Century after century, fierce and explosive battles have raged on simply to determine one thing; who has the strongest and most feared empire.  When Age of Empires was first released in 1997, It gave early PC gamers a taste of what it was like to command their own empire. Players could conquer lands, make peace with opposing players, or make all the wrong decisions and watch helplessly as their empire is overrun.   Age of Empires set the bar for future real-time strategy(RTS) games.

This late 90’s masterpiece published by Microsoft was and still is a very fun game to play,  despite the graphics being quite out-dated, the gameplay is still relatively smooth from a technical standpoint but its commercial success is mostly credited to its game design.  Unlike many RTS games before Age of Empires, the campaign mode follows a historically accurate time line.  In the first installment of the series, players are put in command of their own group early settlers from various ancient including the Egyptian, Greek, Babylonian, and Yamato empires.  Once tending to the basic necessities of survival players can decide whether to take up arms against other empires or try and maintain peace. However, while the single player game play in Age of Empires is very well designed and fun to play, The other half of its success has nothing to do with its single player campaign.

While the single player is a blast to play,  this game also happens to feature a multiplayer mode that effectively multiplies its entertainment value by the number friends playing against each other.  Strategizing and battling against friends is one of the most satisfying features of this game.  For many years the entertainment this game had to offer only came to those who owned a hard copy disk of the game.  However, this game has recently made a return  through its recent appearance on the Steam Store and has been redone in an HD format.  In a world of RTS games today, this one still stands out from the rest.