Armies of Exigo Review

Well I was quite excited when I purchased AoE. I love 'real-time' strategy games, so I had been looking forward to playing AoE. I was very badly disappointed.

Virtually every aspect of the game is good. The graphics are beautiful, making full use of your PC's graphics card. The bodies blow up and fly everywhere, the magic spells look very pretty ("like fireworks" as my friend said), and the landscapes are of a high standard.

The sounds are good. The screams of dying units, the sounds if spells being cast, the music. They all add to the atmosphere and overall they make playing the game more enjoyable.

The problem with AoE lies in the gameplay itself. While most strategy games borrow concepts and ideas from other strategy games, they generally make at least some effort to build on it and change it a little to make it better. Not AoE. A lot of ideas have been ripped from other strategy games and placed straight into AoE, with absolutely no attempt to change them slightly. Even one of the races (see if you can guess which one) bears an uncanny resembelance to the race known as the Zergs (a la Starcraft).
While a lot of the features of AoE have been shamelessly pinched from other strategy games, it does manage to come up with a few ideas itself. The dual-layer system is a great strength. Not only can your units travel on the land, they can travel under it as well. This makes things a lot trickier, but work out how to use it and missions become a lot easier and enjoyable.

Overall, AoE is a fairly good game, despite a very small part of it actually being original. It's not one that people will be stampeding to go out and buy, but if you're into classic-style strategy games, AoE will be right up your street.

This review was added on 22nd December 2004 by Dan Clement.