Age of Mythology

Age of Mythology is a real-time strategy game that was a staple of my childhood so I am going to be a little biased here. Sorry #notsorry

Age of Mythology Gameplay

Age of Mythology (AoM) is sort of your standard real-time strategy game – you build up your own team to defeat the enemy. In AoM, you go through four different ages to progress your civilization and unlock different units, technologies and other types of upgrades so when it comes time to annihilate your opponent, you’re not attempting to murder fortresses and castles with guys equipped solely with wooden bows and arrows.

There a five main cultures now in AoM – the Greeks, Egyptians, Norse, Atlanteans and Chinese. Instead of choosing a civilization like in the Civilization games, you choose a major god in AoM and as you progress, select a minor deity to accompany each of the four ages. The minor gods grant you god powers and exclusive technologies and units.

Unlike past Age of Empires games (which Age of Mythology is a spin-off of), there are four primary resources to collect – food, wood, gold and favor. Favor is the new one that is used for religious/mythological units and the stone resource has been scrapped. Civilian units are used to gather resources and the resources are then in turn used to create buildings, upgrade units, fuel your civilization through the ages and naturally, make war.

The game ends depending on the game type selected. I’m just going to copy and paste from Wikipedia now –

In multiplayer games, there are seven different game types available, all of which are provided as standard with the game: Supremacy—the standard game mode—includes randomly generated map and all gameplay aspects; Conquest is similar to Supremacy, but victory is only possible by defeating all other players; in Deathmatch players begin the game with high resources, but the game is otherwise the same as Supremacy; in Lightning, the gameplay is identical to Supremacy, but the game plays at twice the normal speed; in Nomad mode, players start with one civilian unit, and no Town Center, and must build up on a settlement; the goal of King of the Hill is to control a monument in the center of the map for a set period of time; and in Sudden Death, a player loses if their Town Center is destroyed, and they fail to rebuild it within a set period of time.

Supremacy—the standard game mode—includes randomly generated map and all gameplay aspects; Conquest is similar to Supremacy, but victory is only possible by defeating all other players; in Deathmatch players begin the game with high resources, but the game is otherwise the same as Supremacy; in Lightning, the gameplay is identical to Supremacy, but the game plays at twice the normal speed; in Nomad mode, players start with one civilian unit, and no Town Center, and must build up on a settlement; the goal of King of the Hill is to control a monument in the center of the map for a set period of time; and in Sudden Death, a player loses if their Town Center is destroyed, and they fail to rebuild it within a set period of time.

Our Take

We’ve both been fans of AoM for a long time so…definitely love this game more than we should. In fact, Alex and I met in early December 2014 for our first date and by the time Christmas rolled around that year, I got him Age of Empires II so we could play together on Steam (we did the long distance thing for the first year or so of our relationship). Long story short, it’s been a big part of our relationship. Just that intro music alone makes me so happy.

That being said, Age of Empires II has been thoroughly broken for a long time now by the community developers and Age of Mythology has remained largely untouched. So far. It’s the one we still tend to play because it doesn’t fucking crash in the middle of games like AoE2 does. For that reason, we also haven’t experimented with the Chinese expansion/gods because we like still being able to play this game….

Anyway. It’s a classic. We still play it every few months. It takes a game or two for us to hold our own on Moderate again (we’re not experts and we promptly die on Hard mode) but it’s always an enjoyable co-op experience.

Our rating: 8/10

Title: Age of Mythology
Developer: Ensemble Studios
Game Type: RTS
Bartle Type: Socializer, Explorer, Achiever, Killer
Player Count: 1-8
Average Play Session Time: 30 minutes
Type of Co-Op: Online
Platforms: PC, Mac
Complexity: 3/5