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I think it’s a good sign that I’ve spent a tremendous amount of time agonizing over what gods to worship because they’re all so appealing.Īlso, the Chinese can unleash giant magical monkeys on their enemies. Their myth units and god powers are also for the most part very fun and interesting. Usually, infantry are the counter to cavalry in AoM. For example, their main cavalry unit, the cataphract, counters infantry. A lot of their units break the game’s usual rock/paper/scissors rules. The Chinese aren’t wildly different from previous civilizations, but they have enough new ideas and interesting quirks to feel fresh. It carries the otherwise meh campaign and is great fun in skirmishes (and presumably multiplayer, though I haven’t had the courage to attempt that). The good news, however, is that the new Chinese civilization is excellent. Even with the story issues, it could have been a good campaign with better quality control. That said, the mission design is pretty strong, with a good amount of variety. There are some significant bugs, and the difficulty tuning is very inconsistent, effortlessly easy one moment and brutally punishing the next. There are significant parts of it that just flat-out don’t make sense, and otherwise it’s just shallow and uninteresting in the extreme. Tale of the Dragon’s story, though, is clearly the work of amateurs. The characters were memorable, if not deep, and the plots were coherent and engaging, if not particularly complex or thrilling. Age of Mythology was never a game with especially memorable storylines, but they were at least basically competent. The new campaign is, well, not that good. Tale of the Dragon turned out to be a bit of a mixed bag, but on the whole, I’m happy with it.
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I bought Tale of the Dragon immediately upon release, though it took me a couple weeks to actually get around to playing it, having been distracted by other things. Where things really got exciting was when it was announced there would be an all-new expansion to the Extended Edition: The Tale of the Dragon, featuring the Chinese as a new playable civilization. An extra four Norse missions is certainly nice to have, though if I’m being honest it’s not an especially remarkable campaign. Apparently this was something Microsoft put out back in the day but which I somehow never knew about. The Extended Edition also includes an extra mini-campaign called The Golden Gift. The good news is AoM was a very good-looking game in its day, so it hasn’t aged as badly as it might have. The lighting is a bit more realistic, the water’s a little prettier, and I think the textures are a bit more detailed, but it’s not a major overhaul.
#Age mythology extended edition full#
So I was happy to see Age of Mythology given a second lease on life when it rereleased on Steam as the “Extended Edition,” with updated graphics and full Steam support.Īdmittedly, the new graphics don’t make a huge difference. It had one expansion, The Titans, and then vanished into obscurity, its vast potential largely wasted.
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It deserved to go on to become one of the great franchises of the real time strategy genre, but for whatever reason, it didn’t. It spurred an interest in ancient mythologies (especially Norse mythology) that continues to this day.
#Age mythology extended edition series#
It took everything I loved about the excellent Age of Empires series and spiced things up with the addition of spectacularly powerful god powers and myth units. Age of Mythology was a very important game in my youth.