The game if you'd never played an AOE previously would be considered very good. However as a long standing player of the series it gets a couple of things quite "wrong" so to speak. The cinematics are great in the cutscenes and storytelling narrative good. Gameplay wise it's ok, the new functions for selecting groups is helpful however the flashy animations are often too much for multiplayer play and there's items missing like visible waypoints where you've sent troops. Story mode is playable, but for online multiplayer the 20 year old AOE 2 still comes out on top for speed and simplicity of the animations and micromanaging troops. The placing of building is about 50/50 where again there's nice aspects but lacking aspects which make it cleaner for the user.