Age of Mythology Retold review – a great remake of a classic RTS

If Age of Empires feels at least a little classy, like the kind of game you could show to your history buff dad, Age of Mythology is the pulp novel equivalent. It’s trashy and bombastic like a schoolyard conversation about whether Goku would beat Superman. Now you can find out whether Zeus would best Thor in a fight (or at least which of their proxy armies). Age of Mythology: Retold is the latest in a line of AoE re-releases and the most expansive to date. If you have a head for turn-of-the-century RTS design and can get behind its frivolous tone, Retold is as fine as any RTS remake out there.

Despite my previous musings, I wouldn’t say that Age of Mythology: Retold is brainless; it’s actually quite clever. You’ll be familiar with the basics if you’ve played any real-time strategy game from this era. You control a set of villagers who gather resources like gold, wood, and food and carry them to stockpile buildings. You also control an army (and a navy, depending on the map) which you expand by building barracks and temples to train them. The game operates with a kind of rock-paper-scissors formulation, with infantry, siege, calvary, and myth units (i.e. magical creatures like Sphinxes, Giants, and Minotaurs) having varying effectiveness against each other. You build up your base, and your army, expand into a robust economy, and attempt to destroy your opponents.

I wouldn’t say Age of Mythology reaches the highs of its more realistic twin or Warcraft/Starcraft in their heyday, but it holds its own. Every faction offers possibility spaces and inconveniences; that friction is the source of the game’s delight. The Greeks are the most standard faction, with robust defensive options and less specialized military units. Egyptians get a Pharaoh unit that boosts buildings to increase production. Norse are mobile and aggressive. They obtain favor, which lets you build myth units and use god powers, by killing enemies and animals, carrying their stockpiles on ox-driven carts that you can move anywhere, while their ground troops erect buildings. The Atlanteans don’t build stockpiles and their gatherers are fast, but, in turn, it takes a while to train them. You can transform some Atlantean units into a hero, but that also takes time. In short, each faction requires you to think differently, whether you’re playing as or against them.

There’s also a lot of variance within each faction. To start a match, you choose a principal god to worship, which sets off a tech tree of choices. At the beginning of each new age, you choose another god to patronize, getting their power and special unit. This creates an interesting cat-and-mouse game if you know the tech trees. Predicting where enemies will place their research and trying to level up your civ to counter their choices is the kind of thrill RTS legend is made of.

Retold comprehensively compiles features from the original game’s five campaigns: the original three Greek, Egyptian, and Norse campaigns of the base game and the Atlantean expansion, as well as the bonus Norse campaign, The Golden Gift. The game has two upcoming expansions, which cost extra, and a new mode coming in a free patch after launch. Online multiplayer is supported and there are numerous options for customizing each match, whether you’re battling AI or human opponents. Built-in mod support and a map builder are also here. Like every Age of Empire re-release of the past few years, you could spend epochs playing this game if you wanted to.

If you’re new to Age of Mythology, it’s probably best to start with the single-player stories. The campaigns mostly serve as an excuse to funnel you through maps and missions and teach you the ropes of each civilization, so there’s not much there for anyone who doesn’t plan to graduate to multiplayer. Nevertheless, it’s charming in the way bad fanfiction can be. The protagonist Arkantos is a ‘ultra-cool’ OC, an Atlantean demigod who accompanies Odysseus in the Trojan horse, and travels to Egypt and Scandinavia on a mythical quest. It’s all quite silly but fortunately never self-serious. Cutscenes also never outstay their welcome.

As for the remake, Retold is a faithful recreation that overhauls the original’s graphics from the ground up while retaining their blocky quality. Cutscenes swoop and dive in a manner familiar to any RTS from this period. Perhaps appropriately, the game looks its best when it’s violent. Buildings convincingly burn and crumble, infantry flail and fly in the air after heavy attacks, and god powers feel mighty and magical. Even if you were to play this as a ‘build a big army and roll in’ game, this might be one of the best, simply for how fun it is to look at. That aesthetic enjoyment is boosted by the redone UI, which is unambiguously cleaner and brighter. However, the game’s art does suffer a little. The original had a painterly quality, if a little blurred and faded, almost like a fresco on the wall of Pompeii. Retold has epic, digital art. Overly detailed and lavish, it is at once generic and overblown. Nevertheless, that art does little to distract from the game’s colorful bombast.

Its quality-of-life additions are more mixed, if not in concept than in execution. Like most RTS games of its era, AoM revolves around placing workers to gather resources to build your army. To some degree, this is tedious busy work and perhaps is the easy answer for the genre’s decline over the last two decades. In Retold, you can automate your workers, letting the computer assign them to specific tasks. You can select from a variety of presets based on your strategy. In theory, it’s a nice resource for new players or anyone who can’t be bothered.

However, the auto-placement is… brainless. Gatherers will go to the nearest source of any given resource, with no mind as to what gathering places are closest or whether you’ve built a stockpile. This results in villagers traveling across the map to get wood or hunting far afield of the village center. Therefore, using presets still requires a fair amount of hands-on engagement. It can also be harder to notice when your villagers have gotten off track, because the automation ensures that each worker is busy, preventing the idle pop-up icon from appearing. I decided it would be easier to do everything manually after a while. Similarly, you can toggle exploring units to ‘autoscout,’ letting them chart a course around the map without your direct input. However, it can be easy to forget that someone is scouting, and the Atlantean scouts require a more hands-on approach.

These additions are designed to help new players get a handle on things, but they instead emphasize the centrality of those inconveniences to the game’s design. If you want to play Age of Mythology, you have to play Age of Mythology. There are no shortcuts. While AoM can be fiddly, most of its strategic choices and exciting tactics come from that fiddliness. While one could debate whether a remake like this is needed, Retold is faithful where it counts, updating the UI and aesthetic while leaving most of its idiosyncrasies well enough alone.