Age of Empires Mobile preview - "RTS past into future"

• A big and full mobile entry in the Age of Empires series
• Mixing its classic RTS style with modern-day casual management
• There's a lot to take in and a notable online focus

Whether you're into history or gaming or could care less about either, you've likely come across Age of Empires at some point in your life. This ain't a surprise since it's one of the longest-running real-time strategy series that's still operating. It combines two of the best things: Quick strategic thinking and historical fiction.

With Age of Empires Mobile, Ensemble Studios has leaned more into the fiction side of things, which is a good choice for a video game. It's a 3D real-time strategy game combined with management, city-building, and even some gacha elements. Let's see how Age of Empires plans charge into the modern age of mobile and tablet gaming.

What is Age of Empires Mobile?

Age of Empires has always mixed and matched lore whenever it wanted to tell a new story or recreate historical events. With Age of Empires Mobile, it appears that the plot is going in a different direction. It follows the journey of Josephine, the Steel Rose, who is fighting to reclaim her throne after her people were driven from her kingdom.

It all starts with Josephine recruiting, leading, and fighting alongside the country's people against the Ottoman Empire as it continues to spread across the land. She gains a strong symbol of hope after recovering the Holy Sword and using it to unite the people. From that point, she must build up her fortress and encampment to gain enough strength to take back what was lost.

The State of Age of Empires Mobile

When a series decides to create a mobile entry, many things need to be considered, with the biggest decisions being what stays in and what gets removed. With Age of Empires Mobile, it seems the developers did their best to keep in all the things that make the series great.

There's still that huge sense of grandeur that no matter who your heroes are, you're always building toward something. Whether it's reclaiming your old kingdom, expanding into new territory, or just trying to make sure that your society has the best, you've always got the next big thing to work towards. All the elements spill into each other, but you can decide where to put your focus.

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And your focus can go a lot of places. You'll start in the Early Middle Ages and want to move on up in history. You don't wanna be looking at flimsy wooden boxes you're whole reign, you want a castle atop a mountain if you're into the whole isolated-villain style.

This means you'll be working a lot on harvesting resources, building new facilities, and training villagers to keep the gears of your society turning. From there, you can spend what you collect on expansions, exploring the surrounding lands, upgrades, or expanding your army. There are plenty of opportunities to fight, but a successful campaign relies on a strong base which will need your strategic attention.

Are battles as juicy as they should be?

When it comes to battle, the tap and drag controls work just fine. Each hero has room for a certain number of soldiers and is treated as one unit for convenience. This makes it easier to use around combat being simplified to which weapons are more effective against others. The island battles are even more streamlined since it uses a contained grid battle system and you just need to worry about the positioning of your units at the start. There's still strategy involved but you don't have to constantly worry about moving entire armies whenever someone steps out of line.

Then there's the visuals and presentation. The game combines the new flashy 3D graphics that many hero-based games use to show off their complex characters while still maintaining that retro Age of Empires charm. You can see it for yourself during certain cutscenes with characters looking like low-poly paper dolls as they belt out medieval drama, but it works. Since most of the fights take place from a distance, you won't notice much of the time and you can still clearly tell what's going on.

Rough Rising for Age of Empires Mobile

Age of Empires mobile has a lot to live up to and it is obvious that a lot of work has gone into making a mobile entry that still fits in the series. However, it runs the risk of falling into an obvious trap as development continues: Doing too much.

Within the first 20 minutes, so many elements, mechanics, and rules are thrown at you and it's tough to keep track of them all. There are still some questions about basic things like how to form armies or add more heroes to your lineup, but already the game is encouraging you to join an alliance, ask for help, and then give help in return.

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It's true that Age of Empires has always had an online element, but this may end up being the most online entry in the series. This isn't a bad thing, but when most of the features are online, that leaves you less when you just wanna jump in and play.

There are missions and tasks to complete, but if you hit a roadblock that requires some grinding or passive resource-gathering, then you have to turn to the online for greater rewards. Depending on how functional it ends up being, it could be a tremendous boon to the experience. If not, then you're left with an empire of features that run the risk of freezing and crashing your game.

The New Age of Empires Mobile

Age of Empires Mobile is a developing entry in the Age of Empires series made explicitly for mobile platforms. It has all the look and feel of the other entries while still adding enough to make it modern and more accessible to the casual player.

It may be tossing too much into the pot at the start with what looks like there will be a heavy reliance on online access, but this is still the early days. All empires rise and fall, but in this age, being able to build them in our pockets will help them rise faster and fall slower, hopefully.