The footage uses real-life locations while explaining history, laying ethereal golden soldiers over the footage to help visualize things.Įach campaign mission has an intro video, and once beaten, unlocks a secondary video that focuses on a specific aspect of medieval combat, such as explaining the construction and use of a crossbow or the history behind the Rus’ war masks. It’s high-quality footage, but can easily feel hammy at times, which honestly just fits the experience in my opinion. Relic has doubled down on the historical aspects of the campaigns, as each one is filled with live-action documentary style footage explaining the events playing out. As it so happens, the campaigns are also my absolute favorite part of Age of Empires 4, and universally brilliant. While it might seem daunting to learn all these new elements, the four different campaigns are a great way of doing so. “… Age of Empires IV looks similar to past games with the whole focus on collecting resources, fortifying your settlement, and directing an army.“ As you might expect, battles feel like grander affairs than ever before, and all these new elements work brilliantly together with the classic design of Age of Empires. Some other new elements include being able to hide units in woods to set up ambushes, Monks being able to convert an area of units while holding Relics, and a higher unit cap of 200. Not having to move your siege units from a building to the frontlines is a big shift and can make sieges feel more immediate.
In order to counter this benefit, infantry can now construct siege weapons, like rams and siege towers, on the fly. One of the bigger changes in Age of Empires IV is the fact that you can place units on top of stone walls, making it easier to defend against sieges, and making battles feel much more natural in general. This provides more options and can keep matches interesting as players vie for different ways of winning. Outside of destroying landmarks, you also have two other ways of winning general multiplayer matches building a Wonder or capturing all the Sacred Sites scattered around the map. These options make matches even more dynamic, and define the main way of winning, destroying all of your opponent’s landmarks. The French have a building that produces archers at a lower cost and twice as fast, while the Holy Roman Empire has a building that improves the gathering speed of any villagers in its radius. What makes this so interesting is that, yes, these buildings advance you to the next Age, but they also provide unique benefit. Each time you advance, you get a choice of two buildings to construct, and every civilization has its own unique Landmarks. Just like the rest of the series, you’ll need to advance through Ages to improve your civilization, but this time around you’ll actually need to construct a “Landmark” to advance. “ Age of Empires IV goes back to basics by setting itself in the medieval age.”
However, there’s actually a ton of new elements running under the hood, that give this entry a markedly different feel. At first glance, Age of Empires IV looks similar to past games with the whole focus on collecting resources, fortifying your settlement, and directing an army. The interplay between civilizations is absolutely brilliant, and it’s an absolute blast learning the ins and outs of each one. I could list the differences between civilizations all day, as many also have special buildings, units, research, and more. Then you have the Rus, who get major bonuses from hunting animals and accrue bounties. Meanwhile, the Abbasid Dynasty is focused entirely around their unique House of Wisdom building, and the only way to advance ages is by constructing buildings within the range of the House of Wisdom, thus expanding it. For example, the Mongols focus on ranged combat, get resources from burning buildings, and, due to their nomadic history, are the only civilization that can literally pick up and move their buildings.
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