastard with their biggest weapons – don’t even think about taking regular squads near him, they get gibbed in a couple of seconds – which makes chipping away at his vast reservoir of health (oh yes, we can’t have a Dawn of War game without this shit, it’s practically a tradition now) even more wrist-slittingly tedious. When I fight an end boss I should be excited, nervous, challenged. I shouldn’t be bored.

This criticism isn’t even getting into the more mundane problems with the game – godawful pathfinding, enemies getting stuck in cover and being invulnerable to melee, not being able to save mid-mission¹ (when your computer bluescreens under stress every hour or two this is a big deal). Taken together, it means that Retribution is a huge regression from the promising potential Chaos Rising displayed to some unholy combination of an RTS and WoW. And that’s just no good at all.

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