Weekends are for finally closing the laptop and booting up the wargaming rig. It’s the perfect moment to bring back my long lost love for real time strategy and jump straight into the Age of Empires IV stress test. Yes, for some reason lost only but to the elder gods of Microsoft, no gameplay of Age of Empires IV emerged in months and now they just open up the floodgates and let everyone in at the same time. So if you been wondering if the wait was worth it feel free to check it out now! My Strategy and Wargaming News column will be up tomorrow, this is kind of a big one.

Age of Empires IV

Oh man, the wait is finally over! I’ve been waiting for this for more than a decade and it’s finally here! I’ll probably spend most of my playing time this weekend dicking around AoE IV and see how I feel about it. After a couple of matches I got to say: Not too shabby, not too shabby indeed. Plays like Age of Empires IV, the unit control is tight, the graphics are not as cartoony as the looked and the formula stays pretty much the same with a couple of twists thrown into the mix. In all honesty, I was expecting Relic to go all out and ruin Age of Empires IV like the did with Dawn of War III a couple of years back but the seem to be stepping up their game.

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Hell Let Loose

The best tactical shooter around got updated with the Eastern Front a couple of weeks back but my time flinging shells from T-34 and spitting lead from the PPSH 41 is still unsatisfactory. The new maps are rather cool and much more action packed then the Normandy ones. The wide, open plains of Russia make for some interesting long range engagements. Even better is to jump between the two types of matches. I’ve actually come to enjoy playing Hell Let Loose alone, something I could never do with Squad.

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Gates of Hell – Ostfront

Let me see if I can fit in one more. If so, Gates of Hell – Ostfront is another one I’ve been bouncing on and off constantly. The campaign is boring and the fact that in one of it’s first missions I had to spend nearly 20 minutes finishing off enemies scattered all across the map just to get a mission complete screen to pop did a perfect job of killing my interest. This game’s saving grace is it’s conquest mode. Is it great? Of course not and you would be better off playing the Company of Heroes II Ardennes DLC but CoH II is also a better game than Gates of Hell so there’s that. Worse still is the dumb as a bag of rocks AI that will continuously throw units after units at your lines expecting to get anything done. But the game has been updated a lot of times since I boot it up for the last time about a month ago so let’s see how it all comes together.

Well, this is it for this weekend.