Age of Mythology Retold Is Like A Warm Hug

October 2, 2024

Written by Jamie Galea

As someone who was a dyed in the wool Age of Empires fan when those games were new, I never did get around to Age of Mythology in its time. It wasn’t due to the wildly different theme compared to AoE or its sequel, nor could I fault a lack of access to it, I just genuinely never got around to it. It also didn’t help that Warcraft 3 came out a month beforehand and established a slew of new norms for the genre, in addition to helping to create a few more, and I found that more interesting. Which is why the recent release of Age of Mythology: Retold fascinated me – it’s both the easiest way to get into the game, but it’s how you would remember it, except with a few handy tweaks and updates.

Retold exists in a weird place where while it’s the last of the pre-Age of Empires IV games to get a new version, it’s also the last to have an already existing and perfectly competent version that’s still available for purchase. In 2014, following the success of their Age of Empires II rerelease, Microsoft released Age of Mythology: Extended Edition, which updated the game with all the existing content and expansions, now with the added benefit of higher resolutions and being available digitally. All that, and it made the game’s multiplayer easier than ever to dive into.

As for what Retold specifically offers, the most obvious is a graphical touchup to make it feel more modern, but that only scratches the surface. There’s a greater attempt to make the game easier to get into, via additional difficulty settings and the usual suite of accessibility options, all in the name of making the game more parsable to players. It’s handy, but for reasons we’ll get into later, it’s one of the ways this release misses the mark. For returning players, there’s quite a few tweaks and additions to the general gameplay that’ll change up how you play.

For starters, the games god powers – where you pledge to a pantheon to receive boons and abilities, now run on cooldowns as opposed to being single use. You can also set up resource priorities for new villagers, where you can automate what resources villagers should seek out. It’s very useful if you’re not used to quickly setting up villagers manually, but it does mean that you’ll need to remember that any idle villager will go after a resource unless you futz with the automation. It can be a tad annoying, but once you’re aware of it, you can adapt easily enough.

Arguably one of the biggest additions is the inclusion of controller support, which does wonders in expanding the audience. Not only does this mean there’s an Xbox release, but this makes it easier for handheld gaming computers like the Steam Deck & ROG Ally to better play the game portably. Truthfully I haven’t played with the new controls – I’m far too used to keyboard and mouse controls for RTS on a PC that unless the game is designed specifically for console play, it never ends up feeling “right” to me, but I appreciate the addition. Any attempt to expand the user base of any given game and to give more people a chance to play it is alright by me. There’s also crossplay across every version of the game now, so no matter how you play, you won’t be short of people to match up against.

Playing it now in 2024, I appreciate that developers Worlds Edge & Forgotten Empires have kept the game more or less intact. While the game does look nicer, the models haven’t fundamentally changed, nor have the story cutscenes or voice acting or anything to go with it. For better or worse, it’s the same game you could’ve played in 2002 or 2014, and there’s something about that really works for me.

Mythology was original developer Ensemble Studios first 3D RTS, and it shows how much it still feels like Age of Empires II, except now there’s polygons instead of sprites. You can’t rotate the camera, only zoom in. The menus and keyboard shortcuts feel identical to what you could expect in AoE 2. There’s no option to speed the game up at all, and it never quite feels fast enough for my liking. The map maker has barely been touched up at all in the last twenty years.

None of this has really been altered, and I’m of two minds about it. While I’m happy it’s kept mostly identical, and there’s a real charm to it, I think there’s other elements that could’ve been improved. A big one is the tutorial, which feels too thin in explaining how you play. Compared to other games in its genre, let alone the series, it’s not great. If you’ve never really touched an RTS game before, one way to learn some of the finers is to go through the campaign, and even then, it doesn’t really function as a tutorial there either. I get why they didn’t change it, but it feels like a bit of a blindspot. 

Yet one thing that didn’t change at all, and that I absolutely adore, is that this version of the game still lets you use all the old cheat codes that existed back in 2002 with zero punishment. 

Cheat Codes are something that have all but been eradicated in modern gaming, and any game that still employs them will often disable achievements or turn off saving. Age of Mythology didn’t care back in the day, and Retold certainly doesn’t care now. There’s always something about the intensely goofy yet overpowered units Ensemble would throw behind cheat codes that’s just delightful. 

Probably the thing that really works for me is that both versions of Age of Mythology still exist in tandem. The new version is nice and has a bunch of upgrades and useful things, but the original re-release still exists as a separate purchase you can still make on Steam. It’s the opposite to how Blizzard treated Warcraft III, which upgraded existing versions of the classic game to Warcraft III Reforged, a product that launched in such an awful state that, while better now all these years later, isn’t quite all the way there. Unless you still have the original Warcraft III discs, all you have available is Reforged.

But that also leads into the most interesting and important question about this release – should you check out this new version if you already own the Extended Edition? I think there’s enough new additions and changes to make it worth a look, and with the addition of crossplay across all three platforms, there’s no shortage of people open for a game. It’s also reasonably priced too, which I think will really help.

The one caveat is that right now Extended Edition technically has more content. While both versions feature the original campaigns, civilizations and pantheons, the EE got a new Chinese Civilization and Gods as DLC, but these have been confirmed to be coming to Retold as part of its first major DLC drop. Given that there’s another DLC drop coming for Retold that could possibly be all new content, that might edge it out some.

If you’re like me and never played Age of Mythology back when it was contemporary, I think there’s a lot to appreciate about it with the Retold release. By keeping so much of the original game, but updating it just enough to not feel completely different, it creates a cool yet modern way to experience Age of Mythology. I feel there’s still work they could’ve done to make it a slightly more friendlier experience, but given everything else in the game, I can accept there’s only so much that could’ve been done.

Overall, it feels like a warm hug from an old friend, and you rarely get that with games these days.

For more takes about old video games, follow Jamie on social media @jamiemgalea