Tencent's soulless Age of Empires Mobile cash-grab is here to ruin your childhood

www.androidpolice.com /age-of-empires-mobile-tencent-completely-different/

Games @sh.itjust.works

www.androidpolice.com /age-of-empires-mobile-tencent-completely-different/

72 7

27 comments

What self-respecting RTS and/or AoE fan plays this kind of stuff on mobile anyway?
Barely anything good ever comes from these kind of mobile games, or any mobile games in general for that matter.
- There are lots of good mobile games. Mobile gaming gets a bad rep from all the prominent soulless cash grab type stuff.
  
  There’s a couple good mobile games. Ascension, Lick Be A Landlord, and Shattered Pixel Dungeon are the only ones I play.
  
  I enjoyed plenty of phone and tablet games back in the day, when it all started (god I feel old). When there were both amazing free and paid games. But then they started including ads, and microtransactions, and then battle passes, and then unskippable ads and promotions, and then progression got locked behind paywalls, etc.
  I'm sure there are a few good games out there, but the few attempts I tried a few mobile games again it feels like I always run into having to pay to progress sooner or later. It's most definitely nothing like the golden ages back around 2010.
- Mobile gaming is like dumpster diving--there are a handful of good ones among the utter trash.
  One of the good ones I found is Exiled Kingdoms--it's an homage to 90's RPGs, and it's good on mobile.
  
  Balatro is on mobile now. It’s digital crack cocaine
  
  Hoplite and Knights of pen and paper 2 are both really good IMO.
  
  Slice and Dice is quite fun. I love these threads as I always end up with new games to check out so thank you for the link!
- This kind of stuff? None. It's shockingly bad.
  But a real Age of Empires game? Hells yes. This was announced not long after the AoE2 and AoE4 ports to console & controller had shown to be successful (at least critically—no idea how they're doing commercially). So I thought that they had cracked a way to do satisfying RTS gameplay on a mobile device. It'd be great to be able to play a quick Skirmish on the bus, or while spending time away from home without my computer.
  So when a few aoe creators showed previews of the game back in February this year, I was rather surprised and very disappointed to see that the game has absolutely zero resemblance to an Age game. That the worst fears of it being a shitty rip-off were completely true. Thanks to those previews, I was not surprised on release this week—though the extent of just how bad even the narrative side of this is was still overwhelming.
- I mean, if I could run Civ V on my phone I'd play the shit out of that. Though that's turn based I suppose.
  
  Check out unciv. It's an open source remake of civ v with simplified graphics.
  Don't blame me if this ruins your life.
- I play Broodwar on mobile...😭 sorry RTS fans

It is genuinely hard to describe just how bad this is. I did the best job I could of my own review over on the official Age of Empires forums. Its worst sin is probably the simple fact that it barely even feels like a game where you make choices. You just click what it tells you to do.
It's telling that they don't have an official subforum for this game, although there is one for AoE1, 2, 3, and 4, and Age of Mythology.
- That was a really good review. I only know about this game because my xbox advertised it, and I assumed it was some new xbox game. It's sad to see mobile ads on my xbox as 95% of the games are trash.
- I got a good chucke of of the minireview review for it.
  Age of Empires Mobile is a fantastic real-time strategy game… oh, wait. Scrap that. This mobile version of the beloved RTS franchise has nothing to do with the original PC games. The gameplay is different, and the monetization is extremely pay-to-win. Unfortunately.
  Didn't know it was also a Tencent production. Eww
  
  I had a read over the rest of that review. Damn it was a good read. And sadly very, painfully accurate to my experience.

They already ruined it with the first F2P AoE about a decade ago or so, so I really don't care.

Are we pretending that Age of Empires Online never existed?
- Still does
- I don't think so, why? I only played it very briefly, but I thought it had a small but happy fanbase still playing on third-party servers.
  
  I played at release and haven't followed it since then. At the time, I remember it being highly criticized and not popular with the community. It has been over a decade, and I could be misremembering.

QQ moar

27 comments