In their place are slickly-produced documentary-style campaigns that capture the undeniable pleasure of a pre-reality-TV History Channel marathon. The plodding narrative campaigns of Age of Empires II, with over-wrought narrations desperately trying to provide some kind of narrative tissue to simplistic "go here and kill everything" mission designs, are mercifully gone. The difference between then-and-now, however, is even starker when it comes to Age of Empires IV's single-player experience. So the frantic optimizations and counter-strategies of the serious RTS hobby are all alive and well here for skirmish and multiplayer but so is the low-stress historical sandbox that my dad loved for so many years. The differences are further exaggerated by the choice of special buildings they must construct to advance ages, a very Relic-style approach to creating starker "build" choices as part of faction design, but also similar to some of the ideas Age of Empires III brought into the series.
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While the foundations of the game are the same for everyone, the Holy Roman Empire faction (for instance) gets significant bonuses to its workers' productivity if it can cluster its work force around a few dense job sites at a time, while the Delhi Sultanate needs to be thinking about how to concentrate buildings around Madrasas in order to get much-needed bonuses to dangerously slow upgrade speeds. The different factions are also less interchangeable than they first appear. Acting like the "brush" in a MOBA, these areas of the map severely restrict the line-of-sight of most units and buildings, leading to far more interesting maps and re-emphasizing the skill of scouting. For starters, your eyes are a bit unreliable thanks to the addition of concealment via light forests and tall grass. There's more going on in Age of Empires IV than meets the eye, however.
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It's consistently pretty and colorful, like a diorama brought to life, which is the exact kind of spectacle that made this series so enduring and welcoming without trying to melt anyone's graphics card. Large, slightly clumsy armies of melee and ranged infantry, cavalry, and siege weapons plod across the map to fight in battles largely determined by the exact ratio of rock to paper to scissors that each player has chosen. As you expand, you'll also advance through the titular "ages," unlocking more powerful units, buildings, and upgrades. From a single town center and a handful of villagers at the start you'll expand across the map to seize control of gold and stone mines and dense forests, defending your holdings with long chains of fortifications.
The foundations of this game are as familiar as ever: this is a real-time strategy game about managing tons of workers inside sprawling bases. Even a few years ago I might have reached that conclusion myself, and I'll concede that there is every chance I am just heeding my own call of the easy chair as I embrace Age of Empires IV as a skillful and humble reinterpretation of an enduring classic. If anything, Age of Empires IV is Relic's Age of Empires II remake, which might seem like a depressingly modest ambition or even an unnecessary one after all the fine Age of Empires Definitive Editions Microsoft put out over the last couple years. What's more, this is not some attempt to shake-up the franchise or redefine it in a new context. Somehow that future has led us here, with a new Age of Empires IV resurrected for Microsoft by Relic itself.
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