14th of August, 2025
Age of Mythology campaign thoughts

Age of Mythology is a 2002 real-time strategy game where you control mythic heroes and monsters alongside ordinary humans. I first played it when I was pretty young and it's a lot more approachable than the earlier Age of Empires games, but this review's from a recent replay I did while thinking about making my own strategy game.

This is just a loose review of the game's core and expansion campaigns! It has four official campaigns in total. The original campaign was “Fall of the Trident”, in which a band of (mostly Greek) heroes travel through Greece, Egypt, and Midgard to save the world from the return of the Greek titans. “The New Atlantis” was a shorter sequel introducing the Atlantean faction added in the same expansion pack. “The Golden Gift” was a short DLC campaign featuring a few characters from the Norse section of Fall of the Trident. Finally, “Tale of the Dragon” is a completely separate campaign introducing the Chinese faction added in an expansion to the 2024 remaster of the original game.

There's one more official campaign, the Japanese “Yasuko's Tale”, also released for the 2024 remaster; it's not here because I haven't played it.

Fall of the Trident #

A great core campaign that introduces and tutorialises each of the three factions in short order, then gives you a bunch of scenarios to play with all of your units, powers, and knowledge. The three sections—Greek, Egyptian, Norse—happen in that exact order rather than being separate campaigns, so the Greek scenarios are easier and the Norse scenarios are (mostly) harder. However, it does give you a much longer and more involved story that lives up to the game's premise of smashing different mythologies together for fun and profit.

The campaign's paced well, too: the Greek section is victory after victory (marred only by enemy attacks on your allies, but not on you), the Egyptian section's a back-and-forth (including a scenario literally called “Tug of War”) until you get all the Osiris Pieces and seige the enemy, and the Norse section's got a lotta desperate struggles where you need to hold out long enough for help to arrive. I think, within that, they made the right choice not to introduce the main plot immediately. The Trojan War works as an extended tutorial on basic mechanics and concepts: disrupt the enemy's economy to reduce their military, build forward outposts to reduce your own supply lines, etc.

The story's solid enough, if very flat: a modern take on the tales of Odysseus and maybe Heracles. It doesn't read like a blunt implementation of Campbell's monomyth or any story-plan like that, instead having its own stakes and flow. However, it rarely feels truly mythic. The writer(s) needed to fit the story to the game's systems, so they turn almost every step of the journey into a matter of building and/or destroying bases, and unlike e.g. the Anabasis or the real accounts of the Trojan War, you're not distanced from the protagonists and can't treat them solely as epic heroes. In the end, you have to take the story as it is—its own type of thing, between myth and military campaign.

The characters themselves are fine—shallow, but basically well-drawn and often well-acted within those limits: Ajax the war buddy brute, Amanra the rational ruler, Chiron the wise old man, and Arkantos the mythic hero undergoing ordeals and marked by the gods. Minor characters like Odysseus and Skult are also well-posed.

The writers deserve some credit for avoiding stereotypes with Amanra, the very dark-skinned African queen. She comes across as a pragmatic, serious-minded ruler who leads the group during the Egyptian section and then steps back to an ensemble role with all the rest. It's a shame they couldn't do something like that for Reginleif in the Norse section. I guess they ran out of time.

Then there's Gargarensis, the villain. Well-voiced, physically-imposing, always with the backup plan, and his little moments of poetry are a great way to show that he's cultured and mystical: though they're from real poems written millennia after the story, they sound like mystic incantations or just things he'd say himself. It reminds me a lot of the line in the cosmic horror film Prince of Darkness that's half-copied from Stephen Vincent Benét's poem Nightmare, with Angels. Here's the relevant excerpt:

“You will not be saved by General Motors or the pre-fabricated house.
You will not be saved by dialectic materialism or the Lambeth Conference.
You will not be saved by Vitamin D or the expanding universe.
In fact, you will not be saved.”

Which is reworked into this line in the film, recited by the rotting, beetle-festering corpse of one of the main characters' colleagues:

You will not be saved by the holy ghost. You will not be saved by the god Plutonium. In fact, you will not be saved!

Both recited poems, in Age of Mythology and in Prince of Darkness, make sense in context and neither is acknowledged formally as a poem by the characters. They're just some good appropriation of words from long ago for ominous effect.

Ultimately Gargarensis is as two-dimensional as the rest of them, and weirdly his motive's only explained in his in-game encyclopedia entry, but, then again, you're not playing this for its depth.

(Speaking of the in-game encyclopedia—it's got great potential, and you rarely see anything with that kinda depth and hyperlinking. It tells you not only about your generic and heroic/mythic units, but also about literally any selectable entity in the game. Everything from the heroes and villains to minor characters to trees to destructible rock walls to joke units you spawn in with cheats has an encyclopedia entry of some kind. Unfortunately, it's under-developed in that there's only limited cross-linking. That makes it easy to get to general pages, but hard, if not impossible, to get to specific ones (aside from selecting the thing itself in-game and accessing the encyclopedia from there). Still, it's kinda inspiring!)

One neat thing about the story is that it's largely presented through slightly-janky in-engine cutscenes, with very low-res models. Presumably this is way less resource-intensive than FMV or full CGI, and they can lead directly into scenarios with no loading between, but the main reason I like them is the strangely doll-like quality they have. They really feed into the almost toy-like aspect I described, of smashing mythologies together.

As for the actual scenarios, there's a diverse mix of base-building and quests. Even though many of them involve seiging and destroying an enemy town or some other key buildings, they still involve unique buildup (e.g. you can't build forward bases) or consequences (e.g. if you hold out for a while against desperate odds, then you gain a super-unit). Each one is significant, even the less-characterful ones, though I do have my highlights.

“Consequences” (2) is a good intro to the main game. Nothing flashy, but a solid intro to base-building and -attacking with multiple layers of terrain and map secrets (well, one secret—the shipwreck that gives you Gold).

“A Fine Plan” (4) is the first multi-enemy scenario and one that layers on triggers in a sensible way, as you whittle down Troy's economic and military capacity before taking out the gates. There are some neat things off the beaten path, too, like the lone Medusa guarding a shrine and relic, or the mine on the isolated island. All of it works to make the world feel more complex, more surprising, a trend continued by a lotta later scenarios.

“Strangers” (10) is the classic magma-and-basalt vision of the underworld, but also ruined temples, ghostly boats on the Styx, a dismal swamp, a dead forest, and a burning city infested with snakes. There's a lotta character, and the intense fog-of-war gimmick is done well.

“Good Advice” (16) is pretty clever! A mythic-feeling prophetic dream of appropriated symbols. Things like needing Zeus' help to defeat the Cyclops enemies around the Temple, a divine messenger taking the form of Arkantos' son, the march through the ranks of your army in Erebus, Athena guiding and advising the hero, and just the entire back end of the mission—it's all really strong. The fact that all the units and locations are Greek and you fight in Atlantis is also a nice understated sign of Arkantos' homesickness at the furthest point from any scenario set in Atlantis (15 scenarios after “Omens” and another 15 before “Welcome Back”), plus a blunt omen of the game's climax.

“Watch That First Step” (19) is a kinda clever callback to “Good Advice”, since you use pirate ships to sneak past the enemy. Full of memorable moments in general; plus, unlike most scenarios, the time pressure encourages offense over turtling and economy.

“Old Friends” (21) is a fun little gimmick map. What other RTS has a scenario where you play as resources?

“North” (22) is a powerful intro to the Norse section of the campaign. Captures the feeling of a hostile wasteland better than any other scenario. The ambience, gathering your scattered units, choosing where to start your town out of a few bad options, the stream of attacks from three different enemies, and learning a new civilisation as you go… when I first played the game on Normal difficulty, this was the first scenario I actually lost at, and beating it felt like a genuine hard-fought victory.

“Union” (26) is no challenge, but a lighter, more colourful scenario that's a great contrast to the harsher scenes before and after.

“Welcome Back” (31) is a flexible rescue scenario that offers a lotta freedom in your approach. Your choices are significant: where to start, who to rescue, even where to fight (the enemy has no Villagers, so destroyed buildings stay destroyed).

“A Place In My Dreams” (32) is the appropriately climactic final battle against a tough defensive line. Creeping your city up the hill is very satisfying as you turn a many-front battle into a one-on-one against the final foe.

The New Atlantis #

I really like the start of this: the ominous and oppressive atmosphere, the sinister ancient magic, the complex map designs, the gimmicks of the scenarios against the Greek, Norse, and Egyptian forces, the otherworldly climb up Olympus… Kronos felt like a generic sealed evil in “Fall of the Trident”, but he and the other titans and their whole deal feel legitimately creepy in the first half of this campaign. The only downside here is how aggressively the characters tutorialise and explicitly refer to game mechanics.

It gets a bit rougher in the second half. The main problem's that you fight a titan three scenarios in a row, which dissipates some of their built-up menace. The pacing would've been better with one more scenario each before the Egyptian and Norse titans (to get the Guardian and join forces with Folstag?), which would've also given the writers more time to set up the alliance with Gaia. However, the maps mostly stay clever and detailed the whole way through.

The Golden Gift #

All four scenarios have interesting gimmicks, cool challenges, and a bunch of neat details (except the last one, which feels like a bit of a step down). In particular, the first scenario, “Brokk's Journey”, pits you against a fortified and powerful enemy and gives you a bunch of ways to deal with them if you explore the map to the fullest.

The final scenario's only a step down because the designers didn't use its gimmick very well (you destroy Loki's Temples to gain God Powers, but most of them are lightly-guarded, so the God Powers are basically just free). As with The New Atlantis, this campaign also very aggressively tutorialises. I don't wanna hear in-game characters talk about how we've “advanced to the Mythic Age” but “don't have any God Powers”! Leave that stuff to the non-diegetic objectives, hints, and spotlights. What's the point in all these game-mechanics overlays if you're just gonna hamfist that info into the dialogue anyway?

Tale of the Dragon #

Abysmal. Boring maps, linear routes, weird mid-scenario difficulty spikes or drops, noisier and more-intense terrain textures that make it harder to see your units at a glance… then there's the mediocre cutscene work. It feels sloppy, made for content rather than any worthwhile purpose. I quit after the first few scenarios, but, from what I've seen of the rest, it doesn't get any better.