Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition: a great strategy game on Xbox Game Pass

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Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition: a great strategy game on Xbox Game Pass
age of empires 2 definitive edition: a great strategy game

We played Age of Empires II Definitive Edition with a controller: how the Xbox Series X|S version of the famous real-time strategy fares.

Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition: a great strategy game on Xbox Game Pass

Whether or not you’re a fan of real-time strategy, it’s really unlikely that Age of Empires was not part of your childhood in some way, especially if you were born between the late 80s and early 90s. Among the numerous iterations of a series that recently also saw the debut of the fourth chapter (here the review of Age of Empires 4), the most loved by gamers almost certainly remains the second. It is no coincidence that Age of Empires 2 is back with one Definitive Edition in restored form which, a few years after its release on PC, has just arrived on consoles. Are we talking about a successful port? Let’s find out together.

An RTS with the pad? It’s possible!

We would be hypocritical if we told you that we have started playing Age of Empires 2 Ultimate Edition in Xbox version with high expectations. Historically, real-time strategy games have never managed to make inroads into the console market due to their complexity and difficult controller compatibility with the style of play. Know though that the work done by the development team has been able to amaze us on more than one occasion and may pave the way for more such products in the future.

To dispel all our doubts it was sufficient to start the game on our machine, since the first thing that appears on the screen is not the main menu but a full-bodied tutorial which – complete with dubbing in Italian – Explains the rudiments of RTS when playing with a controller. After a short training, the user is also given the opportunity to improve his pad skills with a short campaign dedicated to William Wallace and to a series of challenges inherent in Sun Tzu’s war strategies.

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The solution used by the study provides acompletely redesigned interface to ensure that all the necessary information can be seen at a glance e

Helpful hints for available commands. Also due to the presence of one large array of shortcuts and key combinations which help to select all units of a certain type (think of the militias), but also to bring the cursor back to the city center or to activate the construction menu, we have not encountered any type of obstacle during the games. It took us a few minutes to familiarize ourselves with this way of playing and in no time we were skilled enough to set up small settlements and build units to then assault the enemy. The only nuisance we encountered at the time of housing placementsince the cursor has made it difficult for us on several occasions to place the houses in a precise and orderly manner.

It is a problem limited to this specific aspect and which, for example, we have not encountered in the construction of the defensive walls. In this regard, we also mention theintuitive system useful for giving orders in successionessential above all during the mass production of small buildings such as walls or houses: in this case, the simple pressure of a key while executing the orders is enough to ensure that the commands follow one another, without having to constantly keep watch the unit.

Another interesting mechanic concerns the management of the inhabitants, now no longer only manual. The developers have implemented a sort of automatism that allows you to choose the approach to adopt on a wheel with various options.

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Therefore, a command is enough to decide to give instructions to the units dedicated to the collection of resources on how to divide between wood, gold, stone and food, or to allocate the accumulation of materials to a specific purpose, such as the production of an army or mighty walls to protect buildings. We can even enable automatic management of crops, so that they are managed and kept healthy without continuous user intervention.

Support for mods and graphics options

In terms of content, the Definitive Edition of Age of Empires 2 does not fully incorporate the offer of the Steam and Microsoft Store versions, since the great absentee of the Xbox edition is thescenario editor. This means that users only have available the Skirmish mode, online multiplayer (through the menus you can decide whether to activate cross-play and play against PC users) and the many campaigns, playable both in single and in cooperative.

Given the lack of the editor, which would have allowed us to whip the game, we decided to find an equally valid alternative. We then started a custom game with infinite resources and indulged in creating a vast city with an army of almost 200 units, which we then sent into the middle of the enemy’s built structures to generate some chaos on the screen . Surprisingly, we noticed that the action almost always remained smooth, even in the most agitated situations.

The insiders have equipped this console incarnation with an infinite number of graphic settings and not with the classic solutions with priority on visual quality or frame rate. The excellent results recorded in our tests are related to the default settings (in line with the “High” ones on PC).

Pushing the throttle and setting it all up Ultra, or by activating one of the many options in the manual configuration (anti-aliasing, 3D rendering of water, vignetting, blood effects on the map and others), some uncertainty begins to manifest itself even when the situation on the screen is less lively. In other words, if on the one hand the decision to provide enthusiasts with such a wide choice is appreciable, on the other we cannot fail to warn you: to find the right balance between abundance of details and stable performance you will have to embark on patient experimentation, just like on PC.

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Those graphics aren’t the only additional options available, as the player is also provided with everything needed to modify numerous elements of the interface and, for example, giving a different look or size to unit health indicators, the default version of which we found too cumbersome. Not even full mouse and keyboard support, which ensures that those with these peripherals play evenly against PC users. Finally, we also point out that to the Mods, although at the moment there is not much available in the libraries to test this extra feature.

Age of Empires II Definitive Edition
Age of Empires II Definitive EditionXbox Series X Analyzed VersionThe entry of the series into the world of Xbox family consoles (remember that AoE 2 also landed on PS2 with poor results) seemed more than positive to us and represents a useful experiment to correct the shot and propose any changes to the launch of the Xbox Series version X|S of Age of Empires 4. In other words, we are sure that the latter will treasure the work done with this Definitive Edition and the valuable user feedback.