It probably doesn't help either that because the campaigns cover such a timescale, the documentaries get condensed - and in the case of the Norman conquest one, presents a duly overfamiliar story to anyone who grew up in England. It wouldn't be fair to slam the game for any of this, though, and I will say in its favour that it's both a novel approach and done with very impressive production values. By no means bombastic, obnoxious, or patronising, it's still just a little too dramatised for my liking, while also not going full costume drama with it. It's a style of documentary that I personally never quite got on with. Even the narration is a pitch perfect earnest history voice. Rather than running through Joan of Arc's life with actors or fictionalising the Norman conquest, each campaign is presented exactly like a certain type of TV documentary, complete with footage of modern cities and landscapes superimposed with animated figures waging wars from long ago. Overall, narrative isn't exactly a central concern though. The usual RTS thing of removing more advanced units from earlier missions applies, and here lines up neatly with the eras and timescale - the Mongols don't have their mega-trebuchet until a few generations have passed in the story and it's actually been invented, for example. Each follows one civilisation over a decades long campaign of war and conquest. The natural place to start is the campaigns. Age Of Empires 4 has all of that, across four 9-mission single player campaigns, 17 skirmish maps (which can be slightly modified with seed numbers, and we're told more map options are coming), and 8 playable, well-differentiated and slightly unequal civilisations. They're base building, four-resource-gathering contests between factions based on historical world powers, and progress throughout a match happens in explicitly tiered eras that loosely represent historical ages.

Let's not argue about which of its elements is the defining one. Even if you haven't played them, the Age Of Empires games were a pillar of RTS design, and probably the most popular candidate for a comeback since publishers largely abandoned the genre in the 2000s.

It's tempting to bang on about the history of Age Of Empires, but let's be real here, you already know it well enough.

From: Steam, Microsoft Store / Xbox Game Pass.

Developer: Relic Entertainment, World's Edge.

It could still be friendlier to newcomers, but Age Of Empires 4 is an assured step in a genre whose comeback is long overdue.

Empires and allies free gold