There's an old joke with Age of Empires II fans that the game taught more history than any class in high school, and that's more valid than ever with three new campaigns. With a quality gaming headset on, your ears are in for a treat. The original soundtrack has been redone and sounds as epic as ever, and unit and building sound effects are more robust and more varied. To go along with the graphics overhaul, all audio has been remastered and reworked. The factory settings do take some tweaking to get looking perfect, and performance is going to be an issue, but I'll get into that later. With the HD graphics pack enabled, everything remains clear no matter how close you get to the action.

A zoom feature has been implemented, so you can now pull back to get a broader look at the map or punch right in to see your workers toiling. Trebuchets swinging, troops riding into battle, battering rams hammering down production buildings it's all here, and it all looks stunning. Ever since I played my first round of the original game, I wanted to see castles and town centers crumble into dust, and that's now a reality. Units and buildings haven't been changed so much that they aren't recognizable, and the artwork and animations are absolutely gorgeous. Age of Empires II has never looked so good, and the developers have kept the feel of the original game. These changes make for a more user-friendly experience, but the biggest and best upgrades are the graphics and animations. No more having to click an individual item to see how much remains. Resources now have a toggleable 'health' bar that shows you how much remains of a certain item, like a boar, tree, or gold tile. The user interface (UI) is also scalable, so you can find something you're satisfied with depending on your monitor size. When you've hit Post-Imperial, and there are hundreds of units to manage, these small changes make a huge difference. Below each resource is also a value that indicates how many villagers are collecting at the given time. Along with standard resource counts, the idle villager icon has been moved up top and shows how many idles you have. Your global queue of tech and units now includes icons in the top-left corner of the screen, just below the reworked toolbar. And you can now queue up technologies and units at the same time, allowing less downtime for production buildings while you're busy managing other aspects of the game. Trebuchets will now pack and unpack automatically when you assign them to attack a certain building either in or out or range. Units can have multiple waypoints set at once, meaning you can chart out a path for your original scout (or any other unit) and not have to continuously click a new place for it to travel to. No more spamming the farm queue button and eventually running out ten minutes later.

Starting out, you can now set farms to automatically reseed as long as wood stocks allow. Still, there are some significant changes that benefit everyone and ultimately make the game a lot more fun to play in Dark Age through to Imperial Age. I'm still uncovering small tidbits that make macro- and micro-managing easier. Gameplay is immediately familiar, but the myriad QoL improvements also make it seem new.Īge of Empires II has never looked so good, and the developers have kept the feel of the original game. Hotkeys can be set to classic or to a grid-like method - the top row of the keyboard is used for the top line of your commands, middle row for middle line, and on - that's easier for newcomers to pick up. I played a lot of the original and HD versions, and I was able to jump into a Definitive Edition skirmish and play without having to make many adjustments. Age of Empires II isn't a game that needed any major mechanics reworked, and that's been honored here in the Definitive Edition.

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