Age of Mythology was one of the most memorable games I ‘played’ with my brother on our old home computer in the early 2000s – playing mostly involved watching my brother play and then attempt to decipher how to pull off God moves while marveling at all the varieties of units it presented compared to Age of Empires. Even to my 10-year-old brain, playing Age of Mythology after all the Age of Empires II goodness felt like I suddenly entered some epic fantasy movie after watching years of historical documentaries. Joan of Arc never called down asteroids on her enemies, sadly. Simply, there was nothing else like Age of Mythology.
Even in gaming discussions today, whether they are in a forum or a Discord group chat, asking about everyone"s favorite classic games that they wish will receive a modern-day sequel or remake almost always has Age of Mythology being brought up fondly. The original developer, Ensemble Studios, had created a legendary experience about gods and monsters, and its legacy continues to live on two decades later. Many fans may remember the Age of Mythology Extended Edition, a remaster from 2014 that touted enhancements for running the title on modern computers alongside Steamworks integration. It is a release that even now touts thousands of daily players.
However, Age of Mythology: Retold is a different beast altogether. It"s being developed by the teams responsible for all the extremely impressive Definitive Editions of Age of Empires games that Xbox Game Studios has been releasing, including World"s Edge, Forgotten Empires, Tantalus Media, and others.
Developed on the more recent Bang Engine that was used on Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition, when looking at all the upgrades and transformations the title has gone through, I felt this is more akin to a remake than a remaster, and it is one that can grow for years to come. Suffice to say, I"ve been excited to jump in. After putting over a dozen hours into Age of Mythology: Retold prior to the launch, here are my thoughts on the experience.
Campaign
The story campaigns that take our heroes across the globe while fighting the greatest monsters from myths and legends are back, and it’s greater than ever. Betrayed by some Gods and favored by others, the Atlantean hero Arkantos’s tale of gaining allies from different cultures who bring their own powers to the mix was like a mini-Avengers Assemble moment for me back in the day.
It’s not just the graphics and model upgrades of the Retold edition that are impressing me either, with new life being breathed into all the classic in-game cutscenes. The camera angles, animations, and the more real estate the new engine can show off are what make it special. While many missions have the end goal of “kill off other guys,” unique objectives that lead up to that are what’s extremely enjoyable. Everything from building the Trojan Horse to having a metaphorical tug of war for a piece of an Egyptian god will always make me giddy.
The primary campaign, with its massive number of missions, slowly introduces each mechanic as missions progress. Right when you"ve got the hang of most of the elements like city building and expansion, resource gathering and management, and unit balance and counters, the game throws you into a different part of the world entirely where things are, to put it mildly, not done the same way. Thankfully, when a new civilization is introduced, a short tutorial is played to show the basics and differences.
The Greeks are who you begin with. Very run-of-the-mill, Age of Empires-style gameplay with added heroes and mythical units, as well as a temple to worship at to gain the favor of the Gods — this is how you use your Godly superpowers. But then, the Egyptians throw away the material costs for constructing buildings (I guess they make structures out of hopes and dreams), offer an exotic array of animal-like beings for your army, along with some ACTUAL animals like elephants and camels. Plus, they have a super-human Pharaoh for boosting any structure while throwing away temple worship completely.
When the hardy Norse and the technologically advanced Atlanteans arrive at the party, once again, it"s a new twist on what you"ve learned in favor of a new, yet still familiar, slate. It"s a refreshing campaign to beat because of this. Age of Empires IV took a similar approach to its civilization variety, though that game turned it up to 11, which I thought was also fantastic.
The campaigns and scenarios offer five levels of difficulty: Story, Standard, Moderate, Hard, and Titan. I found that in Moderate difficulty, going past enemies straight to the objective and finishing them is an easy strategy, so anyone wanting some challenge may want to stick to anything above that. If you want to simply bask in the nostalgia and enjoy the scenery and the over-the-top fantasy storyline, sticking to the Story or Standard difficulty levels is the best recommendation I can give. Sometimes, you just want to turn your brain off and see heroes fighting monsters.
I did not experience any crashes or game-breaking bugs during my time with the campaigns either. I encountered pathing issues in a couple of missions, though these only happened in very specific areas of the maps. The new Villager Priority System can also be wonky sometimes if you let it control everything — more about this in the gameplay section — and might even spam you with notifications if it gets really confused. I am not going to spoil the three available campaigns for any new RTS fans who want to experience them, but the stories and their presentations do get my highest recommendation.
The developer has not forgotten about the official Scenario Editor either. Accessible straight from the main menu, the suite of tools offers anyone the ability to make their own maps and missions and share them with others. Of course, modding is explicitly supported too. So, if you have any ideas to change the game to your liking, whether it is related to game balance, the looks, audio, or anything else, you can get your hands dirty to make it happen.
Gameplay
The mix of mostly human races alongside mythological beings makes Age of Mythology: Retold a very interesting strategic experience, just like it was 20 years ago. The rock-paper-scissors balance system Age of Empires players like me are familiar with becomes a little more complex when heroes of legends, as well as mythical units like minotaurs, medusae, ice giants, and all sorts of other monsters, join the ranks alongside the standard infantry, siege, and boats. Heroes are overall powerhouses, able to cut down mythical units rapidly, unlike anyone else, while those same mythical monsters can wreak havoc on infantry forces. The costs of these units are reflected in the resources they eat up to build as well as the larger-than-normal chunk of the population cap they take up.
A balanced army requires a little bit of everything if you’re playing on higher difficulties while also focusing on building the proper type of defenses. This is especially useful to keep in mind if you’re keen on trying multiplayer. However, for most campaign missions, the regular old death ball method, where you build up a huge mass of units and push till the enemy’s base ruptures, still works wonders, too. Trust me, it’s my favorite strategy even now.
Each time the town center upgrades, thanks to all the hardworking citizens, Age of Mythology offers a choice of Gods to pledge towards. Each side comes with unique God powers, mythical units, and Godly boons that will be available for the rest of the game. This adds quite a bit of choice for each mission. It also means replaying scenarios can be refreshing. Like that lightning storm you let rip on the enemy forces last time to fry them? Well, next time, you can have meteors rain down on them instead.
Retold comes with 12 base Gods, and each of them has minor Gods attached to them for additional choices when leveling up. The Retold version comes with more balance changes than I can count compared to the Extended Edition’s units, Gods, and power formats, all to try and make every faction and their deity viable in almost every scenario. Though, the multiplayer community can be quite unforgiving about changes like these.
God powers have been revamped to be reusable in the Retold edition. As these used to be one-time-use powers, back in the day I would hold on to these boons from the heavens so heavily that I would end up forgetting about them altogether. But with the latest change, this is no longer a fear, but it does mean the enemy can throw more things at you too.
Another major change is the Wonder Age. This brand-new fifth age that’s joining the game promises chaos. Once a player is rich enough to build a Wonder (an immensely costly structure available in the late game), they enter the Wonder Age. Instead of new technologies or powers, though, this takes the gloves off God abilities, mythical units and other elements that usually have a cap on them for balance reasons. This means God powers come back from cooldowns in no time at all, and mythical units hit like trucks, making for a quick end for the enemy if they are still standing. I can’t wait until some pro match ends with both sides constructing Wonders just to witness the carnage.
Multiplayer is something I wish I got to try out. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a match during the review period to test it out. This is probably due to me searching for a match from Asia, as the game is perhaps trying to find someone for me that wouldn’t cause massive lag at those times. In any case, from what I"ve seen from fans and other creators who have tried the game"s multiplayer during the beta weekends, it"s shaping up to be a wonderful reimagining. As always, for an RTS game, balance may be a tough thing to get right at first.
Villager Automation
The Villager Priority System is coming over from the console ports of Age of Empires titles. Ever end up in a situation where you"re just about to finish off the enemy with a final push, only to realize you"re completely out of Gold for more units? Of course, the horde villagers that had "obviously" gone to the wrong resource are to blame, and it wasn’t my misclick from five minutes ago that caused this.
Age of Mythology: Retold has the solution to that. Jokes aside, I enjoyed the lowered stress when this feature was enabled. It is a simple radial menu that shoves the task of sending villagers to different resources over to the computer. There are both preset and custom levels of automation. The presets are generally good, offering different balances of Gold, Food, and Wood that villagers will prioritize.
This is another tool the development teams are using to smoothen the difficulty curve that real-time strategy games tend to have, giving more people the chance to enjoy them. Considering the player needs to keep track of buildings, their build queues, producing villagers and armies, positioning them, scouting, fighting, and a dozen other things in almost every match (not at the same time, unless you’re an e-sports player or something), handing at least one part for the computer to govern may be a godsend to someone who is overwhelmed by all the systems. Sometimes, I just want to play a chill game against the AI with my friends while throwing out countless God powers instead of worrying about all the intricacies.
However, there are downsides to over-relying on this system. From my experience, villagers are slow to change their focus when a resource starts running out. Since they also don’t build their own collection points, a gold-collecting villager could keep traveling across the map, enjoying the view, I hope, to a new point while you’re occupied with something else.
Playing with Villager Priority off and manually sending workers to whatever is needed is still the fastest and most efficient way to gain the most resources. However, not everyone needs pro-player-level min-maxing, so this is still an apt feature to utilize for most casual players. There are also toggles for automatically using hero powers whenever they are available and automatic scouting, too. Again, these can be utilized much better manually, but automatic is a good fallback for inexperienced players.
Like with every Age game the Definitive Edition-makers have shipped, the UI is easily understood and even easier to control. The settings menu offers many options to change almost any setting that I could think of. There’s even a handy search bar in the hotkeys menu to find a shortcut that’s lost in the horde of available options. A godsend. Whether you use keyboard hotkeys like a veteran or just use the mouse to command the battlefield, Retold edition’s UI simply gets out of the way and lets you choose how you want to play. This even includes controllers.
From the little time I spent playing with an Xbox controller (don’t forget that the game is coming out on consoles too), the control scheme is remarkably intuitive. I can imagine myself leaning back on the couch and playing the campaign on a TV with no issues whatsoever, though perhaps on a lower difficulty level. Microsoft has been saying that Age of Empires has been quite popular on Xbox consoles, so I don’t see why Age of Mythology can’t be too.
Graphics, sounds, and performance
Honestly, at first, I thought that the game looked pretty good, but it didn’t do much to bring up the visuals from the original releases. Then, I reinstalled my copy of Age of Mythology: Extended Edition and played the first mission. That’s when I realized my nostalgia was to blame for that assumption.
Have a look at the screenshots below from Extended and Retold editions depicting the same mission and opening scene from the main campaign. I remember hearing from an interview that the developers wanted to make the Retold edition look like what fans of the original remember it as. Now, I completely understand what they were going for. Everything from the units to every map element and animation has been redone in this edition with a lot of respect to Ensemble Studios’ vision.
The pretty graphics do give a rather heavy hit to performance if you"re looking to run the game at its maximum fidelity settings, though. I am running it on a Lenovo Legion 5 Pro housing an RTX 3060 Laptop GPU with 6GB VRAM, an AMD Ryzen 7 5800H CPU, and 16GB of RAM. The game runs at 1440p and is installed on an NVMe SSD.
The same scene depicted above gave over 200 FPS on the Extended Edition, but Retold barely managed to hit 60 FPS. Later in the campaign, I had choppy frame rates once or twice, dropping to single digits, though this only happened when massive armies were colliding just as God"s powers began wreaking havoc everywhere. If I reduce a setting or two, my laptop’s 3060 would have handled them quite easily, but considering Age of Empires IV manages to run better on high settings, it’s a little annoying to see dips such as this.
Keep in mind that I ran the game without the new ray tracing-powered options being enabled, which appear even further above the humorous “Mythical” and “Godlike” graphics options that are available. To that effect, Shadow Quality, Dynamic Reflections, and Ambient Occlusion Quality all feature two ray tracing options: Ray Traced and Ray Traced Mythical. These are pointed towards players coming to Retold with a lot of hardware horsepower, as even a warning pops up when trying to enable them, casually mentioning that the ray-traced settings can cause poor performance.
Dynamic building destruction is back too. We"ve seen this feature slowly take shape in Age of Empires Definitive Editions. But in Retold, chunks of the building fall apart depending on what kind of damage it is taking, with entire pieces falling onto the ground or even off cliffs as they slowly wither down and get set on fire.
With the new deeper levels of zoom available, you can easily see the amount of detail every unit has on its facial features or armor. Being an RTS, this could have been an easy thing to gloss over, but the level of detail is a nice touch. I can always appreciate good animations in games, and the Retold version delivers on that too. From the colossus that slowly falls apart piece by piece while looking surprised by his defeat to the curled-up death of Medusas, the animations have breathed new life into these classic soldiers who have always fought in our battles.
At the same time, while the soundtrack and effects have been quite enjoyable to listen to, a few instances of voice acting have given me some pauses. This is mostly in unit responses when selecting or commanding them and not the lines heard in in-game cutscenes. In fact, the developers have confirmed to me that “all characters, including Arkantos, have been completely re-recorded with new actors for Age of Mythology: Retold.” I had to reconfirm this with the studio because I kept thinking Arkantos’ voice was simply a remaster of the original when playing the campaign. I installed the Extended Edition just to hear the difference between the two and finally realize it is, in fact, a new recording entirely. It’s just very well done, down to the expressions and delivery.
Conclusion
After so many years of fans asking for more Age of Mythology, the Retold edition has been a fantastic delivery of that wish. The campaigns have been rebuilt in such a way that they effectively resembled what my memories thought of the game two decades ago. For any returning fans who are keen on replaying the campaign but are on the fence, I cannot recommend this version enough.
The doses of nostalgia this experience brought me during every mission, thanks to the returning soundtrack and sound effects, recreated visuals, and the over-the-top storylines, were heavy. Even the little drum beat that plays when selecting a watchtower is such an iconic sound. I was so glad to see and hear that everything has remained intact, even through all the upgrade processes. The one thing I wish was included in the game was an updated version of the original intro cinematic. Alas, you cannot have everything, I suppose.
The new gameplay systems meant to lower the skill ceiling required to enjoy the game, like the Villager Priority System and automated powers, have been solid additions, even giving a veteran like me time to enjoy the hectic fights instead of micro-managing resources. The only issue I would complain about would be the performance, which is giving me lower frame rates than Age of Empires IV, and this is with ray-tracing disabled. There were a couple of instances where a lot of effects were on screen, and that dropped my frame rate to single digits. But it instantly shot back up once the divine interference cleared up.
On top of all this content from the original game, Retold is a platform that can grow to receive more content, something that has already begun. There is a small but brand-new scenario arriving as part of the Freyr God Pack pre-order bonus. Featuring voice acting, small in-game cutscenes, and an iconic villain, this is probably the first of many extra missions the development teams are planning on bringing for fans outside of the two major expansions that are currently planned. Once again, I wish I had the opportunity to try out the multiplayer too.
The scale of the changes that have been implemented to Age of Mythology: Retold over the iconic original experience is why this kind of effort cannot just be called a remaster. I hope to see more campaigns emerge out of Xbox Game Studios in the future with the same level of detail to keep this fantastic experience alive. Even if anyone is irked about any of the new features or alterations, the existence of official modding support should make many fans happy. I expect the first files to come out of the fanbase with some sort of replacement scheme before anyone can say "Prostagma".
Age of Mythology: Retold launches on September 4 on Steam for PC as well as the Microsoft Store for Windows and Xbox Series X|S consoles with a $29.99 price tag. It will also be available via the Xbox Game Pass for PC and Ultimate subscriptions on day one. Those pre-purchasing the Premium edition can jump into the game right now, seven days ahead of schedule.
This review of Age of Mythology: Retold on PC was conducted on a pre-release copy of the Steam version provided by Microsoft.