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Tencent's soulless Age of Empires Mobile cash-grab is here to ruin your childhood (www.androidpolice.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/games@lemmy.world
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[–] 37 points 2 years ago (5 children)

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.

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  • [–] 18 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years 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.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Balatro is on mobile now. It’s digital crack cocaine

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  • [–] [S] 5 points 2 years 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.

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    • [–] [S] 17 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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

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    • [–] 9 points 2 years ago

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

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    [–] 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Are we pretending that Age of Empires Online never existed?

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 2 years 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.

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    • [+] -7 points 2 years ago

    QQ moar

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