A challenging, addicting game that never gets old
You start out pretty basic. You get a handful of villagers and a town center. You send your villagers out to collect resources, build buildings, ans survey the surrounding land. Eventually you'll have dozens of units running around and cities and outposts built all over the map.
This is a very simple game. One of the things that makes this game so great is that you take care of everything. The game does nothing for you. If you want three villagers to chop down that tree, go ahead. If you want to built a town center across the river with a dock nearby, that's cool. Every last thing is seen being done before your eyes. You don't see a little card with a picture of a villager sliding across the landscape, miraculously making trees disappear. You see a villager chopping the tree down and taking logs from it. This might sound complicated but about 99% of single player is done using your left mouse key and your right mouse key, nothing to get excited about here.
Combat is fun. It is the most tricky part of the game, as you might expect, but pulled off correctly you'll be sitting pretty. As mentioned before, you can choose the number of units and the types of unit you want for each battle. With a few clicks your men are walking across the sandy ground ready for combat, nothing challenging about the actual gameplay mechanic here.
Well this game isn't perfect. For one the AI is not very good. They'll stand idly by while chariots rush past them and the enemy will often pause to attack watchtowers even if the entrance to your town is ten steps away. You also cannot zoom in or rotate the game world, it is extremely 2D. That is easily overlooked and actually helps to reduce the mindless clutter and keep the gameplay simple. You'll never lose units behind buildings or anything anyway. The unit cap of 50 is also not very cool, but i would guess downloading a mod could fix that problem.
Truthfully I haven't touched the multiplayer, it could be horrible, it could be terrific, I'm still fighting the AI. That's how fun the gameplay is. If you're looking for that old, simple '90s charm, go out and buy this game, it's like $5 you can't lose.