Age of Empires: Castle Siege for Windows 8

The next iteration in the popular Age of Empires franchise as a free to play, but not the best.

Free to play means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. In the past it meant 'terrible game' but in recent years the payment model has gained the trust of fans for producing great games that you don't necessarily have to throw money at in order to succeed. Age of Empires Castle Siege, however, is not a free to play made correctly. It's a classic cash grab preying on long time fans of the series hoping for more to come. The game met with negative reviews.

Game Play

Game play models a real time building game model. That is, making anything will cost an amount of in game resources (wood, food and stone in Age of Empires) as well as minutes and hours worth of real world time. Since the game was made for mobile, the idea is that a player should check once in a while through out the day and start new projects building or manage their slowly accumulating resources. But some of us aren't that patient, so Age of Empires introduces gold a currency that can be spent to speed up the clock. You can earn some gold in game by building certain builds and creating roads for trade as well as warring with other players, but the fastest way to accumulate gold is to buy it with real world money. You can speed up literally anything with gold, from building buildings to training an army. This isn't too far from other games of this ilk but Castle Siege is a little obnoxious about what it lets you keep. During battles, for instance, soldiers that you've trained are only good for one battle, whether you win or lose. So all the resources that you gain by winning a battle are mostly muted by the fact that you lose your army afterwards anyway. the game turns into a grind of training, building and micro transactions with very little incentive to keep playing.

Presentation

The game's one saving grace is that the production value is high. It was originally designed for mobile and, for a mobile game, the graphics are stunning. There's no story to speak of or any other historical fluff that the franchise is known for.

Pros

• Great graphics

Cons

• Pointless game play
• Constant micro transactions for real money required to get anywhere