Is Age of Empires 4 The Next Generation Of RTS? (Campaign Review) 

Hey guys, this is my first attempt at branching out into Reviews. I have no idea if people are actually interested in this and would appreciate some feedback!

Yes, people actually read the description.

The Hundred Years War: "This campaign is _super unique._ You have a series of locations to defend, each of which is attacked by progressively stronger forces of enemies. "

Not having activated abilities (or only a few of them rather) is pretty much what AoE players want, the series has always been focused on macro and broader strategy. Micro is still rewarded in competitive play, just not on SC2 level.

"It's not even a PNG" Literally unplayable!

But how much of the campaign can we do without things dying...? [Fry squint]

Ah my favourite kind of description. It's nice when content creators write their thoughts, it's a relaxing read reading into someone basically talking to themselves. Plus it helps with the algorithm. Some RU-vidrs try to put as many possibly viral keywords inside a jumbled mess of a paragraph, although it's dubious if that works.

This was a great review, if anything i would recommend bringing the style of humour your commentary in your challenge runs has to reviews as well, rather than just giving a "professional" analysis, it makes it all the more entertaining whilst not deviating from how informative the video is, definitely looking forward to more ^^

The Narration was something Age 2 did pretty well starting out each mission with a personal stylized historical narrative about a historical event by someone else the event wasnt about, it was always someone else from the period looking on at the events and figures happening, there were voice lines for each character about in game events which made it great but I suppose they thought even those were still approximations

"I happen to know a thing or two about rte campaigns." Heh. Yeah.

I liked this review, it was quite short and it showcased some of the things AoE did right and some of the issues it had really well. After watching winter's review too it really seems like they went for a cinematic experience with this one, through and through. Can't wait for november 6

"If you want the soundtracks they're already up on youtube" Well said Usually indie titles have soundtrack dlc specifically to support the musicians but I feel confident saying that isn't the norm with larger titles

I feel like I agree with you on the documentary-style narration, that it works in between missions, but in actual missions, it feels kind of detached. But that's the feeling I got overall. It was very immersion-breaking for me, and the weird artstyle remniscient of Civilization 5 and 6 kind of took me out of it. It plays like AoE, but it doesn't really feel like it. Still, it has a lot of interesting presentation and cool documentaries that do work as a bonus feature.

Actually really like the review format Grant. Nice change of pace from your usual stuff. Been enjoying AoE 4 campaign so far and you definitely put a lot of my thoughts about it into very succinct and well though out points. You definitely had a few ideas about the game and viewpoints I hadn’t considered, I think greatly helped by your experience with RTS in general. And yes, people read the descriptions ;)

This was a refreshing change from your usual video schedule, I hope we end up seeing more reviews!

Good review, wouldn't mind seeing you review more RTS games (both old and new) in this style

I really, really enjoyed this review. I certainly hope you will do more! Even if they are retrospective reviews of older RTS games and how they hold up today.

Honestly I’m just excited for the rts genre to be making a comeback. SC2 will always have an incredibly special place in my heart, but it being the only offering for a decade was a bit much

I like your review style. One caveat - when you review music/sound design, please put more examples in video (samples of the narrator, ambient music samples, battle clutter and so on.) Overall great, hope to see more :)

Great to see you branching out into different kinds of content keep it up and hope you enjoy it!

I love your review. Unbiased, not sponsored review is hard to find. Reviews from people that know what they're talking about, even more so. And beyond that, your personal touch of actually bringing in your personal opinions beyond "it's good/it's bad" made watching it enjoyable.

Please continue to do reviews, I always enjoy seeing content creators who branch out into reviewing because usually, they branch into reviewing games in fields that they love and do it from a place of wanting the genre to grow while providing seasoned advice and critics. Also, this review was well structured and nicely paced so keep up the good work GGG!

Looking forward to Nov 6th! LoTV No build sounds like a ton of fun

Solid review! I really appreciate you pointing out things you liked and disliked so concretely. A good reviewer is one who aligns with your personal tastes, and that is easier to discover when the reviewer makes it clear what things they thought were worth mentioning specifically, without relying on broad strokes and sweeping statements.

Yay another video! Absolutely love ur videos! regardless of the content, Your personality always brings me back!

Thanks for the review, Grant! Personally, to me, the campaigns in the original AoE 2 have always been a pretty mixed bag. Though they had a more 'personal' approach to characters, rather than the documentary thing (which I do enjoy but I can see it will be divisive), the missions themselves have a lot of AIs with infinite resources or who are scripted to build very simple compositions, like 'this one only builds longbows and 4 rams'. And the difficulty of missions is all over the place. I remember in the... Dracula campaign? The first three missions were mostly just an A-move with little resistance, then suddenly you are dropped into a town with real bad defensibility with 3 aggressive AIs surrounding you. For me, the campaigns are... fine for playing once. The real meat of AoE 2 for the majority of the playerbase, backed up by statistics from MS, has always been skirmish versus the AI and I have personally been enjoying AoE 4's skirmishes and comp stomps a lot. Would you be willing to make a little follow-up discussing the skirmish modes and all the stuff they offer? In the long run, those are what people will be playing.

Very cool! I loved how it was all informative while still having the more fun/less serious side towards the end

"What even is it, it's t- it's too yellow!" We're on the same page. I got used to it eventually but it was like... it was almost jarring, how visually loud the effect is for something as rote as setting a rally point. Would've felt less out of place as an objective marker or, I dunno, maybe a neat effect when reviving a downed hero unit. Some event or location worthy of being struck by a giant yellow space ribbon.

ok since you took the time to upload this long video (yes I read the description) , I can take the time to write my ideas about it I really liked your review. This was so much better than most of the stuff you see on youtube. No need for playing the angry card or hypeing it up in the heavens. You just give an idea, about good and bad stuff. God how I miss this kind of content. Thanks for taking your time.

Love to see you give impression/review on the other Single player RTS game in the future. Success of any RTS always start with a strong/solid single player content.

Nice video tho, would love some of your humor from other videos too, cause i love it everytime thinking how you would make it. The sound effect and performance are good, thats a good news, because it'd be almost impossible for dev to update those things early, others can come later and its a blessing knowing it, thanks alot

I want you to know that I seriously love your videos. I love your style and you are super good at it, too. This is the video that pushed me over the edge to pledge on patreon. Keep doing what you're doing!

I read video descriptions, just to let you know =) Nice video, I find it useful and entertaining!

I always read descriptions. Thanks for the announcement of the next great challenge!

Just discovered you made reviews as well. Good job, I hope there will be more coming... even older games would be cool since new RTS game releases aren't exactly common nowadays.

Grant that was so good. Can't believe this was your first review. Please do more, you're really talented and your dedication is apparent. And please don't let perfect get in the way of good, it will just delay your videos too much for little benefit.

Reviews from you sound good to me. You have already established yourself as someone who has experience and expertise with RTS games, as well as a unique perspective since it's clear you enjoy seeking out every ounce of novelty you can from them by constructing challenges to change the intentions of the game. Because you have experience and a unique perspective that shows new perspectives in how to play the game. If you continue to do reviews in the future I would love to see what sort of challenges or ideas the RTS made you consider, though I know the audience would likely think of that as a promise to do it in the future unless you said something about it. Thank you for your thorough review. I hope the experiment works out.

That AI thing's been a problem for a while. I remember once playing a mission in the Joan of Arc campaign in AoE2 where I blocked off one of the two chokepoints on the map since it involved a giant river, than dropped a couple of castles at the one closer to my base and waited. The AI kept sending villagers to attempt to harvest resources on my side after harvesting all of the stuff on their side, along with some rather weak attack waves that barely made it past said castles. Took HOURS to bleed them dry, but it was a simple task because the AI was brain-dead. :P

I personally really enjoyed this review! It really lets your experience with the genre show as well as rely on your voice, which I find to be very nice as a narration voice, to keep the audience soothed while you explain your thoughts on the game! I love RTS games, but I am much more driven by personal narrative stories, so I don't think I'll pick this one up. I hope you'll do a review of the DLC's! Also, yes! We read the descriptions and I think the thumbnail is lovely.

I know this type of video isn't the kind that gets the most traffic on your channel, but I do appreciate these.

Yeap. People do read descriptions. For your first review it was great! Informative and entertaining. Also has your opinion and personality, which I feel really matters. Would love to see more

Great video Grant, and as usual great content :D Yes, we read the description. Remember not to burn yourself out again, and when the next video comes out we will love it!

GGG is such a good reviewer. Please more reviews! I have hardly seen such a well articulated review.

This was a very thoughtful review. I largely play single player in RTS so it is nice to have a review completely focused on it.

I really enjoyed this review, thanks for making it. I'd love to see more from you

Yep, totally read them. And I really enjoyed your review. So much so I SUBBED. Well done!

Yeah I've got zero interest in MP, but the AI cheating resources is a big deal breaker for me. I didn't have a whole lot of hope for 4, so I'm not too torn up about passing over it. I still have campaigns on 2 DE to beat on hard anyway.

Very well done review, and I'd encourage that you do more. Maybe a retrospective on the starcraft games someday?

I just want to say that you review was interesting, clear, and straight to the point. Thank you.

I enjoyed the video! I respect your opinion on RTS and I thought the video did a great job of painting a clear picture of how the game is.

I like the logo size better in the thumbnail like this. It's bold, it's prominent, and it's instantly recognizable

I always read the description. If you check out some classical YT vids especially of RuneScape gameplay people would fill it with hilarious stuff. Loved this description 👊

Man I really don't like rts games but I could watch you play and talk about them all day. Thanks man keep doing you

the description is very entertaining and as to the question why i'm watching a review of Age of Empires 4 and reading the description of it? Mainly because the video was made by you.

I think this was a really fair and well thought out review, well done with it.

I wanted a review on this game and you delivered 😅 good stuff 👍🏻

From watching much of your other content, you've always come across as someone who had a firm grasp on what makes up a good game. I have a bias going into this video because I already am familiar with what makes you pleased with a game. That being said, you come across as very objective, while not shying away from highlighting things you like. Your criticism is fair and valuable. I would very much look forward to see more reviews from you!

"What I didn't expect was the history channel"? What, you mean that William the Conqueror was actually a vampire and his soldiers was augmented by alien technology?

Appreciated the honest take, the mostly spoiler free review, and both the good and the bad being highlighted. AI in AoE games has always been weird but it's disappointing that AoE4 seems like it's not just bad but doubling down on the blatant cheating, at least in the campaigns. Half the fun of beating older AoE campaigns is figuring out what moves you can get away with to cripple or trick the otherwise overwhelming AI, but it does feel a bit rough when the AI just blatantly acts in an extremely preset manner regardless of what the player does. Thanks for the review, I will most likely look into AoE4 but I'm not going to be in a massive rush to do so.

I liked so much the review, idk which game you could do a review next (if you wanna do it, no?) but it was cool

Hey man, I follow your VOD channel so I'm pretty biased. But I really enjoyed your video and appreciated your insight on this since I'm wanting to dive into RTS games again. I adored the old AoM series and wish this would have been similar.

Hey GGG, been loving your campaign playthrough so far, but I wanted to give you a quick hotkey tip that might help you going forward You can set hotkeys to select every military building at the same time, there's also one for every tech building, and one for every town center I believe. If I recall correctly these are F1 F2 and F3 by default, personally I rebound them to 1, 2, and 3 for convienence sake, and set F2 to select all military units SC2 style. Pretty much every time you said "I can't believe there's not a hotkey for this" there was, in fact, a hotkey for it. You just have to do a LOT of digging to find them...

Well, I really enjoyed this review, and I am hoping that in the future we will see more of them, even for indie games.

I think the thumbnail size is just right ( I didn't even noticed it without reading description... Maybe it's the color hiding it .) Also I read the description only because someone say people do read them...ty that person.

The logo is kinda big but then again it's chungus in the profile pic too so it's coherent. Only a little bit smaller it's perfect. Great review btw

Good Review! Would love to see more like this.

Good work on the review Grand. I feel informed about about the game, it's strong sides and flaws, it's problems and potencial ways, for it, to grow. Plus Your personal input, showing that you really played this game, makes it pleasant to watch. About the feedback: One, yes, people read the description🙂. Two, logo is fine, but if you make it a bit smaller, it might be even better. Tree, great that you try something new (review), You are a natural in it.

I really enjoyed this game, and I'm okay with the unit designs, tbh. The thing that I really struggled with was the architecture. Maybe I'm just dense and it'll take some getting used to, but I'm constantly finding myself clicking on all the buildings in my base to find a blacksmith, for example.

The one thing that stopped me playing was after accidentally discovering just how much the AI cheats. On the Mongol campaign, I think it's the third mission, you have to destroy an inner city, outer city & a trade district. I went for the trade district first, built siege towers, put about 40 Men-At-Arms inside and went for the walls. They inside only had Spearmen & Archers, so it was easy for the Men-At-Arms to deal with. The Men-At-Arms started attacking the buildings in the trade district and then....about 20 enemy Spearmen + Archers spawned. And about every 30 seconds or so they spawned more Spearmen + Archers until a max number of both had been reached within the walls, around 30 I think, but once the Men-At-Arms had killed enough the game just spawned more. All my Men-At-Arms ended up dying but just before the last few died, I destroyed the gate with my knights, who I originally had sit out because I thought the Men-At-Arms would be more than enough to destroy the Trade District. After the gate was destroyed, the enemy units stopped spawning. I accidentally found a trigger that stops the AI from spawning in a mass of units, I also accidentally avoided said trigger, thinking I was smart to not destroy the gates. Really ruined it for me, if I had accidentally found that, how many small things such as that exist within the game?

A very grantual review. Nah but for real though, I thought this was pretty great even if I’m not the biggest aoe wiz, and I also really liked that bit you had about the game’s soundtrack. You should def make more of these!

There are lots of professional game reviewers out there that are less qualified and do a worse job reviewing strategy games then you ma man. You're doing great. There might be some appeal to doing reviews of older games then new ones, but im sure you know the algorithm better so thats up to you. Im sure that there are people who would enjoy a retro review if it came to it. Also some people dont really mind when the game is not micro heavy. Personally, i love starcraft but cant really micro so i just build units that i dont have to micro and rush them in. I enjoy the spectacle of the fight more the active unit response. Cant wait for nov 6th. ^^ Keep up the great work!

This review is better than any out there. I so agree with you. Thank you for this, priceless! And yes, sound is indeed the best about this game :(

Great review! I was already cynical about aoe4 based on other footage and reviews I’d seen. Your perspective, although still ultimately critical, did add to conversation since it was designed for those who would only play the campaign. Your praise of the good parts felt genuine and cut through my cynicism opening my eyes to good qualities.

Loved it! More reviews would be awesome!

I will watch any of your content Grant. You do a fantastic job. This was no exception.

Very good review, full of useful insights and enough details to actually inform whether I buy the game. Thank you!

+1 algorithm comment, I engaged with and enjoyed the content displayed on my screen. Joky banter aside, I can't think of any real complaints about the review, GGG. Maybe make the game's BGM during your talking points a bit louder? Was a bit difficult to hear it.

i loved the videos after you beat a mission where you get to learn new things about the times

Looking forward to the vid on the 6th. AoE4 has also grabbed my attention for the time being, interesting to see where it ends up in the current landscape

Thanks for this, really found it valuable! Was debating whether to get the game or not after 10 years of StarCraft. Campaign sounds like a good buy by itself

Dude I love that intro sentence. RTS IS awesome! XD And wait what? Am I one of those weird multiplayer only guys?

You did really well man. You talked about the parts of the game that matters, told both positive and negative. Short-ish, informative, on point. Much much better than half hour long reviews where they talk, but say nothing of value.

Excellent review, thank you for that!

many thanks for this. it feels like the first "real" review iv seen of this game.

Your criticism on the battle feel, unit look and clunky AI are spot on. I really wanted to love this, but can't be bothered to even start it up after 4-5 hours of game time.

Great video. Your knowledge of RTS shines through. Thanks. Now that there have been numerous patches how about revisiting AOE4?

Very nice, thank you for the review!

Thank you for the review. I really value an opinion of someone whose content I'm already familiar with. After watching several of your challenge/mod runs of Starcraft I already knew that I was dealing with an actual gamer who know what he's talking about. I'm a single player fan, so I appreciate the focus on that part as well. I'll see how my budget looks in January and might buy the game then. Maybe they'll make some patches by then. :-)

Thanks man, you saved me wasting time on researching the game and possibly money. The crummy AI definitely makes it a hard "no" from me.

5:10 actually that's an age of empires thing, even multiplayer matches focus more on keeping your macro game while big battles unfold, the price of economy in victory value is harder than starcraft.

The only thing missing from this review: How's the AI in custom skirmishes? I can understand AI being... well, trash for the campaign - if they want to tell a 'specific story' through essentially scripted events, then AI or not the same thing's gonna happen regardless. But if the AI is that dumb and just cheats their way through regular skirmishes, I'm not gonna be happy EDIT: I'm aware this is specifically a campaign review, but it would have been a nice bonus to include for those of us who play offline rather than multi. I did enjoy the review

I read the description and I loved this video

I'm so happy that AoE4 is quite successful so far. I'm hoping this will bring golden age of RTS. It's not perfect compared to AoE2DE but it's really good. I hope they fix the broken stuffs and more QoL

I’d love more reviews! Even if you go back to old rts to give your thoughts.

I liked the review a lot. Also you should definitely give the AOE2:DE new DLC campaigns a try, they are spectacular

I read the description. I appreciated it!

Reviews of games similar to what you normally play on the channel are welcome. I already bought Age 4, but I'm happy to see what others think of it as well. If you keep reviewing new RTS titles, it will help me and others find RTS games we didn't know about, and help us decide whether a game is worth trying if we are on the fence about it.

Thank you, Grant, for your work!

I saw every minute of his Campaign and I have to say I am amazed he gave such a good review, I objectively thought he will trash this game in it, he fumbled constantly with the bad UI (cat with a bow lol) horrific lack of instructions on factions (he didn't even knew the French had a keep bonus till after he finished the whole campaign, they never told him, in fact he thought building farms next to it was a good idea because the English had farm bonuses when it looked like that), and his constant frustration with the early game, he either got crushed at the start or he's effortlessly oveemacro at the end... No inbetween. What Grant forgot to say about the campaign is that its broken... The blanc.e changes from late June for multiplayer broke the campaign, many upgrades do nothing (10 ranger archer mongol, instant catapult packing) or units are cripled (he thought for the majority of the campaign spearmen are bad at cavalry because they don't get their bonus Dmg) to straight out overpowered (the archer and mangonel balance was not introduced so the whole game Grant thought Why would you make anything else than archers and mangonels?) Lastly he slaves over the entire campaign spoiler free And letting the game tell him what to do, it was apparent how bad the game treats a new player, he'd constantly misunderstand objectives or even fumble over because the game Gave him bad ideas, in one mission with the French in particular he fought the impossible raiders with only spears because he had no gold, when he finished the grueling task he walked 5 feet to the right and the game went (You must capture the town for it's very rich gold mine deposits, at that moment Grant burst into laughter, what the hell ). To conclude his review of the campaign is generous, he was blinded on these problems because he didn't know they even existed, since I play both multiplayer and campaign it was painfully obvious of the terrible things left unfinished, if you'd think the campaign would prepare you for the real game you are sorely wrong. If nothing else the campaign would ruin your experience, I recommend do Not play the campaign wait for it to be fixed play multiplayer now. Thanks for reading and a huge shout-out to Grant for suffering to the whole thing, the best experience I ever had watching him was when he was at his lowest. I loved to see his skill be wasted at every moment because the game said "no" , more please?

Great insight and great style.