Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition Review (Svirt)
The Good
Age of Empires III DE is a classic real-time strategy and that is just great. The idea of getting experience in order to get shipments from hometown is an idea I loved first time I played the game and still enjoy it. The campaign is also enjoyable and even interested me enough to finish it, which is more than I could say about campaigns in previous installments. Overall I would say that AoE III DE has everything a good RTS game should have.
The Bad
Age of Empires III DE has much to offer while also lacking some features from previous installments which would enhance the game experience in my opinion. When I focus on what is missing, first it is setting maximum population limit for the game, but I see that the limit (200-220) is necessary because the game is poorly optimized and would not handle higher numbers.
Another thing I'm missing is possibility to set difficulty for each AI separately. There are quite bug jumps between moderate, hard and hardest difficulties so it would be nice to have an option to mix them. And the most annoying missing feature is a possibility to play LAN locally - now you have to play LAN games on online servers even though me and my wife, whom I play with, sit next to each other and because of this the game sometimes goes out of sync or just lags because of connectivity problems.
Last thing I'm missing is from the original game (not DE) - it is an option to get experience for each civilization and unlock new home shipment possibilities for you. Now you start with everything unlocked which makes sense for competitive online playing, but they took away the possibility of making a progress in the skirmish game, and it was one of the things I loved in the original.
Summary
Pros
✪ Hometown shipments
✪ Explorers - adding Heroes to the game works good
✪ Enjoyable campaigns
✪ Great graphics
✪ Easy to learn, hard to master
✪ Quick paced game
✪ New well-arranged UI
Cons
✪ Bad optimization
✪ Population limit in skirmish is unchangeable
✪ Removed hometown progress from the game
✪ Online servers even for LAN
✪ Poor AI difficulty scaling
✪ Unbalanced civilizations
7.5/10
Simply put, the game is great, but could be even better.
If you want to play competitive modes (against other players) I would recommend you to just go and play age of empires II, which is much more adjusted to these purposes. But if you like to play solo or with friends against AI there are not many good modern RTSs to choose from and this one would be great fit for you.