Age of Empires 2: The Age of Kings retrospective – The millennial medieval masterwork proves that there's more to RTS than killing and destruction

Realtime strategy games the dizzying pace of professional StarCraft or stumble into the arcane lore of Total War: Warhammer and you might get the impression that the entire genre is comprised of systems-driven time sinks, where it takes hours of research on a community wiki to even understand how the menus work.

With its straightforward, pared-down mechanics, Age Of Empires 2 is a sharp contrast to that uninviting stereotype. There are only four resources (wood, gold, food and stone) and the research tree, such as it can be called, consists wholly of material upgrades for your military and agriculture. If you want to increase the productivity of your empire in one of the other best RTS games, you might need to fine-tune your citizens' wages or cultivate and implement a new form of government. In Age Of Empires 2, you must build a wheelbarrow.

But despite its simplistic central design, no two matches or missions are ever the same, and the scope for experimenting with different strategies is boundless. Stronghold and Medieval: Total War may seem like Age Of Empires II's nearest mechanical relatives, but it perhaps has more in common with Portal or the original version of Resident Evil 4, games that give you only limited tools (blue and orange portal; gun, knife, and grenade) and challenge you to adapt their uses to ever- more-complex scenarios. It takes maybe ten minutes to learn how to play Age Of Empires 2, but given how each mission introduces new premises and twists – you know exactly how to build a successful town, but now you have to do it on a map with no lumber, while fending off waves of enemy cavalry – it still feels deep and unpredictable, even for those who have been on board since 1999.

This all hints at the secret of the game's longevity. Now 27 years old, it has stayed alive partly owing to expansion packs, an HD remaster in 2013, and 2019's Definitive Edition. But its enduring popularity (averaging around 28,000 concurrent Steam users per day, Age Of Empires 2 still has more players on Valve's platform than the Definitive Editions of Age Of Empires 3 and 4 combined) is largely the product of its visual design, its soundtrack, and how Ensemble Studios blends historical fact with high drama in the superbly written campaigns. Compared to some of its RTS contemporaries, the true beauty of Age Of Empires 2 lies in everything outside of the core mechanics.

Strategy Refined

More so than in the late '90s, we now have an accepted genre of 'cosy games', games that let you feel peaceful and at ease, or have the same inviting effect on your imagination as indulging in hobbies or crafts. While training an army and viciously pillaging the lands of rival nations is the ostensible 'point' of Age Of Empires 2, aesthetically and in practice it becomes more like a model or diorama builder, an exercise in 'cosy' creativity. Given the fastidious level of detail in the units and buildings, and the natural splendour of the mission maps, with their forests, rivers and sweeping, snow-covered plains, one of the greatest pleasures in Age Of Empires II comes from ignoring the objectives you've been set and instead pouring your resources into designing idyllic medieval towns.

Once you've raised a monastery, a fishing village and a row of houses, the game starts to feel more like a hybrid of strategy game and city builder, a tangential link between the all-out brutality of Warcraft and Command & Conquer and the pastoral harmony of Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing. You can sit and admire your individual villagers going diligently about their work, listening at the same time to the pleasing, rhythmic chop-chop sound of axes in the forest. War is inevitable, but the world of Age Of Empires 2, teeming with wild animals and natural wonders, gives you something to explore and indulge in beyond bloodshed.

That sense of scale and grandeur – the feeling that you're laying the municipal and cultural foundations of human history, not just tearing it all down – is accentuated by Stephen Rippy's score, particularly tracks such as Shamburger and T Station (strange, non-sequitur song titles are one of the composer's trademarks). Using contemporary medieval instruments and slow, emergent melodies, Rippy's music adds mystique and gravity to even minor accomplishments, the launching of a new fishing boat accompanied by the hopeful lilt of a wooden flute, the slow unveiling of an impassable cliff face given dark foreboding by thudding tribal drums.

The broader sound design, meanwhile – the dozens of different noises that variously signify the recruitment of a fresh soldier, the beginning of a major battle, or the arrival of a new villager ("hee-haa") – serves a thematic purpose as much as a practical one, helping to create the sense that these seemingly disparate moments in your empire's history are actually all parts of a single grand composition. As you train more knights, sow more crops and crush more enemies, you create an unusual kind of music in turn, the different chimes pops and alerts merging into a literal rhythm of progress.

Between the missions, Age Of Empires 2 offers a different perspective on history, one that switches from a broad- scale view of nations and regimes to a closer focus on the experiences of individual people. Attila's campaign, for example, is narrated by a Frankish monk, traumatised from witnessing the brutal battle tactics of the Huns. The history of Saladin and the Saracen empire is recounted by a nameless Norman knight, who becomes lost in the Egyptian desert while fighting the Crusades.

Ensemble goes to great lengths to preserve and present factual minutiae – take the third mission in the Joan Of Arc story, where you come up against three British strongholds, recreations of the castles oJargeau, Meung-sur-Loire and Beaugency that were captured by the French during the 1429 Loire campaign. But this scrupulous attention to historical fact is balanced by rousing voice performances, and cutscenes that evoke the melodrama of national myths and legends. "A blue wolf took as his spouse a fallow doe," goes the opening line to the Genghis Khan campaign. "They settled at the head of the Onon River to raise their offspring. And there were born the Mongols." You can pick up a lot of knowledge from playing Age Of Empires II, but it's wrapped up in big, bold tales of adventure.

Almost three decades since the game was released, however, its most striking aspect is its violence; the tragedy and brutality that run through every mission. RTS games always involve killing thousands of enemy troops and civilians, and sacrificing thousands of your own in the process, but when so much of your time here is spent nurturing your nascent townships and carefully organising your armies and villagers, the death and destruction hit that much harder. The first hour of a campaign mission might be spent arranging your knights into divisions, assigning each battle group a complement of monks and repair workers to support them on their expedition.

One misjudged offensive later, all that remains of that lovingly fostered band of brothers are their skeletons, and the skeletons of their horses, which you have to watch sink gradually into the blood-soaked soil. And when you successfully ambush an enemy battalion or invade a rival city, the effect is reversed: CPU opponents will often insist on fighting to the last unarmed citizen, forcing you to wipe entire cities off the map if you want to win the game. The savagery of a victory becomes just as hard to reconcile as the bitterness of a defeat.

Face the consequences

You also have to face the consequences of destroying the environment. At the beginning of each mission, the map is bristling with green, virgin forests. By the time you've finished building your barracks, your archery ranges and your sorties of trebuchets, however, the world around you is reduced to yellowing waste ground, pockmarked by dead stumps. If you overwork a patch of farmland, you'll hear the sound of sand falling from between a person's fingers, signalling that the once- fertile soil has been ploughed into dust.

Tear down a rival nation's wonder – a great cathedral or marble temple – and you'll hear the sound of a lightning bolt, implying a terrible act of devastation that will echo through the epochs. Considering it belongs to a genre that normally encourages total annihilation, this more layered illustration of violence, against both people and the world, is another reason Age Of Empires 2 still stands as a wonder itself.

Barring remasters, rereleases, and some middle-budget efforts that appeal to nostalgia, RTS games still seem to be out of favour in 2026. Their fall from prominence, relative to their '90s heyday, is perhaps partly the result of drilling too far into their niche appeal, the realtime strategy canon becoming increasingly dense and systems-driven until nobody but die-hard devotees could keep up. In the context of that shift, even though it's pushing 30 – a crumbly age within the world of video games – Age of Empires 2 feels modern, its accessibility and its mix of tines, timbres, and styles of play suggesting that, far from a relic of the past, the RTS genre still has swathes of uncharted territory waiting to be discovered.

This article originally appeared in issue 422 of Edge Magazine. For more just like this, consider subscribing to get the full mag delivered to your door every month.