We all know the Age of Empires series; it opened a new world of strategy gaming for us before. Those days when Starcraft was the king of the hill, Microsoft Studios found a way to deliver a new type of RTS (Real Time Strategy) to the gaming arena. I found myself immersed to the RTS genre, because it’s one of those challenging games that I just can’t get enough of, Age of Empires is the second best RTS on my list. I just love medieval warfare compared to the more high-tech settings, the way Ensemble Studios (The first developer of AoE) created the different units you can command and that would be according to your civilization.

The most exciting thing about this game is its "Multiplayer Mode," I usually play with my friends and I dominated them most of the time. It's a race for tech  supremacy and you need to gather the needed resources for your civilization to move ahead of your opponent; more or less comparable to other RTS but what I like most from Age of Empires is the way they presented each civilization, there's no over-powered or underrated faction. Each faction has a special unit that is unique to that civilization alone, so its a matter of mastering the proper strategy for that particular faction. The only constraint on competitive game play back then is that it's only limited to LAN (Local Area Network), though you can play "Multiplayer" using the Internet but there's a lot of technical issues attributed to the type of Internet technology we have on those days.



Most gamers these days are longing for more competitive and diverse games, with the onset of "Online Role Playing Games" that became a standard market for most game developers, Microsoft Studios in particular had joined the bandwagon with its version of a hybrid RTS/Online RPG game - Age Of Empires Online. Though it may seem confusing at first, you will noticed that it's the same as any other online games out there; where you have a set of NPCs on your capital city and from these folks you will get your quests. Each quest has its own difficulty settings and as you gain more levels, the quests gets more difficult to accomplish. The highest level you can reach is level 40 and one thing I like most are the epic gears you can integrate with your army. It's not really your usual RTS but if you ask me, "Would this really work?" -  I think it's a perfect match!

Age Of Empire Online - Egyptian Capital City

Age of Empires Online is a free to play game with the option to buy the faction of your choice. Actually, there are only three civilizations at the moment, they are the Greek, Egyptians and Persians. If you buy a premium civilization then you can access epic gears for your army, rated PVP and other perks that is exclusive only for gamers who bought the premium civilization pack. Though it may seem another "Freemium" ploy by most FTP game publishers that plagued the internet, I say it's worth a try - especially if you want a breath of fresh air from the usual online RPG that we can find everywhere on the web.