Age of Mythology

Rating:
Summary: A great new installment in the age of_____ series
Review: this is yet anther fabulous instalment in a already thriving series. this game has changed from the other stratagy based games in the age of____ family: it now uses a nice looking 3D engine and lets you zoom in on the huge army you can control. If you have played others in the series and loved them,I believe you will love this one just as much. If not here are a few other games that are also stratagy based that I loved: Star Wars Galaxys, The Settlers, and Rise Of Nations.

Rating:
Summary: Mythological Mixed Bag
Review: I got this game as a Christmas present last year, and have been playing it since. I'm not a big fan of MicroSoft's other strategy-games like Age of Empires / Kings (AOE), nor am I well versed in the Norse-Egyptian-Greek mythology, so I was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked Age of Mythology. This game offers real good "dusk-to-dawn-computer-time". The game itself is entertaining, and the graphics top-notch.

As the title suggests (and for those who've already played it) the game offers Mythological units and heroes to go with your typical human army; And here lies the strengths and weaknesses of the game. For while sending a platoon of Medussas, Collossi, or Mummies, Anubites, and Giant Trolls sends chills down your pc-generated spine, this same overly powerful force gives you a feeling of disappointment at your puny human army who are left standing idly by. I mean, either they stay away from the battle or get tossed around, pummelled, or turned to stone. - Oh and by the way, you also get FOUR GOD-POWERS in this game.

The developers at MS-Game-Studios gave these mythological beings far too much power, that I find myself just building an army of myth-units rather than investing in archers, spearmen, or cavalry. And for some unknown reason, there is a fixed population cap of 100-units at the start of each game. The only way to increase this cap is to "capture" pre-existing town centers that dot the map during each game... Oh man; Talk about ideal ambush sites. Yikes!

But anyway, and as I've said before, despite not being perfect nor addictive, I really like this game. This is one good game to get for yourself or (as in my case) give as a gift. The tutorials are very good, so even a player with no experience on strategy games can pick-up the concept in no time. So check it out for yourself and have fun. Keep in mind, however, that this is only a game and whatever myth-unit you have or god-powers you get stay in the pc.

Rating:
Summary: A failed experiment on all fronts
Review: I remember the previews for this game. It was to have neat god powers, ballanced myth units, and take what Age of Kings made great and make it even better. Well, where the heck did that game go anyway? This surely isn't the game I saw in the previews. Let me get right to the heart of the problems with this game.

1.) The battles are oh so dinky and boring. This is impart to the fact that there's a set limit of only 10 houses you can build limiting your population limit to a low default. That's right, there's no adjusting your population limit like in Age of Kings or its expansion pack (which I now will refer to as AOK TC for short). Add to the fact that each base soldier costs 2 population limit, and you have a really small game. Myth units cost more pop limit, but that sure as heck doesn't offset the fact that...

2.) Myth units are way overpowered. I know ES wanted to show how powerful they are, but some were just out of this world. Like the Anubites only costing 100 food, have 3 times the HP of a base human soldier, twice the attack rate of a human soldier, and an attack bonus vs human soldiers. The myth units just dominated everything. I mean, having 3 or so gold colossus in battle usually means your going to win it no matter what, which isn't fair. AOK TC didn't have any 1 unit that can dominate everything else, here otherwise it's different.

3.) Defense is just as useless as well. In AOK TC, you had to ballance between defense and offense. In AOM, you only work on offensive play. If you're use to someone like the Teutons in AOK you're going to get ate up alive here, since walls are pathetically weak, and fortresses only have 1/5th the HP that castles have in AOK! Who was ES making this game for, nothing but Goth players?

4.) For some reason ES made it so the buildings were back to AOE style. Why I have no idea, since being use to having the units scale to the buildings in AOK TC, it looks really retarded having a villager tower over a house again. Don't forget that you can only build TCs on those settlements that are randomly set on the map, so if an enemy takes your Town Center out in late game and has the map scouted, he knows exactly where you have to build a TC and can defend them well .... you over.

5.) The difficulty was also poor. In AOK, the AI gives you a fair chance to learn how to play on easy, and wasn't a complete cheat on hard. In AOM on easy the computer is comatose and on moderate the AI shows no mercy and plays like ... AOK. Hard is just ungodly difficult and gives you no chance before you're rushed brutally. And unlike in AOK, you can't handle a hard rush in AOM since there is jack in defensive structures and no pop room to have defensive units laying around.

6.) The 3D graphics didn't impress. In fact, I thought they took a step back from AOKs. The units just look bland and blocky, and the terrians look dull and nothing like grass or snow. The water was really nice though, but that's it, the rest looked rather bad. The 2D engine was just right, so why fix something that's not broken? Also there's a whopping 2 map sizes to choose from (unlike the 5 or so in AOK TC), and all of them are dull and bland to look at and play. What fun!

All and all I hated AOM, and I stopped playing only after 2 weeks. The gods barely differed in playing styles for each civs, and it was just didn't have that magic that AOK did. I didn't care about the battles in AOM when I saw the myth units and heros ripping everything apart with no way of me using a superior tactic or something to take them out with my human soldiers.

Crushing down someones wall to degut their town had little excitement since only 1 ram is required for about 1 minutes worth of work before half the wall falls. AOMs Xpac doesn't look much better, it introduces a super unit that costs as much as a wonder and requires another one to defeat it since they're so impossable to defeat. And much like the rest of AOM, it doesn't constitute as fun, it's just stupid.

The game does have some good points, like how each of the 3 civs play radically different from each other. But there's also a down side, that's it only 3 civs. After a short time they get boring with no wide choises other than the minor gods little influnces to the civs playing style. The instruction book also tells you nothing, almost topping Dark Clouds Strategy Guide in being the biggest waste of paper ever. Instead you're prompted to go to their website and print off the real handbook! This is inexcusable, and I expected better from ES.

I know that people are craving another RTS from ES, but in all honesty this felt like a big failed experiment. Even Age of Empires with the Rise of Rome Expansion set is funner than this game, since it sadly seems to be more ballanced than Age of Mythology. Buy the AOK gold bundle instead and play a real game, not a failed experiment. Hopefully ES will learn from this and make Age of Empires 3 a worthy sequal instead of the series unworthy cousin.

Rating:
Summary: This series keeps getting better & better!
Review: The original AGE OF EMPIRES was one of the very first CD Rom games that I bought. I bought some other similar games, but AE was by far & away the best. It brought countless hours of addictive enjoyment. Then came along the Roman expansion & the midieval versions and those were smashes as well.

Continuing on in the series is AGE OF MYTHOLOGY and it does not disappoint. The basic premise is the same: you build cities to defend & armies to go out and beat up on other civilizations. The twist is that, in addition to human combat units, you also get all sorts of myth units to play with as well.

There are three mythological paradigms represented in the game: Greek, Norse & Egyptian. Within the 3 paradigms you have 3 major gods to choose from and several minor gods. The choice you make in your deity accounts for which combination of mythological units & godlike powers that you get.

My favorite myth unit would be the cyclops as they like to throw things, be it people, cavarly or even war elephants! It's pretty hilarious to watch them throw an elephant across the screen & have it take out a patch of trees. The roar of the Numean Lion is quite impressive as well.

In addition to myth units you also get hero units. If you are Greek you get characters such as Jason, Odysseous, Ajax, Achilles, etc. These are especially effective against myth units of the enemy army.

One would think that w/all the myth units & heroes that human units would be obsolete, but they're not. You still need lots & lots of human units as, unlike myth units, they can be mass produced.

Which leads me to another point. In the previous AE series your population limit was set @ a certain number. Your enemy could not have more overall units than you, and vice versa. In AM this changes. There are only certain places where you can build town centers. Each one that you build adds to your population limit - up to a few hundred or so. Capturing these locales is crucial to your survival in the game. Failure to do so means you will be overrun by the superior numbers of the enemy army.

One aspect I particularly like about this game is the symmetry. Being relatively familiar with Greek mythology (moreso than Egyptian or Norse), it was good to see the myth units appropriately assigned to individual gods.

For example: if you worship Poseidon you're able to get cyclops units. That works because Poseidon was supposed to be the father of the race. Another creature of Poseidon's is the Scylla, which is appropriate as Poseidon is the god of the sea.

Unlike the "flat" ends of the screen that you get w/previous games in the AE series, AM looks like it has been carved out of a fantastic dream. It's difficult to describe this aspect, but I liked the touch.

If you like previous games in the AE series, you're more than likely to enjoy this one as well. If you've not ever played AE but are interested in mythology, this one is highly recommended as an introduction to the series. It's everything you would want it to be: fun, surreal & very very addictive!

Rating:
Summary: finally a game good to be called Mythology
Review: This game is so cool! The human soldiers are neat but, those monster things are really great (but slow.) Some giant creatures can also throw other enemy units and kills them instantly. This game is sort of like Age of Empires II: the Age of Kings. And the videos inbetween are set up like Warcraft III's. The codes for the games are good (but i would like the fog of war removed, but thats ok.) Also, instead of being forsed with the heroes you all ready have, you can train a new one every age! If one of your heroes fall, they will come alive again (but not at full health.) Not to mention all the magic powers your heroes can perform, like meters, lightning, and bronze armor! This game is da BOMB! If you like Warcraft III, Age of Empires II, or other games like that you'll love this game!

Rating:
Summary: Good game, well worth the price
Review: If you've played Age of Empires II, you won't be too surprised by anything this game has to offer; it's more or less the same game, with a few tweaks here and there to make it more interesting and fun.

First, the reasons I pegged it a star:

The game is now a fully-rendered 3D game, instead of the 2D bitmaps like AOE2 used. On the one hand, it's kind of need to be able to zoom in and out at will and check out different angles of gameplay, but that's about all you get. 99% of the time, the 3D engine hasn't added anything that the 2D engine didn't do just fine with, but it's bumped up the video requirements SIGNIFICANTLY (i.e. make sure BEFORE you buy the game that your video card will support it), and causes the gameplay to periodically pause and grind on my machine, which, though not exactly the latest state-of-the-art, is not exactly a wimpy either. In my opinion, this was a bad call on Ensemble's part; they should have either stuck with 2D so that everyone could play it or given us more reason to have used 3D, or better yet, given us a choice of how we want to play.

They've also taken away one feature that I REALLY liked in AOE2: the ability to record a game and go back and watch it at will. I used to play people who were better than me, study their strategies, develop as a player, and eventually (a lot of times) beat them by mercilessly exploiting their weaknesses. It's kind of like watching football tapes before the big game. Can't do it in Age of Mythology. I was hoping they'd add a "rewind" feature to AOM, but instead, they took the whole feature out completely.

Now a few notes on why I like the game:

First and foremost, it's more AOE2, which is a game that I really like to begin with.

Also, I really like the idea that there are significantly more differences between civilizations now than just what special unit they get. Fundamental rules between the three major civilizations have now changed so much so that one must use drastically different strategies both playing AS different civilizations and play AGAINST different civilizations. The result is that there is FAR more variety and flexibility in how you play, which, in my book, is always a very good thing.

There are also more different TYPES of units. In AOE2, you basically had six types of units: infantry, archers, cavalry, monks, siege weapons, and naval vessels. AOM has taken away monks, but given us two new types: heores and myth units, and given us a way to affect the game completely outside of the units at all: god powers. Yet more ways to tweak strategies and find new and inventive ways to win. Very cool.

The campaign is very useful. Yes, there is only one, but there are thirty separate missions which walk you, step-by-step, through how to play the Greeks, the Egyptians, and the Norse (the three major civilizations) and give you a great feel for what kinds of strategies work and what kind don't.

All in all, I highly recommend this game. If you've played and liked AOE2, it's a no-brainer whether or not you should buy this game. If you like AOE2, you'll like AOM. If you haven't played AOE2 but you like real-time strategy games, this one is currently the standard by which others are judged.

Rating:
Summary: Age of mythology, the great RPG of 2002-2003
Review: IF you like the fantasy of great fighters and old mythology with men and different creaters? then you will love this game. THis is a very fun RPG that is very lengthly and fun in the process. IF i were you i would be go buy this game right now because its so awesome! so go and have a great time playing it

Rating:
Summary: Gamer
Review: I play this game online over eso and it is awsom. If you loved the Age of Empire Series you will love this game. Better graphics and changes. Now instead of civilizations you will be a god, ... as Zeus, Hades, Thor, Ra, Isis and others... I give it a perfect 5 and would give it a 10 if could!!!

Rating:
Summary: Age of Mythology by Microsoft
Review: A change from the ususual hum-drum of average computer games. Mythological powers a pleasant suprise to unleash upon enemies. Interesting storyline, but several months later it's glory begins to pall leaving a satisfactory and enjoyable aftertaste. The ability to train mythological and human soldiers alike, is extremely useful and downright fun!!! God and goddess powers have convinent effects, such as Zues's thunderbolt, Hel's Nidhogg dragon, and Hemes' secret tunnel/passage way. Strongly recommended for the sightly expierenced and above gamers.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Game
Review: I have played through CnC Generals, Warcraft 3, and Rise of Nations... some of the leading RTS titles today, yet Age Of Mythology has the right blend of depth and simplicity that makes it so much fun to play the single player. However, Warcraft 3 will likely beat it in the multiplayer easily because depth and balance become lot more important than simplicity and fun in that field. Overall, this is a refreshing title for casual and avid gamers alike.

For a quick comparison to the other two titles... Cnc Generals is a resource hog while AoM is smooth. Rise of Nations is tedious and a rehash of Empire Earth... or maybe Empire Earth was a rehash of Rise of Nations, only earlier in time. Whatever, AoM is better than both.