Age of Empires II

I’ve been playing Age of Empires II since around 2002, maybe 2003. It came on a demo disc — PC Format or NAG magazine, I can’t quite remember which. Before I understood build orders or eco management or what a feudal rush was, I was building walls around my town centre and wondering why the AI kept showing up with thirty crossbowmen before I’d even clicked up to Castle Age. I lost constantly. I loved every second of it.

AoE2 has a quality no other RTS has managed to replicate. The design is deceptively simple: gather four resources, build an army, destroy the enemy. But underneath that simplicity is an extraordinary depth. Every civilisation plays differently — not because they have wildly different mechanics, but because small bonuses compound in ways that change your entire approach. Britons get extra range on their archers. That one bonus reshapes how you fight, how you position, how you think about map control. Multiply that across forty-five civilisations and you have a game that’s been out for over twenty-five years and still hasn’t been solved.

The map generation is a huge part of it. Every game is different. You don’t memorise a layout; you scout, adapt, and make decisions with incomplete information. Arabia plays nothing like Arena, which plays nothing like Islands. The variety means that even after thousands of hours, you’re still encountering situations you haven’t seen before. Few games can claim that, let alone one from 1999.

Definitive Edition is the reason the game is thriving in 2026. The original was already brilliant, but DE modernised it without losing what made it special. The remastered graphics are beautiful without being distracting. Quality-of-life improvements like auto-reseeding farms and command queuing removed tedium without dumbing things down. And the new civilisations and campaigns they’ve added over the years have been excellent — real additions, not cash grabs, additions that respect the game’s design language.

I rediscovered AoE2 in 2019, just before COVID, and so did my friends. We played together on North-West University’s congested network, laggy and chaotic and absolutely brilliant. Rediscovering a childhood game with people you care about does that — it brought all the nostalgia back and then some. Spirit of the Law’s YouTube videos were perfect for getting back up to speed — breaking down mechanics, testing things properly, explaining what had changed since the game I remembered. Hera’s content pulled me in further. Between the two of them I went from rusty nostalgia to understanding the game in a way I never had as a kid.

But honestly, what keeps me coming back isn’t the balance or the meta or the competitive scene. It’s the feeling. The sound of the town centre bell when you garrison villagers. The horn when you advance to the next age. The satisfaction of a perfectly timed flank with cavalry archers. AoE2 has a rhythm to it, a pace that builds from quiet scouting into full-scale chaos, and that arc never gets old.

Every few years a new RTS comes along and people ask if it’s the “AoE2 killer.” None of them are. They’re fine games, but AoE2 occupies a space that can’t really be replaced. It’s the right amount of complexity, the right speed, the right balance between strategy and execution. It’s not trying to be everything. It just does what it does better than anything else.

It’s the perfect RTS, and it’s my favourite game. Twenty-five years in, nothing else comes close.