0AD – Open Source Age of Empires – Wait, what?
The original Age of Empires, from Ensemble Studios and published through Microsoft, is one of my favorite games. In fact, I feel AoE, is one of the best games written.
Make no mistake, AoE is still available on Steam in the AoE HD Edition. While I have mixed feelings about how Microsoft has handled this title and their treatment of the original devs, it’s a great game and can be had for cheap during a Steam sale. However, it’s not available for Mac or Linux.
Or is it?
After making a comment about AoE, I was told there was 0AD, an open source project to bring an AoE style game back to life.
I immediately jumped on board, downloaded a copy, and 0AD absolutely looks and plays like an AoE themed game. If you didn’t know better, you would say the band got back together and released this as the next game in the series. The buildings, play style, tech tree, hunting, farming, and building of troops should all be completely familiar. And that’s awesome.
I’ve just started to play through the tutorial and get my feet wet. But, I am absolutely thrilled to see a project like this. The fact I can play 0AD on my Mac is incredibly satisfying.
Now that I have honed my wood cutting skills, mined some stone, run through the golden wheat fields, and stalked a camel to use for food, I’m going to dig deep and try my hand at combat. If 0AD really is anything like Age of Empires, I should be screaming for mercy and wondering why I have no resources by the time I upgrade to the second age.
