Windows Phone Thoughts: Conquer the world with Age of Empires

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Friday, August 13, 2004

Conquer the world with Age of Empires

Posted by Philip Colmer in "SOFTWARE" @ 09:00 AM


Playing The Game
However you get started, you will eventually be looking at something like Figure 6. Like similar games, the map only reveals what your players can directly see or those parts of the world that you have either explored or exchanged maps in. Even if you have explored a part of the world, unless you still have a citizen in that area, your knowledge of that part of the world will start to go out of date.


Figure 6: Game map.

Moving your pieces is very straightforward - tap on a villager and then give them instructions on what to do next. For example, if you want them to cut down wood, you tap on a tree. If you want them to hunt an animal, you tap on any animals that you can see. If you want them to build something, you have to select from their repertoire of available buildings - these become visible in the lower part of the screen once you click on the villager's build icon. When an item is selected, you get a health indicator. When the item is at full health, the bar is completely green. If the item has suffered any damage, part of the bar will be red. The bottom left-hand corner of the screen shows the health in numbers. Buildings can be repaired by villagers and villagers can have their health restored by priests.

As you develop a larger civilisation, you may want to form your villagers into groups. This is particularly useful with the military units as you can then collect the units together into a group that is controlled together with a single instruction.

With a screen that is the size of a Pocket PC's, there is a limit to how much of the game map can be seen at once. The same is true of the original game, so the lower part of the display incorporates a miniature version of the whole map, and you can see this in Figure 6. Where the map is black, you don't know what that part of the world looks like. You can navigate rapidly around the map by tapping on it. One thing to be careful about, though, is that you must ensure you have deselected all of your villagers first (by clicking on the red X) otherwise you will end up sending any selected villagers to the part of the map you've just tapped on. Of course, this may be what you wanted to do but when I was playing, it often wasn't and required some rapid clicking to restore my villagers back to their previous tasks.

As you get deeper into the game, it becomes harder to keep track of what your villagers are up to. Groups come in handy here as it is possible to very quickly switch between the groups by bringing up the "key" strip, as shown on the right-hand side of Figure 7. Numbers 1 to 5 represent groups that you've defined. The other buttons are useful for quick navigation and take you to your (T)own centre, the next (I)dle villager, (C)enter the view on the selected villagers or centre the view on the last game (E)vent. The last button is useful if you've been busy building houses or barracks and the hunting horn suddenly sounds - a definite warning of something happening. Tapping on the E button will take you straight to that event.


Figure 7: Using the key strip.

Researching technology and moving your village through the ages gives you access to bigger and better toys. Unfortunately, the product doesn't come with a printed version of the Technology Tree (or tech tree as the game refers to it) so it is difficult to see how a given research path will pan out and the options it offers up to you. It would be nice if MDM could make the tree available as a downloadable PDF, as they do for the full manual.

Game Settings
In addition to the plethora of game permutations available, you can also adjust the playability of the game. The game settings are accessed from the menu button and are shown in Figure 8. The music is identical to that played in the PC version of the game and I would rate it as OK. It provides a background distraction, but can get a bit monotonous after a while. The quality of the audio isn't fantastic, but that may be a throwback to the age of the original PC game.


Figure 8: Game settings.

The one thing I did wish the game had was a quick exit mode. If you need to get back to your normal Pocket PC, you have to quit the game first. This takes 4 clicks:

1 to quit the game.
1 to say yes, you are sure.
1 to close the achievements summary window.
1 to exit from the main menu.

It would have been very useful to have had a "save and quit" button.

Conclusions
It is great to see such an accurate conversion of Age of Empires on the Pocket PC - and for it to include the Rise of Rome expansion as well. Having the game on its own storage card is, for me, an added bonus as it means that the game is readily at hand and doesn't take up valuable storage space.

If you've enjoyed Age of Empires on the PC, or you like strategy games, you'll enjoy this game. The game permutations ensure that there is a lot of playability and value for money.

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