I’m a massive fan of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Age Of Empires. Age Of Empires 2 was one of the first games I ever played. The sound of the humming villagers as they pick berries is firmly cemented as a core memory, the sort of thing that I might think of, for whatever reason, on a random Tuesday—having not played AoE for years🗹 at this point. As a result, it’s a game that is also tied to a very specific time and place: sat at my desk, on an older computer, probably on a rainy day. The idea of playing it on my mobile phone has never really appealed.

So when I sat doꩲwn with the team from TiMi Studios at Gamescom 2024, I was skeptical of its Age Of Empires Mobile. What followed was 40 minutes of a complete bombardment of things to do. The game has a level of detail way beyond what I was expecting, with several empires fleshed out with unique heroes, unit designs, city designs, and siege weapons. There are multiple game modes, including a Vampire Survivors-style mode, multiplayer sieges, and city building. And yes, your villagers still pick berries.

What most stood out was the huge array of heroes you could unlock. Each hero has a lengthy section on their historical importance and their own detailed intro cutscene. Harald III bursts onto the screen swinging🌊 his axe in a snowy forest. It’s a gacha mechanic for sure - this is a mobile game after all - but the amount of 𝔉effort put into the context of each hero is a nice touch. There’s an array of recognisable historical characters, like Sun Tzu, Hannibal, and King Arthur, but some others you might not have heard of, like Yi Shun-Sin and Queen Seondeok. A history lesson on my mobile game? Yeah, go on then. These heroes are important for combat as you assemble a team of three to assist your armies.

Those armies are used to fight other players, gain experience by killing NPC armies, and assist your empire on a larger, macro scale as you try to conquer territory. This is the key tug-of꧅-war in the game as empires🌌 with dozens of players fight for control of important resources on a global map. At the core of this is the siege gameplay and having seen some of the gameplay of these battles, these are almost more impressive than Age Of Empires on PC. There are hundreds of units, all controlled by different players. It’s total chaos. In a good way. Will my phone melt in my hands? Probably.

I asked the development team what sort of measures will be put in place to prevent a huge pay-to-win empire from just dominating the map, and they said they were still working on balancing this aspect of the game. They suggested to me that empires can join alliances with each other and work together to bring down the dominant factions, which all sounds very good—but I’ll have to see it in action before I can properly🎃 judge just how pay-to-win this mobile game is.

Bey🔯ond all this large-scale conquering and combat, the game has🔥 a variety of other tasks to occupy your time. You can go fishing, for example, or play the Vampire Survivors-style mode I mentioned earlier. As far as I am aware, this mode is repeatable, which solves one of the fundamental problems I’ve always had with these types of mobile games: everything is time-gated and you spend most of your time just waiting around for some arbitrary timers to finish. If I enjoy your game, just let me play it.

Age Of Empires Mobile took me completely by surprise. I’m not one to get excited for mob🐻ile games but I’ll definitely be at least trying 🍒this one out when it fully releases. TiMi has done the Age Of Empires brand justice so far, and I’m interested to see how actually replayable the game’s content is and just how much money it expects me to spend.