Category Archives: Games

Age of Empires: Campaigns and Controversy

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Feeling burnt out on the online game grind after a few months of playing WoW and The First Descendant, I’ve returned to my first love, RTS games, with a special emphasis on the Age of Empires franchise.

The war god Chiyou in the Age of Mythology: Retold Immortal Pillars campaign.The crash bug in Age of Mythology: Retold finally got fixed, so I managed to finish the Immortal Pillars campaign at last. It was a pretty anticlimactic ending, made only worse by how long I waited to see it, but I do remain a big fan of the Chinese civilization, even if the campaign disappointed.

I then moved on to Ol’ Reliable, AKA Age of Empires II. My habit since the Definitive Edition’s release has more or less been to come back every few months, knock out a campaign or two, and then play something else, but even after five years and around 150 hours logged on Steam, I was still nowhere near close to finishing them all.

I decided it was time to finally admit to myself that maybe I don’t want to finish all of them. The DE DLCs have focused too much on Europe for my taste, and there’s a lot of very niche “civilizations” that I don’t think the game really needed. My enthusiasm for playing their campaigns is minimal.

So I decided to give myself permission to consider the game “finished” once I had played all the non-European campaigns,* which felt much more achievable.

A Hindustani town in Age of Empires 2's Babur campaign.*(That I currently own — I still haven’t bought the Mountain Royals DLC, though I may yet at some point.)

As of this writing I have technically completed that goal, though I may go back and play Prithviraj again. The first time I played it, it was still using the umbrella Indian civilization from before Dynasties of India, and I kind of want to play it again now that it uses the Gurjaras.

The last fully new (to me) campaign I played was Le Loi (Vietnamese), and I may have saved the best for last. It became one of my favourite Age of Empires campaigns to date. It feels like everything I want from Age of Empires on every level. A bit of history I knew nothing about, a fun underdog story about triumphing over an invading force, long missions full of multiple enemies to defeat, challenging but not unfair.

The second to last mission, A Three Pronged Attack, in particular really stood out. You get multiple bases to manage and several different objectives you can tackle in any order, so there’s a lot of freedom in how to approach the mission. It was quite challenging, and I was brought to the brink of defeat several times, but I managed to hold on. By the end I’d mined out most of the map, but I pushed through in the end. Just epic.

A mission introduction from the Le Loi campaign in Age of Empires II.The Vietnamese civilization itself isn’t my new favourite or anything, but it was enjoyable enough. Using an army composition of the new fire lancer unit combined with rattan archers made for an interestingly different economic equation, since neither costs food.

“Finishing” the campaigns doesn’t mean I’m not going to play the game anymore, of course. I’m sure I will continue to pick it back up periodically. I may still get to those remaining European campaigns, or pick up Mountain Royals. I think it might be fun to replay some of the original campaigns, too. Many of them I haven’t played in over twenty years. And of course there will be more DLCs in the future.

On that note, there’s been a lot of rustled jimmies in the community lately over the recent Three Kingdoms DLC. I’m not as enraged by it as some, but I’m probably never going to buy it, and I do tend to agree it’s a step in the wrong direction.

I’m getting really tired of “variant” civilizations. I hated them in AoE4, and I’m not happy to see the concept now creeping in to AoE2. This franchise is supposed to be about empires and civilizations, not individual armies. The world is full of so many rich and diverse cultures that could be added, but it feels like these days the developers are focused on finding new and creative ways to keep rehashing what we already have, and honestly it’s getting hard not to see it is a bit racist.

A mission from the Le Loi campaign in Age of Empires II.I don’t mean this in a “the developers are secretly MAGA” sort of way. I don’t imagine there’s any conscious malice at play. But unconscious bias exists, and it’s clear that a lot of people in our society think civilization is something that has mostly only existed in Eurasia, in part due to failings of our education systems.

Like, it’s just wrong that we now have twice as many civilizations representing the Han Chinese as we do the entire continent of Africa. We have as many civilizations from the Italian peninsula as we do all of the Americas. People regularly argue that the reason we can’t have North American native civilizations like the Haudenosaunee is because they don’t fit the game’s time frame, but we can break the game’s time frame to add three new flavours of Chinese?

Playing through the Le Loi campaign really got me thinking about how that’s more what I want to see out of these games. I’m pretty sure most of the people playing AoE2 had never even heard the name Le Loi before this campaign, but it’s a really compelling piece of history and a story worth telling.

That’s where I want to see the developers putting their resources. Exploring elements of the world’s cultures and history that haven’t already been done to death in this and other games. I want to expand my horizons.

A mission introduction from the Le Loi campaign in Age of Empires II.I also dislike that the Three Kingdoms campaign is apparently an adaptation of the fictionalized Romance of the Three Kingdoms rather than actual history, and I agree that hero units have no place in AoE2 outside the campaign (and barely even there).

So yes, Three Kingdoms is probably going to remain a no buy for me. On the plus side, since I don’t play multiplayer, I can pretty much ignore its existence entirely.

On a final and tangentially related note, I also did some looking into player made campaigns, mainly for the AoE games other than 2, which don’t have as much official single-player support.

Unfortunately, I didn’t find that much that looked interesting. I was especially hoping to find some player made AoE4 campaigns, but there don’t seem to be any, not even a single standalone scenario. I could have sworn I heard people were making such things, but apparently not. Very disappointing.

A Swedish home in the Age of Empires III Definitive Edition.The only thing I found that looked appealing was a Swedish campaign for AoE3 that looked decently high quality for unofficial content. 3 may be my least favourite AoE game, but I may get around to trying this campaign at some point. I did always like the Swedes; they don’t feel nearly as overcomplicated as most AoE3 civilizations. Plus the sod roof houses are cute.

Lost Records: Bloom and Rage Review

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By now a committed Don’t Nod fanboy, I’ve been eagerly anticipating Lost Records: Bloom and Rage for a while now. The only reason it’s taken me until now to play this Life Is Strange spiritual successor is that I was waiting for both episodes to release so I could play through it all in one go.

Swann Holloway in Lost Records: Bloom and Rage.By now, I think we pretty much know what to expect from Don’t Nod, and Lost Records fits that pattern to a T. It’s emotional, artsy, heavy on tragedy, a little messy, a little janky, occasionally self-indulgent, very queer, and anything but forgettable.

Lost Records splits itself between two timelines, with the story being framed by scenes in the present day but mostly taking place in flashbacks to twenty-seven years before. Our viewpoint character is Swann Holloway, a nerdy and awkward loner who stumbled her way into a close-knit friend circle of other misfit girls during one summer in her teen years.

The game is all about these four girls, the friendship (and potentially romance) that grew between them, and the dark secret they’ve been keeping for twenty-seven years. Between their heart to heart conversations and playing in their gods-awful garage band, the girls found something strange hidden in the forests outside their rural town, something that would shape their lives forever. Whether it was a blessing or a curse is a question this game will have you asking long after the credits roll.

I’ve said many times that I believe the mark of true greatness in media is not a lack of flaws, but when the highs are high enough to make you forgive the lows. Lost Records is a perfect example of that, as there is plenty about I didn’t like.

The girls on their phones in Lost Records Bloom and Rage.The dialogue is occasionally clunky. The pacing is glacial. The story is excessively tropey (the jock bully’s name is Corey, for Pete’s sake). The plot can feel forced or contrived at times. There’s probably one too many lengthy, emotional musical montages. There’s a lot of story choices that feel like they should be very impactful but aren’t.

My biggest complaint is that the split timeline thing feels like it was mostly just there as a marketing gimmick. I was hoping it would be an opportunity for some very experimental meta game mechanics with both timelines influencing each other, but that mostly didn’t pan out. It actually detracts from the story, because the most head-scratching plot points have to do with justifying why it took twenty-seven years for all this to come to a head.

In hindsight, I think the game would have worked better if it had abandoned the future timeline altogether and just focused on the story of the girls as teenagers. The important bits from the future largely could have happened in the past, and felt more natural for doing so.

In general it’s probably better just to not overthink the game’s plot, because I don’t think it holds up very well if you do, but a game like this is less about the Point A to Point B and more about the emotions it’s trying to evoke. On that measure, Lost Records nails it. This game perfectly weaves a tapestry of friendship, young love, bittersweet nostalgia, and the harsh reality that you can’t go home again.

Swann and Kat, sittin' in a tree...A game like this lives or dies by the strength of its characters, and that’s another place where Lost Records sticks the landing. I can’t give enough praise to Swann especially. Normally in games like these, I find the protagonist can be a bit forgettable as they’re clearly meant to be a blank slate for the player, but Swann has a very well-realized personality all her own, and I found her both very relatable and almost overwhelmingly lovable.

Few other characters in fiction have made me want to cheer for them so strongly. The other girls are by no means forgettable, but Swann steals the show.

Add to that gorgeous graphics and a lovely soundtrack, and you have a game that feels like crawling under a warm and comforting blanket, even when it’s doing everything it can to shatter your heart into a thousand pieces.

Overall rating: 8/10

One final aside: I do find it a little strange that so much of Lost Records’ story is about punk music and the culture around it, but the soundtrack is almost nothing but soft, gentle synth music — almost as far from punk as you can get. Doesn’t really bother me — as I said above, I enjoyed the soundtrack a lot — but it is a bit of a weird choice thematically when you think about it.