I decided to play this genre defining game as an RTS fan that grew up playing other titles like Company of Heroes, Stronghold Crusader, and even a bit of C&C: Generals, so I'm not really unfamiliar to the "old" UI and gameplay style of these games, and naturally I didn't expect advanced AI or very detailed and clean faction designs, etc. But even so, this was quite underwhelming, especially for a "definitive edition". I explain why

I don't know what the original was like, but I know damn well what this should've looked like. When you call a game "Definitive edition" it should mean that it's worked on to be better in terms of graphics and texture, AI, UI, performance and everything in between to be suited for both the OG players and new players that want to try the game for the first time. Of the 4 main factors I mentioned, This game has passed in only one of them and that is Graphics and textures. I must admit that they remastered it very well while maintaining the originality. The other factors however are a total disaster (excluding the UI because it's decent enough)

The AI of the game is the worst I've seen in any RTS game. It's so bad it becomes funny sometimes. The original game has every right to be like this due to the technology back then, but this definitive edition was released in 2019. No OG player or new player wants that terrible AI back. This is like the most important thing when you're remastering a relatively old game, ESPECIALLY an RTS game. After graphics and texture of course.

The performance is no good either. At first I was so hyped to see the 250 max population size. We don't even have that in AoE4. Though after playing for a while, these constant stutters came haunting me. It got to a point that I was getting maybe 3FPS. For some reason I sometimes experienced some stutter in even the campaigns with a lot less troops too, and before you call this a specs problem, I've never had this big of a stutter problem in any game EVER. Look at my profile and see the games I'm talking about.

I'm quite disappointed that this game isn't as good as I hoped it would since I really liked it at first and wanted to try all the different factions and troops, but the excitement faded away more and more whenever I encountered a bug or AI bs or performance problem, but I'm happy that I at least tried it for myself.
You can do the same too, but I recommend it ONLY on sale. It's really not worth the full price based on what I explained.

4/10

its a nice and simple real time strategy game perrfect for beginners! yes it has flaws, but its still a very good game to get into real time strategy/strategy games on computer its easy to pick up hard to master. like all games more games should be. but im a nerd so maybe im just better at understanding this then others (not bragging by the way) so i recommend you play this game and also its sequel age of empires 2 definitive edition.