The new Age of Empires 4 mainly harks back to the second part of the franchise because that game was actually the ultimate version for most gamers (and the development team). That is not to say that part 3 is ignored. AoE4 takes over the Age-up system from Part 3. This requires players to make tactical choices as the civilization enters a new phase.

there are new civilizations. One of them is the Delhi Sultanate, based in India. As a player you get access to combat elephants that can demolish entire buildings as tanks. The Chinese civilization and the Mongols are also shown. The latter have the extra ‘strength’ that they can pick up and move their cities. After all, they are nomads. In total, Age of Empires 4 has eight civilizations at launch.

Much of the presentation features the new story missions. There are four historical campaigns. The Norman Campaign is shown of this. These missions follow the battle between the Normans, French and English for several generations. Historical figures act as ‘hero units’ in these battles. Hero units do not appear in the multiplayer battles, by the way. They are designed purely for the story missions.

Between fights, the player sees a documentary that explains the history of the various battles and events. According to the makers, this documentary is historically correct. Film images of the current landscape are used with animations projected over them, in order to bring the historical events more to life. In total there is about three hours of documentary material in the game, spread over the various campaigns.

Furthermore, the makers are particularly proud of the historical details in the game. Thus, the language spoken by the people in your civilization changes through the ages, for example from old English to slightly more modern English. But this also applies to other languages ​​such as Chinese.

As the presentation only showed images and no hands-on time with the game was, we wait and see how it all plays out. In any case, it looks like Age of Empires in a slightly more modern guise. In any case, the images of the multiplayer battles look interesting, such as the moment when a Delhi fighting elephant demolishes an English church. Whether all this is so historically justified is not so important. More importantly, in AoE you can apparently demolish a church with an elephant.

Age of Empires 4 will be released in the fall of 2021 for Windows 10 on Steam and Also included in Xbox Game Pass for PC.