Age of Empires 4 is a magnificent throwback to the golden age of the real-time strategy game. It's essentially a reboot of stone-cold PC classic Age of Empires 2, and a perfect example of how games like this can tap into nostalgia without feeling like a cynical, money-grubbing rehash. It's a throwback, sure, but has enough new features to justify sticking a 4 on the title. I've been playing it all this week and particularly enjoying the sublime story mode, which features 30+ varied, entertaining missions based on real medieval history. One of the campaigns, The Normans, features a mission where Henry I attacks the city of Bayeux, which involves building siege rams to break through its walls. It's pretty exciting stuff.
After conquering a nearby village I build a blacksmith, which gives me the ability to craft siege weapons. I amass an army and a row of rams, ready to raze Bayeux to the ground. But then I see a stray blue dot on the mini-map. I pan over with the camera and notice a lone archer that I somehow lost track of. When I was dragging and selecting my army earlier in the mission, he must've been just outside the box. Or I just didn't see him. This happens to me a lot when I play strategy games like Age of Empires. I don't use the grouping system (I know, I'm an amateur), so I always end up with stragglers littering the map at the end of a battle.
I'm about to pan away, because it's just one archer. Who cares? I have 20 more on the other side of the map. But I'm stopped in my tracks when I notice this longbowman, this lone wolf, this renegade, choosing not to join me in the dramatic fall of Bayeux, but instead fire arrows into a nearby farm. This unassuming, unremarkable field of wheat is part of some enemy territory I captured ages ago, so it's marked as hostile. My archer must have been near it, sensed it belonged to the enemy, and so he started firing arrows at it in an attempt to destroy it—this small, unremarkable field of wheat, in a deserted, unoccupied part of the map.
I know it's just the AI doing what it's coded to do, and my fault for leaving him out there, but I love this archer. This would be me in a war. I wouldn't want to be storming Bayeux and possibly be brutally slain by an enemy spearman. I'd keep my head down, hang back, and make myself look busy, hoping no one noticed me. "Sorry, lads. Can't join you: I have to rain arrows down on this wheat. The enemy might come back and bake some bread with it. I better stay here and sort it out, very slowly, with hundreds of individual arrows instead of burning it." I don't think I've ever related to a character in a video game more. This is the slacker lifestyle I aspire to, represented by a ranged unit in a medieval RTS.
Quirky stuff like this is why I love late '90s real-time strategy games like Age of Empires 2—and I love that Relic has captured some of that chaotic, scrappy feel in the new game. Even the silly, robotic way the units move, with horses and siege weapons rotating on the spot, brings me right back to those days when the RTS was king on PC. The world is a scary, uncertain place right now, which makes nostalgia-fuelled games like Age of Empires 4, and other remasters like GTA: The Trilogy, especially potent. I don't want the games industry to become too reliant on remakes or reboots of old games, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't enjoying getting another chance to revisit these games and revel in their charming jank.