BKaF – Brad Kovach and Friends

Kim was the person who formally introduced me to Age of Empires. If you’ve never played age of empires before, let me explain gameplay. The gameplay involves building a colony. You can build villagers and you can build all sorts of military buildings. The coolest part of the game is war. When your society is powerful, by means of massive control of lands, numerous resources such as gold and food, and a powerful army, you can start beating up on other colonies… When you take them down, you win. A game takes around 4 to 5 hours, usually.

Let me start off by saying, “This game looks good.” This is definately a nice… nice game to play. The graphics are awesome and the water looks drinkable. The battle scenes are deep. The physics are real. Did I mention the water? The armies are intelligent. The buildings catch on fire, and crumble. The ships splash as they sink. The sound effects are jolting. The only thing that I have a problem with is that A) the camera is too high and B) I don’t have enough time to play this game.

New Things

If you’ve played AOE before, the controls are eerily familiar. You will pick them up right away and begin your conquest. There are, however new, welcomed changes. The biggest change is the Home City. Home City is a place common to your character’s profile. In AOE 3, you are conquering the new world, like Columbus to the Americas. You can receive shipments of goodies from your Home City, such as Wood, Coin, Food, Soldiers, and other helpful stuff. And ta-da, you’re a successful colony. Just kidding. The gameplay is much deeper. Although you can receive shipments, you need to make settlers chop wood in the forest. The trees kinda shake when they get chopped and fall over and bounce accurately when enough chopping has been done. This franchise has moved to a completely 3D graphics engine. Now, you can move and rotate the camera and perspective changes. The glare on the water follows the camera as it should and the shadows and reflections update according to the camera’s position. It’s pure genius.

My Beefs

To some, my issues might seem invalid. I have a difficult time understanding why the camera can rotate and zoom, but not tilt. Some argue that RPG games do not need this control, and I disagree. I’d like to be able to flatten out and watch my army completely decimate the town.

Although not really a beef at all, I don’t like that my laptop, which is very good, had a somewhat difficult time running the game right off. I had to close down Skype, and all the little programs that I run in the tray for maximum performance. But I always do that when I play games.

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