• PunchingWood@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    What self-respecting RTS and/or AoE fan plays this kind of stuff on mobile anyway?

    Barely anything good ever comes from these kind of mobile games, or any mobile games in general for that matter.

    • iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      There are lots of good mobile games. Mobile gaming gets a bad rep from all the prominent soulless cash grab type stuff.

      • Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        2 months ago

        There’s a couple good mobile games. Ascension, Lick Be A Landlord, and Shattered Pixel Dungeon are the only ones I play.

      • PunchingWood@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        I enjoyed plenty of phone and tablet games back in the day, when it all started (god I feel old). When there were both amazing free and paid games. But then they started including ads, and microtransactions, and then battle passes, and then unskippable ads and promotions, and then progression got locked behind paywalls, etc.

        I’m sure there are a few good games out there, but the few attempts I tried a few mobile games again it feels like I always run into having to pay to progress sooner or later. It’s most definitely nothing like the golden ages back around 2010.

    • owenfromcanada@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Mobile gaming is like dumpster diving–there are a handful of good ones among the utter trash.

      One of the good ones I found is Exiled Kingdoms–it’s an homage to 90’s RPGs, and it’s good on mobile.

    • Zagorath@aussie.zoneOP
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      2 months ago

      This kind of stuff? None. It’s shockingly bad.

      But a real Age of Empires game? Hells yes. This was announced not long after the AoE2 and AoE4 ports to console & controller had shown to be successful (at least critically—no idea how they’re doing commercially). So I thought that they had cracked a way to do satisfying RTS gameplay on a mobile device. It’d be great to be able to play a quick Skirmish on the bus, or while spending time away from home without my computer.

      So when a few aoe creators showed previews of the game back in February this year, I was rather surprised and very disappointed to see that the game has absolutely zero resemblance to an Age game. That the worst fears of it being a shitty rip-off were completely true. Thanks to those previews, I was not surprised on release this week—though the extent of just how bad even the narrative side of this is was still overwhelming.

    • Coelacanth@feddit.nu
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      2 months ago

      I mean, if I could run Civ V on my phone I’d play the shit out of that. Though that’s turn based I suppose.

      • hardcoreufo@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Check out unciv. It’s an open source remake of civ v with simplified graphics.

        Don’t blame me if this ruins your life.

  • Zagorath@aussie.zoneOP
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    2 months ago

    It is genuinely hard to describe just how bad this is. I did the best job I could of my own review over on the official Age of Empires forums. Its worst sin is probably the simple fact that it barely even feels like a game where you make choices. You just click what it tells you to do.

    It’s telling that they don’t have an official subforum for this game, although there is one for AoE1, 2, 3, and 4, and Age of Mythology.

    • ConHoliousDonFrankle@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      That was a really good review. I only know about this game because my xbox advertised it, and I assumed it was some new xbox game. It’s sad to see mobile ads on my xbox as 95% of the games are trash.

    • Albbi@lemmy.ca
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      2 months ago

      I got a good chucke of of the minireview review for it.

      Age of Empires Mobile is a fantastic real-time strategy game… oh, wait. Scrap that. This mobile version of the beloved RTS franchise has nothing to do with the original PC games. The gameplay is different, and the monetization is extremely pay-to-win. Unfortunately.

      Didn’t know it was also a Tencent production. Eww

      • Zagorath@aussie.zoneOP
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        2 months ago

        I had a read over the rest of that review. Damn it was a good read. And sadly very, painfully accurate to my experience.

  • CosmoNova@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    They already ruined it with the first F2P AoE about a decade ago or so, so I really don’t care.

  • Cmor@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Are we pretending that Age of Empires Online never existed?

    • Zagorath@aussie.zoneOP
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      2 months ago

      I don’t think so, why? I only played it very briefly, but I thought it had a small but happy fanbase still playing on third-party servers.

      • Cmor@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        I played at release and haven’t followed it since then. At the time, I remember it being highly criticized and not popular with the community. It has been over a decade, and I could be misremembering.

        • Zagorath@aussie.zoneOP
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          2 months ago

          Yeah I’m not really sure either. I get the sense that either it got better over its lifetime or over time people came around to it à la the Star Wars prequels. But I don’t really remember it. I played it a little early in its life but don’t remember anything about it.