Introduction

First of all I just want to say that I played this game way back in the day when it was released and i loved it so much. Back then you had no way of tracking how much time you played but I’ll bet anybody I played over 1000 hours easy! Then when the expansion disc came out I just had to have it, I was so addicted back then.

So now that I’m 25 years old and probably haven’t touched this game for over 10 years, I see that this game is on Steam and for nostalgia reasons I decide what the hell I loved it back then I can love it again on Steam!

Since this game has been released on Steam the developers have included the Conquerors expansion disk (DLC) with the original game and also included Workshop support. It was due to this Workshop support that the modding community for this game created such a vast epic amount of content that the Developers had decided to even release further DLC to this game that I believe was created by the community. However since I bought the game on Steam after this point for me it has always had all the DLC included.

So playing this game again for the first time in probably over 10 years brings back so many memories and I’m soon remembering how I used to build my bases and quickly picking up the hotkey buildings. With this I jump straight into a couple of Death matches and Random matches against the NEW Computer AI which is considerably harder than the disk versions Conquerors AI. I get killed off pretty early and quite easily but I’m not phased at all because the memories playing this game are flooding back to me and im absolutely loving playing this game once again.

Unlike the PS2 version this is Steam and therefore it also now has achievements of which there are around 300 I believe, so if you are wanting those then there will be no using cheat codes like back in the day when you were a little low on a resource or just wanted that pet monkey to run around and kill your enemies with. Although having said that, if you wanted to do that then you can as the cheats are still in the game but achievements are then disabled until you restart the game!

Also one thing I will add since having bought this game it has very regularly been updated with many stability fixes and lag fixes. Due to the age that this game is now considering it was first released in ’99 the support from the Devs is just fantastic especially when they could just ignore this game and focus on their much newer games. Speaking of which I also have AoE 3 but haven’t played it on Steam yet, it doesn’t seem to have Achievements or Workshop content like this game does for some reason so maybe that doesn’t get the same support this game does, I don’t know, either way if you are looking at buying an Age of Empires game I highly recommend you buy this one!

Multiplayer

So this game since being released on Steam has multiplayer – something which I at least never had on my PS2 version although we never had an ethernet cable to connect to it back then so maybe there was multiplayer back then too. I personally have not yet even managed to touch on the multiplayer side of things since I’m progressively working my way through completing all the campaigns in the entire game and its DLC. Multiplayer I can only imagine would even more so greatly increase the overall number of hours played in this game, especially when you look at playing through some of the Workshop Scenarios together too.

Workshop

So this game has Workshop content, what does that mean? It means that the Developers have given the AoE community the power to create thier own graphical texture improvements and share their scenarios that they have created for this game with everyone else that owns the game.

For me so far I have grabbed a couple of graphics improvements that give the water textures a more colorful, realistic feel and new cliff and grass textures. This gives the game a whole fresh, modern HD feel to the game which still has or at least looks like it has the original graphics from 1999. That is what I’m assuming from still having not played the disc version that I still have with the PS2.

There are like I said before, many hundreds of Custom Scenarios all created by the Community Workshop that I haven’t even touched on myself yet that could add up to hundreds of hours of extra gameplay. I have seen scenario remakes of Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones to challenging scenarios and some other very creative scenarios!

There are graphical mods that allow you to completely change the entire feel of the game so you can have Crystal Trees and huge Veins of Gold and Stone Mines with a Space like terrain if you wanted. This is the kind of things you can experience on a game this old that breathes new life into it and could easily see you play over 10,000 hours in this game.

Overall

If you played this game back in the day and loved it – BUY IT NOW! You will not regret buying this game, I only have a meager 200 hours so far in this version, I expect to be easily dropping 1000 hours in eventually. That is on top of what I could only guess would be at least 1000 hours on the PS2 version back in the day.

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