User Reviews (81 - 91 of 279)

Show these reviews first:

Highest Rated
Lowest Rated Newest
Oldest Most Helpful
Least Helpful

The Best Strategy Game Of All Time And One Of The Best Games Ever Made

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: July 11, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Age Of Empires 2 is a masterpiece. Regardless of any complaints anyone has made about this game, there is no arguing. This one of the most fun, addictive, and satisfying games ever made.

You can play it for months. I played it for over a year, then came back and played it for another year. It's probably the most addictive game I've ever played. Not Mario, not Zelda, not the great Doom, not Quake or Half-life or Warcraft or even Grand Theft Auto has ever had me as hooked as this game. Microsoft and Ensemble Studios hit the nail on the head with AOE 2.

The sequel to Age Of Empires keeps everything that made the first one great, throws away almost everything that made it bad, and throws an amazing, revamped user interface that gives the player god-like power if used expertly.

The different civilizations are fantastic. The advantages and disadvantages of each one make the game interesting and balanced, although some civilizations are better (overall) than others. I mean, really, who doesn't love (and equally hate) the Longbowmen? The War Elephants? The Woad Raiders? The Throwing Axeman?

The units are the best part of the game. Except for the paladin and scorpion wipeout trick, the unit balance is superb. The naval battles are amazing, with fireships, ballista ships, and even ships that launch cannonballs.

There are more buildings, tons more upgrades, and a brand-new unit I like to call the x-factor: the trebuchet. This is one of the units that makes AOE 2 a true delight. As built up as a city can become, it can be destroyed in minutes with enough trebuchets.

The multiplayer aspect of this game is what solidifies AOE 2's standing as one of the best games ever made. It is surreal. I've had 12-hour multiplayer sessions many times. You just don't want to stop. It's so fun!!! It's madness!

As far as challenge goes, you'll get all you want. Just try beating the entire game on the hardest difficulty and see the headache you get. And if you get through with that, buy the expansion pack and eat your heart out.

Buy this game! Play it until you're sick of it! That probably won't happen, but even if it does, when you come back from your break you'll be twice as hooked.

Ha!!! The memories I have of this game! Man, this is the best!

If you want to lead a productive life, don't buy this game.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: January 10, 2000
Author: Amazon User

I find myself wasting the whole day when I fire Age of Empires II up, the game is so engrossing, the hours slide by in no time.

Huge Amounts of Memory Required: YEAH RIGHT!!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: February 26, 2004
Author: Amazon User

OK look... to put it smiply, my computer sucks. Yet, Age of Empires 2 is the best rts to run on my system!
733 pentium 3
8x cr-w drive
19.0 gb hard drive
64 megs ram
NO graphics card.... NOT a gaming computer!!! But, age of empires 2 runs smoother than it ran on one of those super computers! So, I don't know what the hipe is about needing a huge amount of memory. PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE! Do not let some other review tell you need more than 128 megs of memory just to enjoy the game!!! You'd be miising out on one of, if not the BEST rts game ever made!

Great war game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: May 09, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This is a wonderful game, you can choose who you are and which map you want to be on, there are different levels and campaigns in which you conquer people with Gendhis Khan and there is even a beginers campaign to learn how to play. When you play the game time fly's. I think this is a great game.

AWESOMEST GAME EVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: May 22, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I went to my cousins' house and I got bored so I started to play on the computer. They had Age of Empires II. I played that game for six hours for like three days and still wanted to play more. Here are the features (I played this game a year ago so this might not be that detailed):

Campaigns: A lot better than Age of Empires III campaigns. Those were just... let's use an appropriate word... prejudiced. These were clever and fun and not prejudiced.

Single Player: A lot less tiring than Age of Empires III, for some reason, maybe because of that darn home city in that darn new game. The cheats were also very clever for example:
Robin hood: more gold
Lumberjack: more wood
How do I turn this on: a car that acts like a cannon
Marco polo: The whole map is revealed
The cheats are a lot more fun than the Age of Empires III ones and somehow cheating is just as fun as not cheating here, unlike in Age of Empires III.

Multiplayer: My mom doesn't let me so I don't know how it is.

Graphics: I really don't care about graphics, as long as you can see without being confused about what's what. To me, the graphics were fine.

I will regret forever that I bought Age of Empires III instead of this. NOw my mom won't buy the good one: AGE OF EMPIRES II!!!!!!!!!

One of the most overrated games of all time

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 15
Date: July 21, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This game is crap. I bought it after reading the wild praise lavished on it from all corners, and after weeks of playing it I decided that it's a vastly overrated waste of time. I even bought a strategy guide to understand what was behind it, but it left me with the impression that this game has very little depth to it.

People call this a strategy game. There's no strategy involved at all. It's simply a race to see who can amass the most technically advanced army first. Any tactics to reach that goal are very simplistic attempts to kill off enemy gold miners and lumberjacks. And defence involves erecting walls around your town, or if you can bear the ingeniousness of it, by putting guard towers around your gold mines. All games play very much the same:

1)Put your villagers to work chopping wood and collecting berries
2)Once you reach the next age, build farms and make some soldiers. If you want to pretend there's skill involved, harrass the enemy villagers. Build some defensive walls.Continue making soldiers archers, and cavalry, and upgrade them. If you have allies research cartography and save yourslef a world of hassle.
3)Reach Castle Age and build a castle, with the ultimate goal of making some trebuchets in the next age. Slowly expand from your initial starting point by building some forward buildings, Keep hararssing enemy villagers if you want.
4)Once you reach the Imperial Age build trebuchets and troops to protect them. By this time you can afford almost all the upgrades available. The first person to achieve this situation has all but won the game. The trebuchets outrange almost anything and you can thus attack any building with relative impunity provided the trebuchets have enough guardians. For such a powerful weapon they're vastly underpriced. Slowly pick off each enemy this way. Periodically check to see if your defence is okay. Apparently you can win by building a wonder or holding relics for 200 years, but it's far easier to achieve victory through miltary conquest, so these options are practically useless.

That's basically it. Come on, strategy? The most strategy I ever used was to build gates at river crossings, keeping the enemy out but allowing my units free access. That doesn't make me a military genius. What about morale, flanking bonuses, entrenchment bonuses, road travel bonuses? Cliff tops offer defence bonuses but relocating there isn't worth the time lost. Diplomacy is a farce. For 500 of each resource an AI opponent will join you. He'll be your bestest buddy if you feed him a 100 of whatever resource when he periodiclaly requests it. The you can happily build a castle and station troops in his territory, and when you feel like breaking the alliance, your troops act like Trojan horse and run riot in his town.

And it's abstracted almost to the point of silliness. A "year" goes by in 2 seconds. A farmer going from his field to the town center takes more than that. So over a year to walk from a farm to the town center. Units miraculously change into upgraded units in the blink of an eye. And a group of villagers can actually destroy a stone guard tower.I thought the point of towers was to be defensive?

People often praise the rock-paper-scissors attributes of the units, but it only makes getting anywhere in this game frustrating. The most neophyte of gamers could build an army of pikemen to wipe out your army of knights, by taking advantage of the anti cavalry bonus of pikemen Does that make him a genius? The only solution is to build a balanced army. Thus all armies of all players wil tend to be very similar. Only the player with the biggest and best army will win the game.

And it's got ONE zoom level, and it's too close in. You can't figure out the "bigger picture" with one zoom level. Just as you're concentrating on your assault on the enemy town center, the enemy could be doing the same to you just off screen and you'd never even notice. There are alaam bells but you rapidly get overloaded with audio signals and they become meaningless.

Apparently it's better multi player, but if you want to put up with stuck up poseurs who continually denigrate people with "noob" jibes in all seriousness, be my guest.

The most commendable thing about this game is the manaual which is attractively presented and well written. I wish all manuals could be like that. And I could mention that it's actually quite fun for a few days before the awful truth dawns on you.

As for the "commendable" historical aspect, it just means that you can't use more tactically useful air units, pyschics or magic spells. The historical aspect only prohibits any strategy forming.

Don't be fooled by the hype. Age Of Empires 2 is a shallow RTS that rapidly becomes formualaic. If you want an historical RTS with depth go for Sid Meier's Gettysburg, Caesar 3 or Medieval Total War, not on this rubbish.

Good Enough

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: May 28, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Rarely does a game comes along and becomes as addictive as AOE 2... the last time I lost sleep from playing like this was Sid Meir's Civilization II. Although there was a signifcant improvement in the games interface, AI, and graphics compared to AOE I; it still lacks the necessary 'intangibles' from making it a 'must-have' classic (Civ II, with its simplicaity and breadth of game play, is the standard for all strategy games are to be measured)... still, I would still recommend game enthusiast from trying out AOE II.

Truly exceptional...

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: February 29, 2000
Author: Amazon User

I'm not sure if there's a point adding onto the deluge of positive reviews, it's just that this game really does deserve all of the adulation. The original Age of Empires was a bland, banal piece of drudgery; however my opinion of everything Microsoft was turned on its ear when I first saw this sequel in action.

It's not so much that Age of Kings creates or even reinvents a genre. It's just happens to be the first product of its particular genre that does it right. I wouldn't be surprised if this product was the result of programmers using a checklist of requests given by Real Time Strategy game players. Just about all of the annoying "I wish the program would just understand and do it this way without me having to do everything manually"-type problems of RTS games have been eliminated. For example, the fact that my dozens of little soldiers can now actually stay in formation and follow my exquisite battle plans (instead of charging off willy-nilly to perish) was worth the purchase price alone.

That said, the few criticisms previous reviewers shared are mostly true. The AI is none too impressive (perplexing sometimes, who builds an army consisting solely of battering rams?), the scenarios can become tedious, the strategic depth doesn't compete with the better Turn Based Strategy games, etc. However, all of these complaints are universally applicable to all RTS games. And I do take issue with those who fault its replay value. I've already spent more time on the Random Map feature of this game than is healthy. Age of Kings is quite simply the best of its species.

Oh, and if you plan on engaging foes online - be prepared; online gamers are rude and ruthless to begin with, and Age of Kings players even more so.

Exciting, Challenging, but at times overwhelming

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 7
Date: December 28, 2000
Author: Amazon User

"Age of Empires II: Age of Kings" is a wonderful game of strategy. It is not just about making large armies and crushing your opponents. Economics plays a key role, perhaps ever more important than military considerations. However, war is still the main occupation of the game, and it is the least rewarding. There are no tactics involved whatsoever, and in order to accomplish anything, you need an army so large that you cannot manage it but simply just let it loose. This lack of control really detracts from the game itself. It would have been better if there had been a separate battle engine as part of the game. However, overall this game is good for hours of entertainment, as you never have the same campaign twice, and on the higher levels it is very challenging to survive long enough to fight back.

The lack of tactics in the game lost it a star in my review. The other star is for the general gameplay and graphics. You are forced to micromanage your towns and all the villagers, as well as your armies. This can be trying, especially the more units you have. There is no option to order villagers to continue working on their own without you issuing new orders. This is especially annoying with farms and fishing ships. Also, the graphics of the game aren't great, so these two factors detract another star.

However, I still reccommend the game for anyone interested in real-time strategy. It is probably the best such game out there.

The Coolest game of history!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 7
Date: May 26, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Now, a LONG LONG LONG time ago, other countrys were either at peace-or war. Ok kids, this might be violent, but it is history violence. It contains CARTOON VIOLENCE but- not guts and everything, just blood. Now other Owners, Say THIS IS THE BEST STRATEGIE-ACTION GAME EVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Review Page: Previous 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Next 

Actions