I have mixed feelings about AOE 1 DE. On the one hand, it absolutely looks like you might have wanted it to in your mind's eye 25 years ago when Age of Empires came out, with a (small) number of tweaks to QOL (I think the reseed farms button is new) while still being mostly faithful to the old game. It includes all of the original game, Rise of Rome, and two reworked campaigns from the demo, and all the associated civs for online and comp-stomp play, giving it a fair bit of meat for your money. I got to see a lot of stuff I'd never seen before, experience a lot of stuff I'd never experienced before. Some of the missions here are a ton of fun. (Turning Archimedes' fabled sunlight reflectors defending Syracuse into laser towers for the sake of a video game was inspired.) On the other...it is indeed faithful to the old game, kind of to a fault.

The missions here have been tweaked, remixed, and occasionally rearranged or replaced, but you still have to contend with the limitations of 1997: a low population cap, wonky AI (despite admirable efforts), and a general lack of strategic options compared to AOE 2. This results in the difficulty curve being all over the shop irrespective of which order you play campaigns or missions: one of the hardest missions in the entire game is the first Hittite scenario, which the tutorial campaign subtly points you toward at its conclusion, while the very last Rise of Rome mission chronologically (The Coming of the Huns, here remade to resemble the Catalaunian Fields scenario from AOE 2) becomes piss-easy after dealing with the early Wonder rush.

It's a fun piece of gaming history, and clearly since I saw it through to completion so I didn't *dislike* it. It's just frustrating sometimes when the old mechanics wind up not quite holding up the way your nostalgic brain wants them to.