AOE4 is mostly straightforward in its approach where the campaign is concerned, build an army and destroy your enemies. Most of the strategies from the previous games still work which will make fans of the franchise quite happy. 

Poll

Who will win the Punjab Elections?

BJP 32.76%

AAP 43.10%

INC 24.14%

Submit

View All In Poll

There are four campaigns in total and each has a lot of levels, enough to keep you engaged for a long time. The difficulty also scales up nicely offering more challenges.  I enjoyed the campaigns even though I found some of the more restrictive levels very frustrating, especially ones where restrictions were imposed on how you used your army. 

Though fun, the campaigns don’t teach you about the tech trees in the game, sticking only to basics. So, while this approach may work for veterans, newer players may find it a bit annoying to have to research about each faction’s tech progression on their own.

Age of Empires’ mechanisms and feel are very similar to the previous entries to the game. It was one of the sourest points for me in an otherwise great game. RTS games have progressed way beyond the rock paper scissor strategy that governs the armies of AOE. There is a lot more depth and complexity to the games now. It feels like a missed opportunity, the only exception to this was the Mongols whose campaign was a breath of fresh air in the game. With Mongols, you can’t build a settlement like you can with the other factions, so no walls and other security structures. On the flip side, you can keep moving your buildings to advantageous positions without spending a bomb rebuilding everything.

The rest are more simplistic in their approach. Each faction has its plus and minus points which can be researched and leveraged in the game.  That said, this Age of Empires will hopefully take on a life of its own considering the popularity of the game in the modding community. If that happens, AOE4 will be well worth the investment, just because of the infinite replayability it will offer through its community. 

The game is only available on PC which I thought was sad, considering how well the Xbox Series S and X are doing it would have been great to have a version that worked on them as well. The Xbox anyway accepts keyboard and mouse for surfing, what’s the problem in letting an in-house game from taking advantage of its significant processing power?

AOE’s system requirements are very low. I managed to play the game very smoothly on a five-year-old laptop with discreet graphics. This was very impressive considering most modern games would never load, let alone be playable. However, it looked and handled a lot better when it was played on a proper gaming PC, so that was a plus point.  

Age of Empires 4 is a great strategy game, but it is so similar to the re-mastered older games that it barely has an identity of its own. Fans of the franchise will find AOE4 comforting to play, but its gameplay and style are very outdated when compared to all the recent RTS games. RTS fans who have never played AOE before might get a little frustrated with the game.

ASUS launches detachable laptop

ASUS has launched a new 13.3-inch Windows 11 laptop that can be used as a tablet by detaching the keyboard. The Vivo book 13 Slate comes with a 13.3-inch Pantone validated Dolby Vision screen, a stylus with 4096 pressure levels, 3.3-GHz Intel CPU, up to four 256GB SSDs, up to 8GB DDR4 RAM, 5MP front and 13MP rear cameras. The device has two USB C ports, an audio jack and a micro SD card reader. India pricing for the device has not been revealed.

Harry Potter: Wizards Unite shutting down

The location-based Harry Potter game from Pokemon Go creators–Niantic will be shutting down on January 31, 2022. The game will no longer be downloadable from December onwards and players will not be able to buy anything in the game as well. The two-year-old game let players capture creatures from Harry Potter’s wizarding world and it let players interact with popular characters from the franchise. The company did not mention the reason for the sudden termination of the game.

Squid game inspired crypto crashes

Cashing in on the success of the Korean show Squid Game on Netflix, scamsters developed and launched a crypto token that was meant to be used in a red-light-green-light play-to-earn game. The coin crashed this week. Developers restricted users from selling the token when it reached record highs of $2860 per coin.