Review

Yawn. Wake me up when Ensemble fixes the combat in their ultra-micro-managed click-a-thons.

Go play Kohan or Shogun if you want strategic combat. If you like shiny objects, loud noises, and a resource model that is *STILL* broken and ruins a game after 30 minutes, then by all means, have fun clicking in Age of Empires 3, I mean Age of Mythology.

Oh, and thanks, Ensemble, for eliminating the best feature of your previous games: full cooperative play. Now I have no incentive whatsoever to play AoM. I don't understand this, I really don't. Why would a developer eliminate a feature whose technical issues had obviously been ironed out, given that two previous games successfully provided it? Just to be clear, the feature I'm talking about is the ability for multiple human players to simultaneously control a single civilization (effectively becoming one virtual player). In a game with so much micro-management, two heads (and two pairs of hands) really helped keep the frustration at bay. This was easily the coolest, longest-lasting draw for AoE and AoE2. With it gone, AoM plays like just another flashy, busted RTS. In my AoE2 review, I made the following compliment:

"Ensemble basically lets players play the way they want, which is exactly the way it should be."

Well, by scrapping the co-op play from AoM, they've taken a giant leap backwards.