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The first of two DLC for the Definitive Edition drops the focus on the history of the asian, african and south american cultures present in most of the past AoE 2 Add-Ons and returns to Europe. It offers sixteen new singleplayer missions split up into three campaigns, two of them for the new cultures: Burgundy and Sicily.
The first campaign is about english King Eduard Longshanks, the famous antagonist of William Wallace. Arguably the easiest campaign of the three, it has a focus on defense and attack. In most missions you have to fortify or just hold your position, until you manage to build suitable infrastructure and a strong enough army to launch a counter attack and defeat your enemies.
The Longshanks campaign is way too easy, one of the easiest of all the available AoE 2 campaigns I'd say. In addition to the rather passive AI, the game usually gives you big advantages right from the start of the missions, like multiple castles or a surplus of exploitable ressources in close proximity to your base. In the second mission for example you have literally nothing else to do than to wait for the 45 minute timer to run out. Your given bases are so heavily fortified right from the beginning that the few pathetic units the AI attacks with every ten or so minutes don't even put a scratch in your walls. Basically the same counts for the fourth Sicily mission, if you are clever at the start.
I really wanted a good campaign for the English and the Longshanks campaign is solid overall, but the problem is: It almost feels more like a tutorial campaign sometimes, but it's not meant to be one.
The second campaign, where you play the new Burgundy culture, is a little bit more diverse but also very uneven in difficulty. The second and fifth mission are somewhat brutal and relentless for beginners even on standard difficulty and the third mission has a pretty unforgiving time limit, while on the other hand the first, fourth and sixth mission are piss easy. With six missions, the Burgundy campaign is also the longest (the other two only have five).
Finally, the campaign for Sicily puts emphasis more on micro management, with less available ressources and technologies and a generally lower population limit. It's supposed to be the most challenging of the three campaigns I guess, but strangely it felt almost as easy to me as the Longshanks campaign.
There was only one small annoyance on the technical side: During my playthrough I noticed occasional performance- and framerate drops. They were not too common and did only last for a couple of seconds, but they were definitely noticeable, and I can't recall encountering them during my playthrough of the new "The Last Khans" campaigns of the base game.
Overall "Lords of the West" is another more than solid and welcomed Add-On for my beloved AoE 2 at a very reasonable price. However, AoE veterans should definitely play on Hard or at least Medium difficulty, because compared to other Add-Ons, the campaigns in this one are a literal pushover for the most part. It makes the whole thing comparatively short too. Just took me 18 hours to finish all three campaigns on standard difficulty, which is barely little more than half the time it took to finish "The African Kingdoms" or "Rise of the Rajas" for the HD Edition.
"Lords of the West" is not exactly the best AoE 2 Add-On, but hey, it's more AoE 2 nevertheless!
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AGE OF EMPIRES 2 DEFINITIVE EDITION - LORDS OF THE WEST (DLC)
Genre: Realtime-strategy
Release: Q1 2021
( ) 0/8 Simply one of the worst games ever made. Don't waste any money on this.
( ) 1/8 Bad. Seriously flawed with barely any redeeming qualities. Worth a couple of Cents at best, if at all.
( ) 2/8 Sub-par. Only for hardcore-fans of respective genre / series. Don't pay more than 5 bucks.
( ) 3/8 Meh-diocre. It‘s okay. Don't pay more than 10 bucks.
( ) 4/8 Decent, but not for everybody. Don't pay more than 15 bucks.
( ) 5/8 Good game, Must-play for genre- / series-fans. Worth 20 to 25 bucks max, if you are not a fan.
( ) 6/8 Great game, universal recommendation. 30 bucks would be a steal for this.
(X) 7/8 Outstanding game, a milestone of it‘s respective genre. Definitely worth its full prize.
( ) 8/8 Simply one of the best games ever made. Get this, the prize doesn't matter.