I’ve always been a bit of a fan of the Age of Empires IP despite not being MOP’s resident RTS gamer. That’s an honor bestowed to Tyler F.M. Edwards, whose Not So Massively and related columns’ insights and ability to make me genuinely consider games more thoroughly than my smooth brain often wants to is astounding. Actually I have quite a fond memory of playing AOE2, all the Warcrafts, and many other RTS games – though these days I often talk myself out of playing them owing to my own mental barrier to them.
Be it true or not, I think of an RTS campaign in terms of sessions that take hours and hours, and I always feel as if I’d get more accomplished in some other games. It might be hokey and inaccurate, but that’s where I have them situated in my mind right now.
But mobile games, those are quickies! I’m gently coming around to the idea of having a regular mobile game in my gaming rotation. It started when I began to play deck builders and their ilk for a while and then became a full-on daily mobile gamer with Harry Potter: Magic Awakened – may it rest in peace. Yet with HPMA’s exit I now have a huge gap to fill in my gaming life.
Then last month along came a spider: a new AOE game titled bluntly AOE Mobile. I thought this really could be exciting! I love AOE. I’ve enjoyed some of the franchise’s other games. And I’ve got the mobile gaming slot open.
Well, I am sorry to report, fellow gamers, that once again, I have made a grave, grave mistake. There has never been a greater bastardization of a title than this.
If you see a red dot, you tap it for loot – or something
When AOE Mobile initially starts up, there’s some very pretty cinematics of a generic Joan of Arc-style hero going on a quest to defend her lands. At first I was OK with this. I recall heroes in AOE and how they functioned. It was basically a tutorial teaching you how to move and select troops and guide them through this scenario. All of that seemed a bit more like tactics-based combat than city building as I was expecting from the game, but it isn’t too far outside of the realm of AOE.
After completing this tutorial, you’re guided through picking a civilization style, and then the game properly begins. There were a few problems I ran into right then and there. There’s no Persian civilization! Come on! That’s like… basic AOE civ right there! And worse still, I have yet to play the tactics-style combat that the tutorial taught me again. As in, the game officially begins, and you start doing civ stuff and some other combat games, but none of the combat from the introductory tutorial comes up again.
It’s bizarre to say the least – but we’ll come back to that. We need to first discuss the true gameplay of AOE Mobile: tapping red dots.
I admit, again wholly, that it has been many, many moons since I sat down and seriously played an RTS campaign. So how I remember those games could be clouded by years of rust and brain plaque. Yet I recall beginning with a humble town center and perhaps a few townsfolk and soldiers. Then, I’d assign them to various tasks like chopping wood and picking berries until we had enough loot to expand our little domain and build ever greater buildings. Better buildings led to better units, which grew and grew until we had an army that could go and take over another settlement.
Playing AOE Mobile isn’t so much about that strategy game experience as it is about clicking on the red dots. Sometimes, you’ll click on the flashy golden chests or icons too. Just look at that screen capture above. There’s so much to tap on! For a zero-inbox, zero-notifications person, not being able to clear all these is almost a nightmare realized.
I can legitimately pick up the game for a 30-to-60-minutes-long session and never once stop tapping on red dots. I have no real plan or goal for what I’m doing or trying to achieve in most cases either. I’m simply tapping red dots.
I suppose that’s a game mechanic in its own way. Not really what I’m looking for in my AOE gaming, but it is a way to play games. I admit that sometimes it’s not so bad to turn off the brain and just tap until you’ve had enough for the moment.
AoE Mobile is truly a Frankenstein-ing of games and genres
Maybe I am being probably a bit more facetious than usual, but it’s not entirely untrue either! In all fairness, there is some gaming to be done here too when you’re not too busy clearing notification dots; it’s just that it’s not a normal RTS or typical AOE style of game by any stretch of the imagination.
First and foremost, the gameplay really is primarily tap-the-red-dot-driven, but there are other games that AOE Mobile seemed to have taken inspiration from as well. One of the largest is probably Clash of Clans, which likely originated as a watered-down version of AOE or Warcraft! Another game it reminded of it is Travian, which I was extremely addicted to in the late 2000s.
The similarity to Clash of Clans presents chiefly in the way you tap around your village to gain your resources; you tap on the lumberyard to pick up your wood or tap the mines to get the stone and such. If you boil Clash of Clans down to its base level, you are building a city and going to fight other players’ towns. However, your towns don’t exist on a real map where you can pan around and see how close or far other towns are. Rather, you exist in some extra-dimensional space that doesn’t really have any set location or distance from anyone else.
By contrast, in Travian, your town really exists on a map, and if you look around you’ll see other players around you. If you want to get bigger and stronger quicker, you go and pillage those players. (This was actually how Starborne played as well.) AOE Mobile has this kind of a map too, but I couldn’t really tell whether there were other real players around me or the map was just for sending troops to gather extra resources.
Outside of those few gameplay loops, there are other objectives that are basically like minigames. There was the tutorial combat, which I haven’t found again yet, but there is another form of combat too, most of which is a simple rock-paper-scissor autobattler where you assign a unit type to your heroes and try to line them up with a unit type they counter. This is called Island Tactics in-game. I don’t know why it’s called that, other than the fact that each tier is animated as being on an island. Luckily, you can put this all on auto and just keep tapping the bottom right corner until you finally lose and exit the minigame.
When you’re in your town, there is a small fishing game where you tap and hold to toss a net out. It’s one of those games where the longer you press, the farther you’ll toss the net, so you want to get a feel for it and toss the net so that it lands directly on top of the fish.
There’s also the Apex Arena, where you challenge and compete with players using combat similar to the Island Tactics, except you need to preconfigure an attack and defense team. You don’t battle in realtime against other players; you fight against the teams the other players have setup ahead of time. It’s kind of similar in that way to the HPMA holiday event I did last year. Then there’s the Military Exercise, which I legitimately could not understand how to play. I don’t know – brain plaque again, maybe.
The best part of the game (genuinely) is Battlefield Survivor, a Vampire Survivor clone. I’s actually fun and obviously unexpected. How does this happen? Age of Empires… what is this? Out of absolutely left field with no connection to my town or battling players around me is a bullet hell mode. It’s just the height of too much.
The monetization, oh my glob, the monetization!
Here we are arriving near the end of my experience with AOE Mobile, and I must tell you about the egregiously in-your-face levels of monetization that we have here. HPMA was annoying, but you could play the game with only the briefest attention given. AOE Mobile is constantly bombarding me with deals, new heroes, and every annoying pop up it can.
I mentioned my zero inbox lifestyle above, right? I really must mark everything as read – I just have to. And every time you re-open the game, the game has reflagged its deals as unread. It’s not with the token red dot, though, so I guess there’s a bit of reprieve. Instead, it’s a little green sticker, which is slightly better. It’s not great, but at least I can tap and move past it without much more mental anguish.
I truly can’t stand most of what I’ve experienced in AOE Mobile. I know I’m laying it on thick, but it’s really is kind of that bad. I came into the game expecting a generic run-of-the-mill AOE experience, and instead it’s some kind of mish-mash of minigames, Clash of Clans, and gacha. It’s so bad that it’s just bad. Of course, the Battlefield Survivors mode was actually pretty fun, but then I should just play Vampire Survivors or some other dedicated version of it – perhaps The Spell Brigade. That was fun and I was able to co-op it.
AOE Mobile is free-to-play on mobile phones, but just be aware that what you’re getting into is messy as all get-out. If you really want a mobile strategy game, there are so many others to pick from.
Every other week, Massively OP’s Sam Kash delivers Fight or Kite, our trip through the state of PvP across the MMORPG industry. Whether he’s sitting in a queue or rolling with the zerg, Sam’s all about the adrenaline rush of a good battle. Because when you boil it down, the whole reason we PvP (other than to pwn noobs) is to have fun fighting a new and unpredictable enemy!
