Good ol' Age of Empires II is back! Or sort of; perhaps not so much the 'good' part, but certainly the 'old' part. Why is that, thou may ask. Well, my friend, thou art exposing the major flaw of this game: it's still almost the same. ALMOST.
Making a port of an old game is not easy; you have to contemplate many aspects: keeping the same gameplay dynamics, but updating them with the features this generation has to offer. For example, this port adds Steamplay for easier matchmaking, rooms, achievements, and - the one that excites me the most - Steam Workshop support, for mods, maps, textures and sounds. Yay, now we can customize our game with a single click! Well, sort of.
Maybe it was a badly stablished development cycle; maybe it was that they rushed the final release before accuratelly testing every detail; or maybe it was they just wanted to fish for money with the pre-sale. Whatever the reason for this, what we have here is an incomplete product. And one can see it when doing what Age of Empires was made for: playing with somebody else, online. It's choppy, laggish, even playing in LAN; sometimes it makes the game rather unplayable. If you ever were into RTS games, you know that you need to have a steady connection to properly react to the events in the game. However, since giving an order will be around 3-5 seconds behind the unit actually carrying out that order, due to the delay, your plans will be destroyed just for losing those seconds. Imagine you get attacked by the enemy or wild animals, and you react quickly enough but your units don't obey right away; you'll end up losing units, resources and time.
There also seems to be some bugs with the Workshop system; unsuscribing doesn't remove the mods. Not even unload them. It's like after you installed them you'll have them forever. And game rooms, even if set to private, will be public to anyone, so if you just want to play with friends you'll have to kick everybody.
Finally, achievements don't work properly. Two weeks since release and they're still bugged. Yesterday I won a bunch of achievements without even meeting the requirements; and trust me, I didn't meet them, I was just playing around with the map editor, and didn't even test the map, and I won the "destroyed 100 buildings in a single fight" achievement; I mean, come on.
I sincerely hope this will get updated, patched and finished in time. Don't get me wrong-- it's a fun game and I love it just as I loved it before. But come on, you can do a better product to meet the expectations. I know you can fix it. Make me proud.
Graphics: 6/10 (because they changed some textures... for worse)
Gameplay: 8/10 (single player plays fine, the problem is with the multiplayer)
Coding: 4/10 (choppy and needs a lot of work to fix)
Replayability: 9/10 (if they fix it, it will make a very fun game to play with friends)
Customization: 7/10 (if they fix Workshop it would be at least a 9)
My overall score: 34 out of 50 | Buy it when on sale
(NOTE: this will get updated as (and if) they fix the client)
