Age of Mythology: Retold Continues to Disappoint
I’ve had a lot of criticism for Age of Mythology: Retold so far, especially around lack of content, so a lot was riding on the recent Immortal Pillars DLC, which reintroduces the Chinese. Completely redone from their first incarnation in Tale of the Dragon with a new campaign to boot, this is all entirely new content.
The campaign is a bit mediocre. It’s fairly short at nine missions, and three of those are “dungeon crawl” style missions with little to no economy, which never works very well in this style of RTS.
As with the rest of Retold to date, the voice acting is pretty dire, and the writing isn’t very good, either. The villain has a pretty sympathetic motivation, but then they have him randomly murdering innocent people wherever he goes for no reason whatsoever.
The mission design is a bit of a mixed bag, too. The early missions feel pretty basic, and while the later ones are a lot more enjoyable, I still find myself thinking that more mechanical creativity should be possible given the near limitless possibilities offered by the mythological source material. StarCraft II really raised the bar for RTS mission design, and no one else has even come close to equaling it.
The Chinese civilization itself, though, is excellent. The art design of everything from buildings to god portraits is simply gorgeous, and their mechanics hit the right balance of feeling fresh without making you feel like you need to fully relearn the game.
The Chinese have a very strong emphasis on defensive play and turtle strategies, which have always been my preference in RTS games, so they fit me like a glove. Despite my love of Norse mythology, the Chinese may be my new favourite civilization in this game, and I ended up having a pretty good time with the campaign despite its other shortcomings purely on the strength of the Chinese civilization.
Overall, the DLC has rough edges, but it still offers a lot of fun.
So why is that headline above so negative? Because I literally can’t play it.
Things were fine for the first half of the campaign, but then the game started experiencing random crashes to desktop. A lot of random crashes.
There doesn’t seem to be any pattern to when a crash occurs. Sometimes I can go almost twenty minutes without one, sometimes they happen every thirty seconds. I’ve found they also happen in skirmishes as well as the campaign. I tried updating my graphics drivers and reinstalling the game, and neither helped.
I tried brute-forcing my way through with constant quick saves, but after a while it just got too frustrating needing to restart the game every minute or two. I’m about halfway through the second last campaign mission, and I’ve thrown in the towel. The game is unplayable while this persists.
I tried looking online, but reports of similar issues are few and far between, and no one seems to have found a solution. Given the apparent rarity of the issue, I’m not hopeful for a fix any time soon.
Between this, the abysmal voice acting, the maybe AI beta god portraits debacle, and the incredibly poor state of Arena of the Gods, I’m just stunned by the lack of quality control in AoM: Retold. The Age of X franchise is usually one you can depend on for consistent quality. I don’t know what went so wrong this time.
It’s so frustrating because Immortal Pillars did seem like it was a step in the right direction, right up until the crashes started.
