CAUTION: Major glitches may ruin an otherwise fun experience!
User Rating: 7.6 | Age of Empires: The Age of Kings DS
This game is relatively fun given that the DS only has 2 turn-based strategy games at the present, Advance Wars DS being the other. Advance Wars is the better of the two with a more stylish presentation and game-play but AoE offers the freedom of building towns and units anywhere on the map offering more customization of strategy, etc. AoE offers a more traditional strategy game where you must train workers to gather natural resources needed to construct buildings and train units. Each turn you are allowed to "research" one item and once you've researched the required number and have enough resources you can "Age Up" allowing you to create more powerful and diverse units. The major glitch that turned me off (and finally drove me to trade this game in) occurs most frequently when playing the Empire maps mode against more than one computer controlled enemy. Late in a game, after a hefty investment of time, the game decides it no longer wants to save and you are presented with a screen telling you to turn off the system and re-insert the game. Most of the other glitches in this game (read forum for descriptions) are avoided by saving often but not this one! One could argue that this problem MIGHT be avoided by not playing against more than one computer controlled enemy at a time, however, this is one of the best options of this game and a player shouldn't have to sacrifice game-play to avoid glitches. Needless to say I turned off the system but I did not re-insert the game. I talked to many people and discovered that this, among others, is a common glitch. There is also a glitch that apparently locks up the game making it permanently inoperable and I actually discovered two used units at my local game store that had this problem so beware if you plan to purchase this game used! As I said earlier, this is a relatively fun game but the glitches can drive you to sell it or avoid it altogether.
