Age of Empires II (HD)

I have a history with this series. I’ve spent many hours screwing around in the games. Loved the cheats in the first one.

But i did try to actually finish some campaigns, many times. I thought that i got better at games or that they fixed things up here, but no. Playing this is impossible for a functioning adult.

This HD remaster is good, but AoE2 is a bad game, it always has been. All those thousands of hours i played on release — it was just as bad, i just didn’t know any better, despite having played C&C, Dune 2/2000 and Cossacks. Formations have ruined the combat from AoE 1, which was never any smart, to begin with. The unit AI is insufferable and uncontrollable, your units do whatever they want, while the enemy is AI manually controlling each and every unit faster than you ever will. You just want your pack of horses to attack a “catapult”, but when you click it, the guys who were near it turn their backs and try to assemble into a square right at the place where it was shooting. How hard was it to just attack?

The writing is garbage and the campaigns are cringy.
All units and buildings are just copypasted across all nations, even visually they rarely differ.

Cossacks, which was released just one year later did everything better, especially combat (but campaigns are even worse). Age of Mythology has drastically different factions and good campaigns. Age of Empires III has much better combat and great campaigns.

No, i don’t care for multiplayer, i played some in the 2000s and it’s not the 2000s now. And “easy” difficulty in settings has to be easy, not impossible.