Age of Castles Review

Age of Castles is a strategy game, and I do use that term loosely in this case. The game suffers from a lack of features and doesn’t give you a reason to play. It tries to give you the illusion of interactivity and choice by giving you a selection of 5 different people to play as. Each class has different stats, but the difference between them is so miniscule that you might as well pick randomly with your eyes shut. Then you are given a menu inside the game where you choose how much of each type of citizen you want to deploy. The amount you choose is supposed to change how fast you build/earn/recruit, but all of your stats move along at the same crawling pace regardless of what you choose.

I will begin with the interface, which is also the gameplay because the only time you actually do anything is in the interface. After starting a game, you are taken directly to a menu where you will see 4 different drawings of people and their stats. The names of these people are the Merchant, the Soldier, the Builder, and the Cleric. Each moves part of your civilization along, except for the soldier who defends your castle. This interface is where you will spend the whole of the game. Once you choose the amount of each person you want to assign, you click start day. You are taken to a view of wherever you are at that point with a whole bunch of people in brown suits hammering away at your castle. You see what happens in a small box on the bottom. What the objective of the whole game is is recruiting enough people to move one spot on the map, which you do by having a high number of Clerics. There is also a shop where you can buy various things, but it doesn’t do much at all. The other thing is a badly designed battle system that requires no skill or input from you. You simply get a screen showing the enemy and the choice to either run away or fight. The outcome is dependant purely on luck. So there you go, that is everything you do, described in the short paragraph above. The has absolutely no content whatsoever, and it tries to pretend it does which makes it all that much more terrible.

The backgrounds are interesting, but if that was what you wanted to see, you could just look up paintings and get a much better result. It’s not too entertaining to watch people in brown sacks hammering at a castle either, and that’s what you’re going to be the whole time. The fact that you spend all of the time playing this game at one of 6 screens doesn’t help anything. There is nothing to see in this game and, beside the colorful scenery, you don’t get much of anything for your money. I find it hard to call this think a game at all, rather than an interactive photo book-with a bunch of badly animated peasants messing the photos up.