William the Conqueror WILL kill Anglo-Saxon king Harold in the battle of Hastings in 1066. Age of Empires 4 doesn’t dabble in what-ifs but steadily sails over the sea of authenticity. I’m OK with this as it allows for the necessary distance between players and history that they help unfold. The same documentary approach continues through scripted developments in missions, provided by the narrator instead of hero units in the field. They aim to be historically accurate, offering very detailed briefings, Discovery channel style.
The Normans, The Hundred Years War, The Mongol Empire, and the Rise of Moscow are those single-player campaigns. Separate historical battles are not part of the package as they feature in the campaign(s) proper. In short, it’s big, and it has (almost) everything. It also comes with gorgeous cut-scenes that will eat up almost 200 GB on your SSD if you decide to install 4K HDR Video Pack assets (86 GB if you opt-out from that bloat). It offers four single-player campaigns, eight semi-asymmetric civilizations, skirmish, multiplayer, and a host of detailed training missions. Pure neo-classicism.Īge of Empires 4 shares much of its DNA with the Age of Empires 2, embracing the simplicity of, arguably, the best entry in the series. It aims not only to preserve but to actively promote and celebrate the ancient status quo.
But what it does, it does surprisingly well. It has no ambition to break any new ground or jolt the comatose genre into forward momentum again. It’s a high-budget, real-time strategy game trapped inside a temporal bubble, constructed around the perceived want of a nostalgic fan. Considering how much everything has changed in the last quarter of a century, Age of Empires 4 is almost Old-Testamentesque in its conservativism.
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