Age of Empires Online takes bottom honors

Posted by on August 24, 2011 in Reviews

I’ve been playing a fair bit of Command and Conquer: Generals lately. It actually holds up pretty well! Fast, easy, eminently asymmetrical, and full of personality. The interface isn’t even particularly terrible, even if there isn’t a panel at the bottom of the screen to show me what units I have selected. Part of the re-learning curve in Command and Conquer: Generals involves sending all your Comanche attack choppers directly over a GLA missile bunker because you didn’t know you had them selected.

A year or so ago at a press event, I was talking to one of the guys from EALA, the studio that made Command and Conquer: Generals. He told me that I’d called Red Alert 3 “the worst real time strategy game ever made”. I felt bad at the time, since I didn’t recall that particular bit of vitriol and since EALA is one of my favorite RTS developers. But he was probably right, not just about me writing that but about me meaning it. Red Alert 3 was a frenetic sloppy overbearing stew of poorly implemented backwards ideas from a developer that should have known better. However, I have good news for the developers of Red Alert 3: you’re off the hook.

Read of the Age of Empres Online review here.

  • Pod

    >The interface isn

  • Fraser

    Tom, your magic power is making nerd fanboys foam at the mouth and bash their keyboards in anger. I’d like to get you a coffee and shake your hand.

  • Sam

    I love how you barely mention the game which is really what it deserves. Played it in the beta and the slow drip feed of content is excruciating when all I really want to do is play some skirmish Age Of Empires.

  • Telefrog

    Tom, I have to agree with every criticism you lobbed at AoEO. The grind to get to a decent (not even full) tech tree is just too damn long. The awful pricing structure is nuts.

    I’ll stick to AoE3 for my Home City leveling fix.

  • Nathan

    Did GameSpy add a “casual gamer’s take” just to take the edge off your review, or was that two-perspective thing intended from the start?

  • http://www.quartertothree.com Tom Chick

    Nathan, the answer to that is “yes”. :)

    Seriously, though, it was an editorial decision that I’m not really privy to. To their credit, they didn’t ask me to change the score or one iota of my criticism. They ran what I wrote exactly as I submitted it, which is a lot more support and trust than I’ve gotten from, um, other sites I’ve written for.

  • Paul W.

    Well that review really put a damper on what I thought was a good idea worth checking out, crippling a game to make me pay for more and then calling the remaining bits “free” is just disingenuous claptrap!

    I like adding some persistent elements to the usual “start from scratch” nature of RTS play, but it just doesn’t sound like you are able to ever get to the actual core game without paying as much (or more with that 6 month subscription) than I paid for, say, Starcraft II which I still get fun games off of as well as frequent user and developer created free content.

  • Samuel Bass

    Interesting article, I passed it on to my design team. Haven’t played much AoE Online yet, so I can’t offer my opinion…although I do think this is my first uncredited cameo in a QT3 front pager!