Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition Review (Horizon Stronghold)
This game was absolutely phenomenal back in its original iteration created by Ensemble Studios. It would be extremely difficult for a company to screw up this masterpiece of real time strategy and despite its many flaws, they did not. The animations are largely improved with the exception of the pre-rendered cutscenes. The gameplay is still good but the AI is dramatically worse, with regular system breaks and horrible pathing by the soldiers. Oftentimes in the campaign troops can get stuck in seemingly random ways with you having to manually pathfind for them and the AI will straight up break, with all of its troops and settlers becoming stuck in an endless command loop doing nothing but walking back and forth if they do anything at all. That being said, it is much more of a rarity in the skirmish mode where the maps are more open; and I have not seen the AI break in this way outside of the campaign.
The campaign was almost the same as in the original (excellent of course) with the exception of the Shadow Act which they utterly butchered, assassinating the character of Chayton Black and turning him into a mouthpiece of Native American virtue signaling. The voice actor they got to play him is horrendous with his inflections sounding like he's a chatbot AI, although Holme was still fairly decent.
The additions they made to the actual gameplay such as the new nations and mercenaries were terrific. Mostly the voice acting is consistent with the old game (partly because they tasked unused voice lines for characters such as Washington), although there are some very few yet jarring discrepancies such as the US explorer which are damn near immersion breaking with how terrible they are, and a few of them such as Padre Miguel have different audio levels than the originals making them either stand out or barely audible if you are in combat.
The UI for the Home City has been revamped and frankly it's a downgrade. Whereas once the system had everything organized by level, age, and function, now everything is mashed together in a difficult to locate mess. Additionally, any sense of progress from the original game has been removed with all home city cards being available at the start making the level system entirely meaningless (if you can't see other players' home cities anyways, what is the point of altering the cosmetics? Why have those still level locked?)
All in all, a decent recreation of one of Ensemble's last masterpieces, although clearly not a passion project. 6/10.