The game does a good job of preserving the task of having to build up a base and establish an economy, but without miring you down in micromanagement. Then, when you choose to call it a day, your allies or opponents do the same, and so it goes until either you win or you lose. During your turn, you can move all your units, engage in battles, build structures, and conduct research. You'll be looking at a map from an isometric perspective on the bottom screen, while the top screen shows you detailed information about different terrain, buildings, and unit types. The game initially looks like Age of Empires II, and even though it's turn-based, a lot of tried-and-true real-time strategy conventions carry over. The five big campaigns do a good job of staying focused on interesting historical characters, while putting you through some big, tough battles. In case it isn't already clear, there's a lot of stuff to play in here. What's more, as you finish campaign missions, you earn points with which you can unlock some new units and a bunch of new maps. Multiple AI personalities and difficulty settings are available as well. The multiplayer options are nice to have, but thankfully the computer artificial intelligence puts up a solid fight. Because this is a turn-based game, it's actually pretty convenient to pass the DS from one player to the next between turns. Multiplayer supports local wireless play if you've got friends with their own copies of the game, though luckily, there's a pass-and-play option as well. Skirmish matches can include up to four human or computer-controlled players, and there's a wide selection of maps to choose from (though there's no option to make your own maps). The campaigns could easily last you more than 20 hours, and at that point, you've still got skirmish matches and multiplayer battles to explore. You can play the campaigns in any order, though they're successively more difficult, and you must play through the missions themselves linearly. More importantly, the campaign missions are generally diverse and interesting, challenging you to make some tough decisions, tempting you with optional objectives, and surprising you with occasional twists. The stories mostly unfold between missions, but they're well written and engaging, so you might just come away from this game eager to learn more about these great tacticians. The game does a great job of infusing these campaigns with storylines based around the trials and tribulations of some of history's greatest military heroes: Joan of Arc, Yoshitsune Minamoto, Genghis Khan, Saladin, and Richard the Lionheart. Each faction gets its own single-player campaign spanning five or six missions (big missions in most cases). That's fewer than you might expect if you're familiar with Age of Empires II, but you'll appreciate having the ability to recruit unique mercenary units from other civilizations, such as Persian war elephants, Viking berserkers, or rifle-wielding Turkish janissaries. The game features five different playable factions: The Franks, the Japanese, the Mongols, the Saracens, and the Britons. Last year's long-awaited Age of Empires III took the series into the colonial era, but this game takes the conquest back to the medieval ages, where armies lived and died primarily by the sword. Age of Empires for the DS is a winning combination of the depth and content of Age of Empires II and the slick turn-based design of Advance Wars. There are a few relatively minor issues with Age of Empires for the DS, but for the most part, this is a fun, deep, and addictive strategy game that packs in a good history lesson to boot. Yet almost all of the elements that made the original version of Age of Empires II so great are still here, despite such a fundamental change to the gameplay. Specifically, this is a turn-based strategy game that plays much more like Advance Wars than like previous Age of Empires games, which force you to be very quick with the mouse and keyboard in order to succeed. Age of Empires for the Nintendo DS shares its name with the popular and long-running PC real-time strategy game series, but it's been completely redesigned to play well on a portable system.
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