In my formative years, Age of Empires III was a game that I returned to quite a bit. The historical setting drew my attention, sparking a now-tempered love affair with the European colonisation of the Americas. Stephen Rippy’s score, like every other in the series, nestled itself amongst the earworms that still nest in my head. An early obsession with British history led me to beeline straight to Redcoat-filled armies and free villagers from houses. Its graphical fidelity, even on my rubbish computer, was astonishing. While it was a well-received game at the time, it’s today generally dismissed as the inferior brother of 1999’s stone-cold classic Age of Empires II. But there’s a kicker to my story with III:
I only ever played the base game. 2006’s expansion The WarChiefs and its 2007 successor The Asian Dynasties were never touched by my feeble teenaged hands, their added features remaining buried. It was at this time that interest in the RTS was waning, on both a personal and cultural level. The FPS was the kingmaker by now, and this rung especially true after 2007 saw Call of Duty 4 explode onto the scene. Digressions aside, Age of Empires III stayed in the back of my brain for more than a decade. Only LAN parties and the occasional taste of nostalgia lured it back onto my hard drive. So, to have it return now as Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition is an experience in new perspectives – in more ways than one.
The most obvious thing about this Definitive Edition is its status as a complete collection of the original game’s content, including those expansions that I never played. To return to a game that I remember fondly with all-new stuff to do is an absolutely incredible ride and is something that more remasters should become more comfortable with doing. At its heart, it’s still the Age of Empires III that I grew to enjoy: The combat is still gripping and aesthetically charming, the music still rings with personality, it still looks gorgeous…but there’s more of it! My personal – and limited – experience with the original has created an illusion of the game having mechanically matured alongside me. Obviously, this isn’t the case for the majority of those with fond memories of Age of Empires III; my own history with it is based upon a very loose attention span and a distancing from the RTS to be like the cool kids. This was especially the case as soon as I discovered Team Fortress 2 and became its bottom bitch for the next ten years.
Yankee Doodle Dandy
…it’s grown both mechanically and historically since I first became hooked on that base 2005 gem…
As for the ‘new’ features themselves, they’re utterly remarkable. You mean to tell me that I can revolt and become a settler nation like South Africa? Actually, I’d rather be Haiti instead. They’re way cooler, their revolution was based as hell, and Toussaint Louverture is a bigger chad-daddy than that cuck Napoleon Bonaparte will ever be. That also means I can be virtual-smug about the the Louisiana Purchase – you’re welcome, Jefferson. The new variety of maps on display was mind-blowing; Asian and American landscapes in the same package! The Home City feature, one of my favourite additions to the base game, was expanded on in the new content and balanced to near-perfection. I’m not making my love for this remaster a secret: It’s absolutely fantastic in its own right (the new visuals in particular are a sticking point) but my personal experience with that relatively bare base game has made it a bolt of lightning that revives it in a way that I couldn’t have ever dreamed of. There’s even two new playable civilisations in this Definitive Edition: The Swedes, led by military genius Gustav Adolf, and the Inca under the guidance of a man with many different name spellings. If last year’s Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition is anything to go by, then we can expect more in the future.
That said, Age of Empires III is 15 years old and it feels like it. If you’re used to more modern RTS titles like 2006’s Company of Heroes or just haven’t played an RTS before, then perhaps give this one a miss. My personal experience with the series makes its gameplay loop second nature –2002’s Age of Mythology is one of my favourite games – but newcomers will absolutely not have a good time with Age of Empires III’s more complex gameplay compared to its predecessors. Even then, its reliance on the tried-and-tested RTS formula from the 1990s is enough to turn many people off. The Explorer unit, for example, is a great idea and a natural evolution of the starting scout unit, but Treasures (rewards scattered throughout each map) are a weak compliment. There’s too much micromanagement involved for relatively meagre rewards, and this Definitive Edition could have done with reworking them more thoroughly. The Home City, too, was highly controversial back in the day and has remained largely unchanged. A heavy focus on the single player this time around also makes multiplayer offerings feel duller in comparison. Finally, there are a lot of bugs and performance issues even a month after release. That’s something that can be enhanced with post-launch content and patches, though.
Of course, that’s not the only way that Age of Empires III, and myself, have matured. While I loved reading and watching about the colonisation of the New World, my view on that event has changed dramatically. Knowing what I know now about the plights (that’s putting it lightly) of Native Americans in the centuries following contact with Europeans, I honestly dreaded the game’s return. And that’s saying absolutely nothing about how it completely ignores the spectre of slavery in the age of colonialism! Remembering its mythologised approach to colonialism and reading articles on the subject over the years, like this superb one from 2008, made the more enlightened historian inside me cringe. It’s entirely understandable that widespread challenges to ‘traditional’ narratives of colonialism were still relatively young in the mid to late 2000s, but that didn’t make even the base game of Age of Empires III any more of an uncomfortable tomb to raid. Thankfully, the Definitive Edition has effectively remedied these discomforts.
Things that make you go ‘Boom’
I had no idea that these representational issues were being fixed when I first booted the game, so the beginning disclaimer came as a huge relief. It’s another way that the Definitive Edition felt like a parallel maturing: Just as I had grown to recognise the problems with the game’s historical narrative, so too had the game itself. These positive changes also have little effect on gameplay, from what I’ve read about the original expansions in preparation for this review, which is also relieving – albeit less so than “this game isn’t sort of racist any more”. If you’re like me, I’m very sorry. That said, if your likeliness to my sorry self has made you avoid a replay for this reason, you’ll be as pleasantly surprised as I was. There’s a question to be raised about the preservation of games here, though. If one wanted to compare the original title and the remastered one today, it wouldn’t be very difficult to obtain physical copies (or even technically illegal digital ones) of the original game and its expansions. But what about in five years? 10? 20? There are countless articles about this sort of thing, though, so this isn’t really the place. You can still buy the original version on Steam, too. I just wanted to pad out the review because I’m lazy. Bite me.
Final thoughts
Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition is a remaster like any other, bringing the original game’s content together along with essential contextual changes. It, like me, is not what it used to be. While the remaster work is great, it can’t fix what’s essentially a newcomer-repelling RTS that pales in comparison to games both before and after it. However, it’s grown both mechanically and historically since I first became hooked on that base 2005 gem, bringing many more hours of gunning down Spanish and French soldiers with my superior British gunpowder and ships…and exploring the joys of Haitian justice.
Reviewed on Windows // Review code supplied by publisher
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- Tantalus Media, Forgotten Empires
- Xbox Game Studios
- PC
- October 15, 2020
