14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft, as the publisher, and Robot Entertainment, a development studio made up mostly of veterans coming from the regretted Ensemble team, have announced and shown off their upcoming digitally distributed strategy title Age of Empires Online.
The Microsoft booth has many attractions, from Kinect to Halo: Reach and Fable III but as a strategy gamer who loved the Age of Empire series since I first laid my hands on a mouse I was strangely attracted to the newly announced Online addition the the series they were demoing.
Age of Empires Online is quite a throwback experience. It looks a bit like Age of Mythology with upgraded graphics and a more cartoon like tint.
It plays like the classic titles in the series, although there are signs that suggests that the game will become more complex as the player invests more time and, presumably, more money in it.
Initially the game will be free to play. Anyone can get the package and get started as the Greeks, the best known civilization of the ancient world.
The player gets a capital city, which is a bit like a more accessible and more fleshed out home city seen in Age of Empires III.
In that game players could choose cards and then play them at certain points in the game to influence its course while in the new Age of Empires Online both resources and units can be played in the instanced maps where objectives need to be overcome in a very familiar real time strategy manner.
The only issues I have detected is that the game seems a bit easy and that the mission I sampled was a bit on the long side.
Age of Empires Online will be digitally distributed, with Games for Windows Live delivering the infrastructure, and currently the launch date is set for 2011.