It’s been 22 years since the original release of Age of Mythology and now it’s coming back with some great new additions but still being the same game we all came to love. Age of Mythology: Retold is a reimagining and brings all the original game’s unique gameplay and storied mythos to current-day RTS standards. The game launches on the 4th of September and will be available on day one on Xbox Game Pass or you can purchase the game on a console or PC.

Once you have finished the little tutorial you will be pushed into the campaign mode or if you are more of a skirmish quick game type person that is also an option. There are four different pantheons you can choose from which are Greek, Egyptian, Norse, and Atlantean. I’m a huge lover of Greek mythology and also Norse so that was a no-brainer for me.

These are the same ones in the original game but have been remade for this title. Dependent on the pantheon you choose is the background of the game mode, so for instance, if you choose Greek you can summon Zeus’s lightning bolt, or if you go down the Norse root you could be a complete badass and summon Níðhöggr the Norse dragon.

There is no need to wait for the perfect time anymore to unleash the power of the GOD on your enemies, unlike the original these powers can and will recharge so you can hit them more than once, which is a great addition as before you needed to wait for the perfect timing or sometimes come unstuck by using the power too early.

You can also unlock the new “Wonder Age” and build your wonder up and make the GOD’s powers cheaper so you can smash that as much as you want. Something about smoking people with Zeus’s bolt is satisfying, to say the least.

I mentioned earlier there is a main campaign that is broken down into 3 campaigns if you want something a little more objective. It has 50 mission scenarios so you can spend hours doing that if desired. The player’s favourite skirmishes have come back with different modes like PVE, PVP, MP, and Co-op, or if you are a little better than me you can jump into ranked but those people are hectic. If you are a part of the modding community don’t be worried, mods will be supported in the title so I’m keen to see the creative juices that flow from people.

You will notice the civilians being different in this title from the original as their system has been reworked. The system is called the “Villager Priority System” which adds more automation to stop the players from needing to make sure they’re working all the time. It’s a little like the previous system but more refined and the villagers will use their heads instead of standing there scratching their bums.

I’m going to be interested to see how this game plays on the Xbox once it releases, as I’ve always played these styles of games on keyboard and mouse and I rely on hotkeys and clicking a lot to navigate to do what I need to. If you have never touched one of these games before I would recommend doing the tutorial which will walk through a lot of the key fundamentals of the title.

The game becomes quicker once you start using the hotkeys for things. You can remap keybinds if you like playing RTS games in a particular way, but I felt like the controls are exactly where they need to be, which was super helpful because that is how I’m used to playing RTS games. The only thing I remapped was a couple of controls to the two side buttons on my mouse to make things slightly quicker.

I’ve always loved the backing tracks in these titles which sound like their specific era. While you are chilling and building you have this nice calm tranquil music, and you know it’s about to go down when the music turns more into something you would expect from a war with the loud drums and faster pace that gets the blood pumping.

The part that let it down for me was the narration and voice dialogue which all sounded like it was AI generated. It had this super robotic sound which made me want to pump through the tutorial even quicker so I didn’t need to listen to a robotic version of Athena. I can understand that voice dialogue is not a huge factor in this game but it’s still a factor, and it would have been nice to hear someone talking and not sound like it was forced or robotic.

I turned the music down a little with all the other noises in the game from the environment to clicking on troops a little much so once I had adjusted the audio levels it was quite an enjoyable experience.

I was a little disappointed by the graphics in this title; they felt and looked super outdated. The graphics have been overhauled to an extent with this new title and do look good, but still felt a little lacklustre and I feel like a little bit more time could have gone into making everything look a little crisper and finished. The user interface was this brown colour and looked pixelated and not finished, and inside those boxes were smaller boxes where you had to hover over them half the time to see what they were as the pictures inside them were not accurately depicting what was inside them.

I almost dread to say this but the UI side of things does not look much different to the original title in 2002, apart from maybe some upgrade so it’s not so pixelated and a change of colour in the menu. This retold edition does look better than the original which I will grant them. I did like the work they put into the environments as each environment felt truly different to the others. Things like using GOD’s powers didn’t feel like some generic image anymore either. There were animations put into them and how they were animated brought the game more alive than what we saw in the original.

Age of Mythology is one of those games you can get lost in for hours upon hours, building from the ground up and becoming a force to be reckoned with. If you played the original version you will love the retold edition. Who knows we might see each other on the battlefield somewhere.

Written by: Hayden Nelson