Author Archives: Dan Stapleton

Age of Empires 4 is a base-building, sword-clashing, village-pillaging RTS of the classic style, inside and out. Jumping into a match as the tenacious English squaring off against the chivalrous French feels like being transported back – not only to its setting of the High and Late Middle Ages, but to a different era of strategy games entirely. And there are some things about that which feel really nice, like comfort food for gamers of a certain age. But it’s the few spots where Relic has taken risks here and there that this battlefield shows us its best and feels modern. Outside of that, it often just seems too careful and safe in a world where Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition already exists.

If you’ve been sending villagers out to hunt animals, mine gold, and chop wood for decades like I have, you can slide right into the armored boots of most of Age 4’s factions with no real fuss at all. Winning pitched battles reliably requires knowing the rock-paper-scissors relationship between spears, horses, and bows. A quick raid to murder some of your opponent’s villagers and shut down their economy can be more strategically valuable than victory in any head-to-head engagement. Building walls and other defensive structures turns the late game into a tense chess match where map control is key, though eventually high-tech artillery like cannons will break the stalemate and lead to a decisive sweep for whoever fields them most effectively. The pacing is right where it needs to be when you’re against an evenly skilled opponent.

I was also impressed with the semi-randomized skirmish maps, which let you choose a biome – defining the colors, tree types, and overall vibes, from European Temperate to Asian Steppe to Taiga – in addition to a layout. They each present different tactical challenges, from two opposing ridges overlooking a valley that feels very much like a StarCraft 2 tournament map, to very open layouts with lots of unit-concealing forest in the middle that encourages a cheeky guerilla war and lots of misdirection. Some of them can feel a bit unbalanced, though; mountain passes will always favor castle-building civs over nomads like the Mongols, for instance. But overall, it’s a great variety of well-designed battlefields. And while I was worried naval combat would feel like an afterthought with how little Relic talked about it leading up to launch, it’s fairly well fleshed-out, making island maps a thrilling proposition of their own.

But for six out of the eight playable factions, I just didn’t feel like there was enough new going on here. I mean, they each do play a bit differently; unique techs, units, and landmarks are great at establishing an identity evoking their historical inspiration and varying up how you maximize your economy. The Chinese gain much of their gold income from Imperial Officials who walk around collecting taxes from all of your buildings. The Abbasids get the Baghdad House of Wisdom which positions them to be a leader in tech and – hilariously if you know its real-world fate – grants fire resistance to nearby structures.

But these modest touch-ups didn’t do much to change the fact that there’s almost nothing in Age 4 that couldn’t have existed 10 years ago. That includes the graphics: even on max settings they don’t look that impressive, especially when I could go play any Total War released since 2010 and see an order of magnitude more units with much more detailed models and far higher-fidelity environments. And with Microsoft signing the checks, it’s not like Relic made this on a shoestring budget. At the same time, new mechanical ideas like being able to hide units in forests to set up ambushes are a nice twist, but other than that I’m not really doing anything that I couldn’t in the Definitive Editions of Age of Empires 2 and 3 that have been released recently.

UNLESS… WAIT FOR IT… YOU ARE THE MONGOLS

With fully mobile bases, no population buildings, and an economy heavily focused on burning down other people’s stuff to get money, the Mongol faction breaks with tradition and convention and shows what Relic can do when it’s really trying to bring something new to the table. The Mongols took me from feeling kind of lukewarm about Age 4 to excited to explore new tactics almost immediately, and I’ve spent the majority of my multiplayer time since then throat singing and microing horse archers. The Rus are a nice breath of fresh air as well, though they’re not nearly as unconventional; they focus on dominating the wilds with smaller outposts rather than having a dense, heavily defended urban core.

Unfortunately, not even Genghis Khan could save me from the generally terrible unit pathfinding and targeting. It’s not StarCraft: Brood War bad, but it’s pretty bad, with cavalry commonly getting stuck on rubble and dancing back and forth nonsensically, scouts trying to ride through a forest instead of around it, knights trying to surround and gang up on one spearman instead of breaking off to hit the siege weapons behind him, and archers stopping to plink away ineffectually at a tower when there’s a pivotal battle going on just a short jog up the road. You are going to need to babysit your armies constantly, on a very fine, tactical level, to get the best out of them. And that’s true even when you’re not playing a super micro-heavy faction like the Mongols.

But there’s one area where Age 4’s old-school sensibilities brought me nothing but delight: It features a full 40 missions of single-player campaign goodness. The first two campaigns, featuring the English vs the French in the Norman Invasions, and then the French vs the English in the Hundred Years War, are a bit slow due to the fact that they focus on the two most boring factions – they could almost be mistaken at times for mirrors of each other. But the Mongol Empire and Rise of Moscow campaigns feature tons of interesting objectives that put you in the middle of thrilling flashpoints from history. You’ll unlock live-action mini documentaries for each scenario on things like how to build a composite bow or traditional Mongol folk music, which are pretty neat – though I would have killed for basic pause and rewind buttons as they played.

It’s worth highlighting that the music and sound design are great across the board. Traditional instruments and melodies evoking the spirit of each faction start out simple and build to something more epic as you advance through the ages. Voice lines for each unit were recorded in the native languages of their historical cultures, including some that are no longer natively spoken. The English units, for example, speak mostly incomprehensible Old English in the first age, which gradually evolves through Middle English and eventually arrives at the Early Modern English of Shakespeare’s time. This was a really nice touch, and none of it sounds overly stereotypical or cartoonish.

On the other hand, maybe my biggest disappointment so far is the lack of a map editor. One of my favorite activities in older Age of Empires games has always been designing my own scenarios and sharing them with my friends, and right now you can’t do it here. Fortunately, Relic says mod tools are on the way – I just hope they don’t take too long to get here.

Imagine yourself walking through a tunnel in the underground ruins of the ancient Sumerian Empire. The camera focuses tightly behind your back, adding to that sense of claustrophobia and dread as you clunkily move through the caverns. Suddenly, you hear the distinctive screams of famed High School Musical diva Sharpay Evans from ahead. You know you’re about to be met with a heart-pounding fight against some godforsaken terror that will be sure to test your quick-time event skills.

This is what it’s like to play every game in The Dark Pictures Anthology series, and its latest tale, House of Ashes, is no different. If, like me, you think Until Dawn was one of the most interesting games to have come out of the last generation of consoles and haven’t minded the growing pains Supermassive Games has had to try to anthologize the series, House of Ashes is its best work since Until Dawn in 2015. However, if you’ve become bored with the formula or never liked it in the first place, the latest story probably won’t change your mind.

In some ways, that’s the rub of this entire review. Supermassive hasn’t made any, well, massive changes to how its games play or look outside of new difficulty options. The facial capture is still mostly great, though sometimes the characters’ necks look like they’re made out of liquid. Environments look stunning at times while others will remind you that Supermassive is no longer working with a big budget from Sony. Movement is clunky even though we now have full control over the camera during exploration. The bulk of the gameplay in House of Ashes’ six-or-so-hour runtime comes down to making choices and performing different types of QTEs. It’s a formula that Supermassive has used to varying success over its last three Dark Pictures games, but in the right circumstances it still pays off.

Without going into spoilers, House of Ashes is very much a step up in storytelling compared to the previous two games in the Dark Pictures series. Both Man of Medan and Little Hope tried to subvert expectations in ways that never felt in the spirit of Until Dawn. House of Ashes swings the story pendulum back and ends with the prospects for an entirely new direction for the series. Following the reveals in Little Hope, I was left fascinated to see what the team would do next. That’s not because I’m continually chasing the excellence that is Until Dawn, but because the direction the franchise might take next is as interesting as The Dark Pictures Anthology has ever been.

I don’t want to oversell the story, though. There are still instances of weirdly stilted dialogue and certain aspects of the plot don’t really pay off in meaningful ways. Plus, the whole idea of a game set in the middle of the Iraq War with Marines going into a secret compound to search for Saddam’s biological weapons can be off putting knowing what we now know about how that particular conflict turned out.

There’s also some potential for character arcs to feel either unearned or heavily cliched. I mean, you can probably guess what might happen when a young Marine and an Iraqi soldier are forced to work together. It can, of course, change depending on your choices, but it never feels like Supermassive is breaking new ground with its character work. If anything, the characters continue to be the weakest part of The Dark Pictures Anthology, though the participants in House of Ashes are a small step up from what we’ve seen in Man of Medan and Little Hope, with Salim being the most notable.

What House of Ashes does do well is the same thing that made Until Dawn so special. Supermassive excels at building tension throughout its best moments, and it subtly uses the environment to help do that. For example, House of Ashes mostly takes place in an underground ruin. Think of films like The Descent for a solid reference point. In both that movie and this game, the creators use tight camera shots as the characters are sneaking through tunnels to add an extra sense of claustrophobia, which increases the scare factor. You never know what’s going to be around that next bend, and Supermassive is superb at mixing in both jump scares and other ways to keep you on your toes.

And for fans of the gory deaths that are seen so often in horror games, the new difficulty options make the QTEs even harder. You can, of course, turn things down to easy mode for a fun night with friends. On that note, we should mention that co-op is the best way to play these games. Whether in the same room via Movie Night or online, this is a fright that you’ll want to share. If you want to take things up a notch and really see some blood and guts, the tougher difficulty options will oblige. I mostly played on the middle difficulty (Challenging) and didn’t have too much trouble, but bumping things up to Lethal tested me – as it should.

On top of everything else good about House of Ashes is a central mystery that’s a return to form for Supermassive. After two back-to-back middling endings with Man of Medan and Little Hope, this one nailed it for me. That isn’t to say it’s groundbreaking or guaranteed to blow your socks off, but it’s more in line with what many expected to see coming out of Until Dawn. Plus, again, the implications it has for the future of the franchise are beyond intriguing. Without spoiling much, it’s safe to say that I am as hyped as I’ve been for the series since Supermassive first announced it was making more horror games. If it can deliver on what it’s set up, we might be on the verge of The Dark Pictures Anthology becoming a force in horror games.