Age of Castles Review

The premise of Age of Castles is that you, the King of some lost fantasy land, are trying to rid the world of evil, as the intro so kindly tells us. You need to gather your forces and move through various lands in order to accomplish your task.

And if you take this literally, the game delivers exactly what it promises. Basically, this is a "gathering resources" game.

This isn't a strategy game like the title-- a reference to the famous real-time strategy game Age of Empires-- implies. This game basically requires no skill at all, except for clicking buttons and an elementary understanding of percent values.

Let me flesh that out a bit better. The actual game play is turn based. Before each turn, you must divide your population, consisting of Merchants, Builders, Clerics, and Warriors, into whichever way you see fit. Each of these population types gather or influence Gold, Castle, People, and Attack, respectively. If you're low on Gold, pump up your Merchant faction to sixty percent and cut down your Builders to ten. Castle crumbling apart? Then boost the number of Builders you have! Basically, that is the extent of skill needed for this game.

After you finish dividing up your factions into the most productive manner you can, you start a new day. A new day consists of watching a 2D representation of your kingdom that you cannot interact with and a little text box informing you of occurances in your kingdom such as "A blacksmith sold a sword! +20 gold!" This, in all, lasts about 10 seconds, and then you finish the day, and go back to your happy little screen to continue diving up your population.

Simplistic. Even the battles against evil hordes of the undead consist of clicking a button that is labelled "Attack!" about ten, fifteen times. So if you got your button clicking down and you know some math skills, you could probably master this game.

The depth of the game play is basically centered on the fact that you can buy various power-ups from Ye Olde Magik Shoppe; You can buy potions, amulets, weapons, and scrolls that affect the gathering-rate of your resources and also your attack and denfense rating. But these items cost money... err, well, not money exactly. They cost magic, an ever elusive resource that you will end up hording to the dickens if you ever want to buy that treasured Scroll of Protection.

Another aspect of 'depth' (I'm using that term very loosly here) consists of the fact that you can choose the type of king you want to be in the beginning of the game. Be a smoozy prince or an evil neuromancer! And how does this exactly affect your game? Well, it's supposed to give you a daily stat boost in one of the resources you gather, but I didn't exactly play through each character to find out the exact strength of the boost. You also get a lovely portrait of your character. How sweet!

Now, enough about game play. What about the artistic value of the game? Well, the graphics are, to simply say, something from the golden age of gaming, the 90s. I think the game would be most effective if played at 800x600 resolution, but sadly the options in the menu are very shallow and the only reference to graphics they contain is a tick box labeled "high quality". Note that this tick box was already checked when I started up the game. I shudder to think what their idea of "low quality" is.

The music, though, was slightly better. I was actually impressed with the composition, even though it was very highly compressed, and the sound fits in very well with the medieval theme of the game. Although I liked the music, I also noted that there is no way to turn it off in the game, nor is there a way to adjust the volume of the sound effects (I got tired of listening to my soldiers going "uuurgh" everytime I clicked the "Attack!" button whilst fighting the mighty Dark Riders of the Swamp level!).

As for the story, I suppose that it vaguely resembles something out of Lord of the Rings, as the last level is in a giant volcano of doom and you do have characters like dwarves and Dark Riders. But in no way by saying that do I mean that you can find Frodo and go destroy the Ring, no. The influence is obvious though.