Age of Empires Mobile surprised me with its creative single-player modes

I didn’t have that on my bingo card

TiMi Studios / Level Infinite / Microsoft

Bringing a beloved franchise from PC to mobile is a dicey affair. “Don’t you guys have phones?” lives rent-free in everyone’s head as a testament to that. As such, reactions to Age of Empires Mobile being announced were predictably lukewarm, but one thing you can’t say about people over at TiMi Studios and Level Infinite – the developer and publisher of the mobile take on the IP – is that they aren’t trying their best to make this as authentic to the franchise as possible.

Looking at the miniature town on the phone’s screen at Gamescom 2024, I can’t help but see Age of Empires in it. It helps that the usual resource quartet – food, wood, stone, and gold – is displayed at its traditional place in the UI. Iconic civilizations like the Byzantines and the Franks are in the game, each with their own unique art style.

But Age of Empires Mobile isn’t about recreating Age of Empires, the RTS, on a new platform. It’s not a port. Age of Empires Mobile is its own thing and I’d compare it more to an old-school browser game like Tribal Wars mixed with elements from modern mobile titles.

I think it’s important to understand that this game isn’t primarily made for old fans of the brand – though Microsoft, Level Infinite, and TiMi certainly won’t shut the door on them. This is an expansion of the IP to a new platform and market with the hope that maybe one day the people playing the game on their phones will transition into buying games on PC.

“We know people have deep emotional attachments to their part of the franchise, so we hope players try it out at least,” a spokesperson tells me. “But we see this as an entry point to bring new players in, who might find RTS on PC – it has a steep learning curve – a little intimidating.”

There is a massive campaign map with cities and resource locations on which you can move around your armies. Buildings take days to build in real-time, as does the research of new tech – that’s also where typical mobile game money makers like time boosters come into play.

Particularly intriguing is the possibility of battles and sieges that pit entire alliances against one another. That’s an experience you can only get to a certain point in the PC games, as the devs rightly emphasize – in this way Age of Empires Mobile does bring something new to the table.

These alliance sieges feature the full panoply of an Age of Empires match: troops, ships, and siege weapons can all be produced and fielded.

Once a city’s gates are broken and defenders overcome, the attackers must coordinate to quickly take down any remaining resistance and focus on key buildings to conquer the place.

Armies in Age of Empires Mobile are led by heroes from history, who each have their own set of skills and bonuses. You can put up to three of these into a team and in charge of troops, so you are incentivized to find good combinations that synergize well with each other or counter some strengths of your opponent, if you have information on them.

The action and intrigue, or so the developers hope, will generate organic storylines like in titles such as EVE Online. 

The developers do want to offer plenty of content for people seeking a single-player experience as well, though – and here’s where TiMi caught me completely off guard. One of those modes, Battlefield Survivors, is a Vampire Survivors-esque bullet hell, which allows you to gather some resources to bring back to your castle and strengthen your empire with. Military Exercise is a testing ground of sorts, where you can try out heroes and units and experiment with them. 

Then there are Island Tactics, which is an auto-chess mode, and Lost Borderland, an extraction mode in which you take an army through an unknown battlefield, overcome wave after wave of foes, and get the option of retreating with your spoils or pressing onwards, risking it all for even more loot.

As someone with very little interest in multiplayer, I may simply check the game out for an AoE auto-chess or to try out that extraction-based horde mode, so I’ll call this a pretty good idea by TiMi.

Age of Empires Mobile is set to be available on iOS and Android on October 17, 2024. You can pre-register for the game to claim free rewards once it's out on the official website.