Despite all the faults, Age of Empires is a very enjoyable history-themed strategy game.
Following the time proven strategy-game formula of gathering resources, building military units and beating your foe who tries to do the same, you will lead a civilisation of your choice (dozen or so available in the game) from stone age to iron age. One thing about Age of Empires that immediately sets it apart is how much work the developers put into filling all these activities with visual details. For example, villagers will chase gazelles, take them down with spears then start gutting the animal with hand tools and transport the meat into the town center. Similar animation will enliven their gathering fruit from nearby bushes, fishing, mining stone or chopping down trees for wood. The game allows you to construct quite a large number of buildings with different architectural styles for each group of civilisations. There is also a truly huge number of both ground and naval units to choose from ranging from axemen and archers, to cavalry, chariots and war elephants. In later ages, with well developed cities and huge armies consisting of diverse units clashed in desperate battles, Age of Empires will show how beautiful and detailed game it really is.
Alas, there are many problems detracting from its enjoyability. While the historical setting is naturally appealing, too little effort was made to make the theme feel authentic, or to exploit all its possibilities at all. The civilisations playable in the game differ only slightly. Each has some unique ability and lacks several units and technologies from its portfolio. But this has been done is a rather strange way and the Japanese can merrily build triremes, middle eastern civilisations will field hoplites and the like. Furthermore, the campaigns do not help the situation at all. You can follow the historical rise of Egypt, Greece, Babylon and Japan, and although the scenarios are well designed there is no real continuity between them and the overall feeling of the historical campaign is rather disappointing.
The game also doesn't feel very well balanced, there is a rather low population limit hard-set in the game and as a result you will soon notice there is no real point in building most of the ground units but go exclusively with the strong hoplite line built at the academy. To top this, gaining naval power has a devastating effect upon the enemy. He who controls the high seas will be able to wipe out anything on the enemy shores quite a bit into the inland with the ridiculously overpowered and long-ranged ships.
Other issues plaguing the game include poor path-finding and an equally poor interface lacking in some basic features including build queues placing a huge micro-management burden upon the player.
All this considered, Age of Empires is still loads of fun to play. Once you get over the idea of it being historically accurate in any sense, or anything other than a fast paced action-centered strategy game set in ancient times, you will be able to enjoy the many pre-designed scenarios as well as randomly generated maps for hours to come.
Bottom line: not quite what it might have been, but still a great old-school RTS, which the fans shouldn't miss!