Although initially feeling like a glitchy medievil version of Advance wars, AOE : AOK proves itself a worthy opponent.
When first playing this game, you'll think that this game isn't so different from the Advance Wars Series. Yet when you really get in to the game, you'll come to find that this game is very different. The first difference can be found in the graphics already, instead of choosing the old-but-faithful overhead view, the developer chose to use the graphically more impressing and more challenging to make 3d isometric view. Sure, it's getting used to initially, to move the cursor around, but it gets more useful after a while. The battle animations are, au contraire Advance Wars, fully 3d animated. This gives a brilliant view and it shows the DS' maximum at graphics. Yet the sound, oh the sound, hasn't been used fully, since there is that constant, neverending background music. The additionnal battle music and other sounds from buildings, units and other when you use them, are all taken from Age Of Empires : The Age Of Kings, the PC version. So instead of using a bit of inventivity, Backbone chose to play it safe and took the old but wellknown sounds.
The gameplay, in which your military, economy, exploring and research stats are very important, resembles the Advance Wars but also the orginial PC version. In stead of having to collect 4 resources, namely food, gold, stone and wood, you only have two to collect; gold and food. But don't think this makes it any less hard. You can also get some resources from your town center, wonder or church, if a monk has brought a relic to the church. There are also pick-ups all over the map, goats that give you foodstuffs, crinkets that bring up some cash ... There are also ruins scattered across tha map, which can give you an extra militia, extra food, extra gold, an extra technology or the unit who discovers it can be killed due to no reason at all. That makes it a bit more challenging. Off to the battle sequences, most maps are in fog of war, but no fog is an option that can be chosen as well, although it makes the game a whole lot easier. There are five main civilizations, Japan, the Franks, Mongolia, the Saracens and ofcourse the Britons. Every civilization has one hero which is given at the beginning of every game, the Mongols have Genghis Kahn as example and the Franks get to have Joan Of Arc. These heroes have different hero abilities, like to heal units or to kill surrounding units. Choosing civilizations can be wise, because a.e. the mongols have a technology discount while the Franks have extra income from their farms. Yet in the 5 campaigns, you can't choose your civ, you'll have to play with what you get. The Hundred Year war is one of the campaigns and lets you play with Joan Of Arc. There are four types of combat units, Ranged, Infantry, Cavalry and Siege. These all have advantages and disadvantages against each other, a.e. the cavalry is very effective against the ranged units and infantry, yet the infantry is strong against siege ... . There are more than 60 different units which can be chosen from and the variety is huge, differing from Paladins to Welsh Bowmen to Trebuchets to Swiss Pikemen. If completing a mission, you get a score, your empire points. These can unlock extra maps and extra special units, but also give you a status. If you can get 3000 empire points, with an avarage 100 empires points/ map, you get the status Sultan, but when just beginning with zero empire points, you're still a peasant. Getting the highest rank, Emperor, is a much anticipated goal.
To end with, the game is plagued with annoying glitches such as unable to save or the game just freezing. This occurs frequently and can irritate a player endinglessly. The most well known glitch is that if you pick a username of 3 or less letters, the game crashes. Why ? Nobody knows, but don't try that at home !
As i conclude, Age Of Empires : The Age Of Kings DS is a great game with a huge amount of unluckable things and great graphics and gameplay, but due to uninteresting sound and annoying glitches this game doesn't get a 10.