I got the game today
Some game store already sold it
I like the game so far, but its got its flaws, here's a short review from me:
Graphics: 9
Even on low settings it looks beautiful, especially sea battles look awesome with huge ships, not those thingy things from the previous age of series, and huge cannons, besides the water looks beautiful too. Shooting buildings looks good too, parts flying of it, and nearby enemies actually DO get damaged because of it. Trees dont look good though IMO
Gameplay: 8
Its still good, but its basically the same as all the previous age of empires, except for the addition of Home Cities, which I dont really like so far. I dont like not having to build drop sites anymore too, but I will get used to that.
Replay: 9
A large campaign, a lot of different random maps, scenario editor, online. IMO this kind of strategy games never get boring too.
AI: 7
Pathfinding still sucks, some of my cannons got stuck trying to walk through a house. The AI is pretty competitive though, which is good, and it isnt done by cheating as I heard (on AoE 2 on hardest the CPU would get quite a lot resources more)
Maps: 7
There are a lot of different ones, which vary quite a lot, but I get the feeling they all are a tad too small.
Sound: 7
Music is good, although it just looks like it is the same as AoE2, but then a bit altered. The voice acting is poor IMO. They really overdid accents, you start the campaign with one veeeeery annoying Scot, with a very stupid accents. The little messages when you give orders to units are annoying too. I know Dutch the best, and it sounds very weird. A woman saying ''Timmerman'' isnt actually good too. She isnt a man...
Other: 8
There are a lot of small features that makes this game fun, in one random map you could kill some wolves, who were trying to get some Indian in a tree. When you killed them, the indian would join you, these little things make it fun and more replayable. Sometimes these things can be annoying too. I was having a fight in the middle of some Indian village. As this village is one of those ''mother nature'' things, it didnt participate. And the indians were just sitting outside, smoking their pipes, doing their dances, while there was a fight going on at that exact same point.
And btw, they made the UI smaller, yay