Age of Empires has many flaws, and they seem to outweigh the good.
The way Age of Empires is set up is that it goes down through history and lets you play out important events in history through the game, and the first Age of Empires was placed in the early B.C. period to the late. In the campaign mode there are three different civilizations you can play as (four if you count the tutorial), Babylonian, Greek, and Yamato Empire.
One of (if not the) greatest problem that I had with this game was just how stupid all your people were, you could tell them to go somewhere on the map and they would get completely lost or stuck when there's a pathway right in front of them, or your troops would just stand idly by as some your other soldiers were being slaughtered by the enemy. But then there's your enemies if only your troops and villagers were as smart as them! Your enemies somehow amass giant numbers of villagers and troops even though you are only allowed for 50 men in total for your whole population, not only that but they seem to gather resources much faster than your villagers; how else would they be able to build the fortified walls surrounding their city, along with ballista towers and all those archers? Which, of course, because of your enemy being so smart and often even starting the mission off with walls, towers, and plenty of buildings, this makes for a very difficult experience, do you know how annoying it is to send an army that you've been training since the start of a mission just to see it be demolished by the enemy!? Well, it's not very pleasant, which is yet another reason why the game is to difficult.
The soundtrack for Age of Empires is literally just two (or three I can't remember) different tracks playing over and over and over again, and every time the game stops to switch to the other track there is about a five second freeze of the game, where you can't do anything, which is also annoying. Graphic-wise the game was good for it's time, but is dated by today's standards, graphics though, rarely take part in my view on a game.
The game itself though, is pretty uneventful, almost every mission consists of you building your buildings, training your army, and then attempting to kill the enemy with that army. That's it, they're is around 35-40 missions of mainly just that. Which, needless to say, can get pretty boring after a while. Which leads me to my main point, when a game becomes more of an exercise than it is fun, that's where the whole thing starts to fall apart for the gamer, which I think is what happened in Age of Empires for me.
So to summarize Age of Empires for the most part is a pretty dull, and pesky experience of a game, and any RTS gamer who hasn't played this yet probably shouldn't unless they think that they're up for a test of they're patience. And most importantly any gamer who is looking into this as an introduction into the mainly great Age of Empires series, should not buy this they will be disappointed if they do and most likely miss out on how wonderful of a game that Age of Empires 3 is, buy that!