With seven missions in Age of Empire II's campaign mode to undertake, there's enough ancient action here to fill up several lessons on the Tudor reformation. For a game that manages to fit so much in (necessitating a three-mission tutorial), it's quite a feat that it's so easy to control for most of the time.
You move a cursor around the screen (roll on eight-way thumbpads – you'll need to use the keypad to progress) and are able to recruit villagers and soldiers or build structures with the * and # keys. This is all carried out through a remarkably straightforward interface.
Along the way you'll learn how to mine for gold, train horsemen and fend off rival kingdoms, as you and your neighbours squabble over the ever-precious timber, stone and precious metals that your (and their) economy is based on. Starting out with little more than a landscape rich in natural resources, it's up to you to found a village, grow it into a town, and develop technologies and systems such as iron-working, feudalism and archery. Maybe not Mel Gibson and semi-mythical King of English folklore, true, but lots of knights in shining armour, foreboding castles, blacksmiths, archers and fighting – surely the vital ingredients for any worthy exercise in historical argy-bargy.Īnd so you're dropped into the saddle as a general in the Middle Ages, controlling the destiny of a kingdom in a far off land. Well they weren't in the GCSE history curriculum but they sure are here, in Age of Empires II. Where was Braveheart? Where was King Arthur? Where were the knights in their castles, riding noble ponies and slaying each other? Considering how much cool stuff happened in England's history, it was a continual disappointment to be bludgeoned over the head with lessons on the Corn Laws at school.
0 kommentar(er)
