The Wonders are far more engaging than just waiting until you've got enough resources and then clicking on a button to beef up the town centre. Instead, they build Wonders, which is one of the more obvious hints that Big Huge's Brian Reynolds, formerly one of the chaps behind Civilization, has his hand quietly on the wheel here. The big difference between the Asians and the Europeans is that stepping up to another Age (unlocking another level of the tech tree) doesn't involve upgrading the town centre. We're back to sensible harvest/construct/fight mechanics here, with the possible exception of the oddball Indian Sacred Cow field, which chucks out experience per idling bovine. Mercifully, there's none of The WarChiefs' comical screwing around here - buffing fighters' combat skills by having villagers dance around a fire-pit on the other side of the map, or hypnotising bears on the field felt at pantomime odds with AOE. They play different but the same - familiar to AOE convention but with some genuinely interesting tweaks. The Chinese flamethrower will be your favourite thing here, simply because you really don't expect to see giant jets of flame in period RTSes. I dunno about the mysteries of the East, but their equivalent of Homebase certainly has a better paint selection than ours. Its colourful trio of Japanese, Chinese and Indian factions are a far cry from the muted brickwork of the original's European forces. It looks great (those nasty fonts aside), remarkably vibrant, but carefully exaggerating its architecture and colours just enough to ensure some sense of authenticity remains alongside the tooniness.
There's something immediately far fresher about the Asian Dynasties than either AOE3 or its first expansion, The WarChiefs. So maybe that's why the big name studio's been called in. It's got its crazy, angrily defensive fans, but for all their efforts it hasn't managed the mainstream breakthrough AOE2 did. It's the least interesting of the AOE series, playing things far too safe and making some really dubious font choices to boot. And like Aliens was to Alien, this is flashier and lighter - almost a different prospect entirely.Įxcept, of course, Age of Empires III wasn't anything like as smart and experimental as Alien.
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To continue the movie analogy, Big Huge Games (Rise of Nations/Legends) stepping in to handle this latest expansion for Ensemble Studio's long run of Age of Empires games is like James Cameron directing the sequel to Ridley Scott's Alien. It's an odd practice, but I can understand the thinking behind it - "we spent all this time making this game can't we just sit back and enjoy the big pots of cash for a while? Hey you, here's a biscuit - go make me some levels." It's rare that such cases suffer the complete quality breakdown of the direct-to-DVD movie sequel, enthusiastically but cluelessly directed by the original's lead stunt guy or chief tealady, but it's really rare to call in another superstar developer to do the money mop-up the first guys can't be bothered with. Having a third-party developer make the expansion pack for another team's latest magnum opus is hardly an uncommon occurrence.
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