The campaigns are a real shining point of AoE IV, offering a lot of interesting moments in history beyond the key battles that you’re more likely to have heard of. While the civilisation and campaign selection is slightly less than in AoE II, they are incredibly well fleshed out.
The tutorial gives a smooth overview of everything we know and love in the series, the Story Mode difficulty level in the campaign removes the micro play and mass tactics to create a more narrative-driven experience, and the Art of War challenges create space for players to test themselves and improve their understanding of core elements of the game in a modular way.
What is most evident in our time with the game is Relic Entertainment’s dedication to not just existing AoE fans, but also new audiences to the series and the genre. Age of Empires IV brings many of the best-loved elements from AoE II into high definition, enriched with new features, gameplay elements and a finesse many would argue was overlooked in Age of Empires III. Still, it’s clear where developers have learned from previous mistakes. It’s a fantastic return to form for the series, but we wouldn’t go as far as to say it matches up to AoE II. Playing into the familiar trope of “getting the team together,” the mission pulled a real-world historical event into a framework that was recognizable, fitting right in between the TV documentary style narrative delivery and a video game mission pieced out into several stages.While we wouldn’t call it revolutionary within the genre, AoE IV achieves with style and grace what many RTS games don’t - a balanced and well-rounded finished product that offers some solid replayability, opportunity for growth and, most importantly, good fun. Early in the French campaign, for example, I was tasked with gathering troops with special abilities one-by-one to fight in a duel. All of these are ways of warping history into incremental stories that have the feel of video game narratives. They all have a distinct tone to them: the English conflict with the Normans is the story of pitched battles on opposite shores the French campaign centers on national myth and heroism the Mongol campaign is about one cunning maneuver after the other and the Moscow campaign is the story of one city-state that grows to be a power. I spent the bulk of my time with “Age of Empires IV” working through those campaigns - four distinct sets of missions that ask you to command four different empires through some critical moments in their history.
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