Age of Empires II Deluxe

The Age of Empires series has been a pillar of PC strategy gaming for years. It's renowned for its intricate blend of civilisation building, resource management and, of course, combat. Age of Empires II Deluxe now attempts to bring this same, all-encompassing real-time strategy approach to mobile phones.

This, the 'deluxe' edition of last year's Age of Empires II, parades a range of bundled extras, including two new civilisations, the Japanese and Persians, and an entirely new Quick Play mode. The latter lets you delve straight into a randomly generated map to take on your enemy, providing the mobile edition with what's basically a skirmish mode.

The other mode on offer here is the Campaign, and it's here the majority of the action happens. After you've worked your way through the brief tutorial, you can choose to play through one of three campaigns, each of which totals around seven missions in length.

Starting with little more than a few huts and poor villagers, it's up to you to make the most of the landscape and situation you find yourself in. You view the land from above and can move around to explore your surroundings either via a mini-map that zooms out to view the entire playing area, or by moving the cursor to the edges of the screen.

You build new structures, attract workers, develop technologies and grow a correspondingly large, advanced army to expand your empire through non-peaceful means.

It's when you begin to delve into the campaigns, however, that the problems begin.

To begin with, everything seems fine. The controls are relatively easy to get to grips with, once you've got the hang of the isometric perspective and camera controls. You can construct new buildings or conscript soldiers by pressing the # or * key respectively, and setting your villagers to go about gathering resources for your bustling settlement is easy enough. At least, when they're standing still.

The problems stem from when you get into combat. In most missions, you'll find your base under a constant stream of attack, and once a battle breaks out, it's impossible to keep control of your armies.

This is because rather than having a small, refined animation for attacks, the characters bounce around the screen like a ping-pong ball in a washing machine as they go about slicing-and-dicing the enemy. This makes selecting them incredibly hard, and attempting to rethink your strategy mid-battle is nigh on impossible.

The other problem with selecting your units is that you can't drag a box over just the ones you want to take. Instead, you can either click once to select just that unit, click twice to select all the units of its type, or click three times to select your entire army. What if you want to take a mixture of units, but leave some behind to defend my base? Tough. You can't. It seems the only strategy that Age of Empires II Deluxe wants you to employ here is an all-out attack.

Dodgy path-finding just serves to compound the problems further; occasionally, when you tell your units to move somewhere, one will shoot off into the distance and go the longest way round humanly possible, without ever actually making it to the target and just vibrating casually against some rocks. We have no idea why this happens – but it does, and the distinct lack of AI your team mates demonstrate will have you reaching for the white flag all too soon.

It's a shame that Age of Empires II Deluxe suffers from these problems, because it's easy to see the game it could have been. It's good looking, there's a wide raft of options, buildings and civilisations on offer, and you can upgrade your civilisation as you progress through the missions to gain access to new technology – just like in the PC game. But unlike in the PC game, the combat just isn't any fun, and given the game is based almost entirely around it, that's an unforgivable mistake.