Age of Mythology: Retold review – A good myth never dies

The classic RTS returns fit for the new age

Microsoft

Praise the gods of nostalgia, for they’ve favored us once more with the return of an iconic RTS that goes beyond merely giving it a fresh coat of paint and tying some ribbons around it – Age of Mythology is getting the full-fledged remake treatment in Age of Mythology: Retold.

You can rib on Microsoft all you want for things like the failure of Redfall, the acquisition of Activision Blizzard, or its seemingly suicidal hardware strategy – for many old-school RTS fans, its treatment of the Age series over the last couple of years has been exceptional in a positive way and AoM: Retold continues this trend, learning from previous releases to upgrade the standard once more.

For the uninitiated: Age of Mythology originally came out in 2002 as a spin-off to the iconic Age of Empires series. Where AoE depicts historical campaigns and battles, AoM fully embraces gods, heroes, and the world of mythology while keeping the gameplay principles of the mainline games intact. You still task your villagers with gathering resources, build up a base and an army, and do battle against your opponents.

AoM: Retold offers larger battles than the original. / World's Edge / Microsoft

Each of the four factions available – Greeks, Egyptians, Norse, and Atlanteans – offer you the choice between several different major gods, so there’s still a lot of variety. Which major god to take is an important decision, for it determines your starting god power, first myth unit, and so on. This allows you to naturally veer into different playstyles.

Aside from regular human forces you can recruit monsters of myth, such as hydras, medusae, sphinxes, valkyries, fire giants, and so forth. You can also call upon the power of the gods in a more direct way, cursing your enemies’ lands with locust plagues, raining down lightning, and other divine punishments. All of these mythical units, godly powers, and technologies require Favor, which replaces Stone in the series’ traditional resource assortment – Food, Wood, and Gold remain in place.

Favor is interesting, because it’s one of the areas in which AoM: Retold’s different factions are designed asymmetrically. The Norse, for example, earn Favor by seeking battle and defeating enemy units, while the Egyptians can generate it passively by erecting monuments in their base – which is all very on-brand for these cultures and keeps the mechanic anchored in real history, in a way.

In a twist from the usual formula, AoM’s age advances not only unlock new tech and units, but allow you to choose between one of two minor gods to add to your pantheon on top of the major god your faction is based around. These provide an additional god power and myth unit, allowing you to make several interesting and important decisions per match (you’ll get to add three minor gods each game), adapting your strategy on the fly.

The Norse have received various adjustments to make them more fun to play. / World's Edge / Microsoft

Retold keeps that core gameplay intact, but is making big changes to some aspects. Originally, every god power was a one-time-use deal, which led to players not using them at all rather than wasting them at the wrong moment – a typical phenomenon. In Retold, you can use powers as often as you like, given you’ve amassed enough favor, as they’ve been made cooldown-based. It’s a large departure from the original, but definitely a change making the game more fun as well as challenging: You’ll get to press those “fun buttons” more often, but so does your opponent.

Its new engine also allows Retold to have a higher population cap than the original, which means that you can build larger armies than before – those make for more attractive targets for Zeus’ lightning bolts.

Aside from faithfully recreating old content, developer World’s Edge added units and features where necessary, such as for the notoriously fickle Norse faction, which offers an all-around better and less punishing experience now.

Age of Mythology: Retold once again makes strides in approachability and onboarding. There are plenty of tutorials and the game is very active about offering these. When you click on the first available Mythical Battle in the game, a standalone single-player scenario featuring the Norse, the game will politely ask if you’d like to make yourself familiar with the peculiarities of that faction’s gameplay first, for example.

The tech tree for all factions and gods is prominently featured in the main menu, so you can get into the nitty-gritty of it any time and learn more about your available options.

Mythical and human units once again fight side-by-side. / World's Edge / Microsoft

An even bigger win in terms of approachability is the fact that you can automate your economy to completely focus on producing units and fighting battles. This automation feature enables you to keep your economy balanced without too much involvement. Basically, you can tell the game which percentage of your villagers should harvest which resource and it will automate things accordingly. There are several presets for this (which are already balanced according to your faction’s needs in certain ages) and you can also create manual templates with custom ratios. While you still need to provide your villagers with farms, granaries, and storehouses near resources to keep things efficient, the fact that you don’t have to manually assign every worker to their job creates some breathing space for you, which can be used for more fun activities.

A lot of useful information is clearly displayed on the top of the screen – your resource and population counts as well as your divine powers can be found here, in addition to your control groups, quick-selectors for things like idle villagers, and current production going on at buildings. This frees up a lot of screen real estate in the bottom and center of the screen, where all the action and spectacle happens.

You can group several different production buildings into a single control group, which will then automatically assign new shortcuts to all the possible units you can build from them, allowing you to still produce reinforcements efficiently without going through all production buildings separately by their type – it’s like having one mega-production building for everything.

These are all great options for removing some of the entry barriers the RTS genre has – and that’s important for a game with so much spectacle going on. Playing AoM: Retold, you don’t want to focus on optimizing your worker count at this gold mine – you want to load up troops into this giant bird carrying a tent so you can paradrop them in the enemy’s worker line, and you want to see how your sacred crocodiles evaporate enemy formations with the laser beams shooting out of their maws. You want to aim that god ability that lets you summon Fenrir to hit as much of the enemy army as possible – especially when that enemy is your buddy and you want to have a good laugh at them afterward.

All that spectacle is supported by a vibrant color scheme, some great new unit models, and cool animations for things like burning buildings, crumbling walls, and all those juicy divine powers. It really feels great to be back in this world of myth and monsters with explosions everywhere, men getting thrown around by giants, and cries of “Prostagma!” heralding the courage of your troops.

With several campaigns (including the original story featuring everyone’s darling, Arkantos) and scenarios, skirmishes, and multiplayer, Age of Mythology: Retold is packed with content – and 30 bucks seems like a fair asking price for that package.

Age of Mythology: Retold truly teleports the RTS classic into the modern era: It’s the definitive way for fans of old to relive childhood memories and dive deep into the nostalgia of it all, but it’s ready to welcome a new audience thanks to its gold-standard approachability measures – a good myth may undergo changes along the way, but it never dies.

Score: 8/10

Platform tested: PC (Steam)