Age of Empires II is, without a doubt, one of the greatest RTS games out there. When I was a kid, it was probably the first strategy game I ever played, and the one game that gave me a big interest in medieval history, to the point that even my first online handle was inspired by it.

At this point, I presume everybody who's been PC gaming for a while is familiar with Age of Empires II, but in case you're not, I'll try to briefly talk about it here. As I said above, it's one of the great Real Time Strategy games, with a focus on the medieval period. This "retired" version was the first version to release on Steam, as Age of Empires II: HD Edition. It brought visual updates in terms of higher resolution options, as well as new updates until the release of the Definitive Edition. Personally, while I greatly enjoy the DE, I do have a special place in my heart for this version, as it's the closest to the original version of the game I played as a kid.

Gameplay, if you're familiar with the genre, is relatively simple, though hard to master. You usually start out with a Town Center, a few villagers, and from there you need to gather resources, build your base, raise an army, and fight your opponents, although you can also establish alliances. There are different paths to victory in skirmish scenarios, from conquest, to stuff like building (and defending) a Wonder, or capturing relics. Beyond that, there's several different gamemodes with their own set of rules, like Regicide, or Wonder Defense. Anyway, lots of options for playing against the CPU or other players.

For a player like me, though, the main "meat" of the game lies in the singleplayer campaign, and this game has plenty of them, even more so with the expansions. The base game includes the five original campaigns, as well as the ones from the Conquerors expansion; these campaigns, while not 100% historically accurate, provide a great starting point to start learning about medieval history and famous people from that time.

Something I'd forgotten to mention above is that the game offers plenty of civilizations, and not just limited to those from the Old World. With the Conquerors expansion for the original game (included in the base version here), it even had Mesoamerican civs, and further expansion for this version of the game added more African and South East Asian civs.

In terms of graphics, it looks pretty good; the enhancements for this version were great to bring it to modern systems, while staying extremely faithful to the original. While I appreciate the DE's more detailed models, I'll always prefer the look of this one over it. As for sound design, well, it's good; there's some good music, great narration for the base campaigns (in the DLCs, I'd say it's a 50/50), and each civ gets its own voicelines for units.

Personally, I'll always recommend this game, as I'm a big fan of Age of Empires II.

Great game

The best game in that time! i remember we spend all night on caffe pub all friends we play this game! i remember this time like yesterday! What a beautiful game was!