Age of Empires has always been a special series, even among the dozens upon dozens of strategy games out there. Its blend of grounded history with tight, strategic gameplay is second to none — and its enduring popularity is truly a testament to Age of Empires’ nearly timeless design. That winning formula is trying to be translated to a smaller screen with Age of Empires Mobile, and while it has a lot of sights and sounds of Age of Empires, it doesn’t have its spark. There’s potential buried underneath a mountain of generic gacha and idle game design that, at the moment, just doesn’t feel like it can match its PC counterpart.
During a recent trial version of Age of Empires Mobile, I had the chance to play the game for nearly ten hours. Initially, I had high hopes, as it seemed like the game could be a touch-screen version of the series that let you move units around the map strategically — a little bit clunkier, but fine. While elements of that style of gameplay are present in the massive sieges, bizarrely, the bulk of Age of Empires Mobile is completely different from that opening.
After the initial tutorial, you’re dumped into your base, where you build all the structures you might expect — the town center, barracks, universities, etc. But this is where the more mind-numbing elements of the game come in. There’s almost no customization of your base whatsoever; the buildings you place all go in pre-determined slots, and each one is on a timer. This means you’ll have to wait for a building to be built, but you can build and assign villagers to speed the process up. Resource collection is also mostly passive, although you can again assign villagers to speed it all up.
“Age of Empires Mobile failed to excite or engage me in any real, meaningful ways.”
Every single thing you do in Age of Empires Mobile is attached to a timer: upgrading buildings, conducting research, sending units to take down others on the world map. This is one hundred percent an idle game where you’re just building structures to make your civilization stronger and can pay for items to speed up the process. The strategy here feels vapid, with more time spent clicking through menus than actually doing meaningful planning for your civilization. I also worry about how long doing tasks will actually take. I had a generous helping of speed-up items in the trial version, but those will be harder to come by in the full release.
The other counterpart to the base building is combat, which takes two forms. There’s a massive world map that features roving bandits and other players, and here, you can send your commanders out to find resources, fight battles, explore, and more. The other part is an island system you advance through, with each island being a kind of Auto-Chess battle where you place commanders and see them duke it out with enemies. Again, though, there’s very little strategy here, as all you need to do is make sure you’ve sufficiently levelled up your commander and their abilities, and you don’t need to do anything at all after placing the units.
“Objectively, Age of Empires Mobile is a well-made game, it has a fantastic presentation and really stands out as a graphically powerful mobile experience. “
Those commanders represent the third pillar of the game and its main gacha element. There are over two dozen commanders you can pull using tickets, with each one representing a different ancient civilization – like China’s Guan Yu or France’s Joan of Arc. It’s your pretty typical gacha system where you’ll have to pull a lot to get the characters you want, but unless you really know your history, that won’t really matter. These commanders feel fairly interchangeable in terms of power and abilities.
I have a hard time seeing how this gacha system is built for your typical player, how many people are going to know all these historical figures? It’s a bizarrely boring way to gamify Age of Empires’ celebration of history, especially considering the different civilizations of the game simply change the aesthetic of your base and units.
I know I’ve been pretty negative so far, and I think that’s mostly because Age of Empires Mobile failed to excite or engage me in any real, meaningful ways. Objectively, Age of Empires Mobile is a well-made game, it has a fantastic presentation and really stands out as a graphically powerful mobile experience. There’s a bit of fun in seeing your base grow, seeing your little soldiers and villagers mill around completing their various tasks. At the same time, the world map and massive sieges have a little more complexity, and feel more meaningful in the choices you make.
There are glimpses of how Age of Empires Mobile could be great, but in its current form it just doesn’t feel like a strategy game — it feels like a shinier version of dozens of other mobile games doing the same thing. Its biggest problem is that it simply doesn’t feel like an Age of Empires game, and that’s something that’s going to need to change for the game to have legs in an already oversaturated mobile market.
Age of Empires Mobile launches on October 17 for iOS and Android.
