Does Age of Kings give the real-time strategy camp a new crown, or is this simply a pretender to the throne?
Ben Morris

The original Age of Empires was hailed as one of the RTS greats. However, even the best suffer from a few niggling flaws and AoE was no exception. This long-awaited sequel seeks to put right those wrongs and re-establish itself at the head of the pack.

The Age of Kings plays in much the same way as the original. In other words, you must use peasants to gather resources to produce defences and buildings, and an army with which to defeat the enemy. Nothing special there, you might think. Instead of designing some radical new ideas for the genre, Microsoft have instead perfected what they started with AoE.

The differences are numerous but noticeable, and the most obvious is the way in which combat works. Many of the previous RTS games suffered from the 'tank rush' method of victory. Each side would race to build up the biggest army of the hardest unit before sending the whole lot out for a brief and bloody battle. He who had the greatest number of 'tanks' was the victor; no need for cunning strategy.

AoE2 also has units which are better than others. The key, however, is that all the units also have a weakness against some other unit, their nemesis. For example, elite longbow men may be able to pick off pike men all day without so much as breaking sweat, but it's a bad day to be picked for the army if the same group of archers has to face an oncoming horde of skirmishers equipped with shields.