Age of Empires: The Age of Kings

"Nothing like the PC version, but still fun"

Well, when I first found out that Age Of Empires was out for the DS, I was ecstatic. I love the computer game, and play it a lot, and I expected a mini version of the computer one. Well, as soon as I got it, and started looking through the manual I saw a lot of major differences between the DS version and the PC version. First of all, the DS version is turn based, where you build stuff and move your units a few squares, and hand it over to the other player for them to do the same, whereas the PC version was all about speed, and building everything as fast as possible. Secondly, there are only two resources, food and gold. You just build a mill over the food, or a mine over the gold, and it collects each every turn. The third one is that you can only build buildings directly next to your Town Center. This makes your towns tiny, and squished together. The fourth thing, which I really don't like is the researching. There's a menu that you can go to during the game that you can research things with, and once you have the buildings for whatever you want to research, you can choose it, and you can only research ONE thing per turn. It was more fun in the PC version when you could get a lot of money, and go on a massive researching spree. Overall, it's not anything like the PC version, but it's a very fun game that plays almost like a board game.

Graphics - 9/10

The graphics are pretty good for an RTS, and are the same, if not better, caliber of graphics that are on the one for PC. The units look pretty good, but the bad part is the scenery. The scenery isn't very good at all. If it's mountains, you just see little ^'s on the ground, if it's trees, you see a small, bad looking, tree. The buildings are okay, I guess. They are tiny, and aren't very detailed, but I guess they're not terrible. All in all, the characters look good, but it frays around the edges when you talk about the environment.

Fun Factor - 8/10

This game is pretty fun, I have to say. I wouldn't say it's more fun than the PC version, but they're very different, and it's hard to judge between two things as different as these two. To win, you have to use strategy. You have to strategically place your units, so if you get attacked on any side of your village, there will always be someone protecting it. I actually find the campaigns to be more fun than the normal games where you just play against an opponent with no objectives, or anything of that sort, whereas I thought the opposite on the PC version. As a whole, it's fun, but you better be strategically equipped.

Re-playability - 6/10

Like I said earlier, the campaigns are the best part of the game, and once you beat them, it's not very fun to replay them. Once you beat them, you're stuck having to play normal games, and trying to unlock stuff with your points. It's okay to play the normal games, and if they get too easy, just put another enemy against you, or change their difficulty, but after a while it gets really, REALLY boring. If you don't like doing the normal games, then I would say not to buy this, because once you end up beating the campaign, which isn't very long, you will probably never end up playing this game again, unless you play multi-player with your friends or something. Re-playability is the part that brings this game down.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 04/19/06