You are introduced to the three new civs via historical campaigns for each nation. The mini-campaigns (none more than six or seven episodes long) are certainly better than the family saga that you played through in the first two Age of Empires III titles, but they are still exemplars of the “do what the voice tells you” model of scenario design. You aren’t given a challenge to meet so much as you are given time to meet Requirement A before you are told what Requirement B is. There isn’t much room for outside the monitor thinking or genuine exploration. The character voices border on caricature, a trend that carries over into the skirmish mode. In the Indian campaign, for example, you apparently lead an army of Apus against an equally poorly voiced British villain. Not that the European or Native voices were model accents.
The skirmish game is the meat here. As in the WarChiefs expansion, the new nations are so colorful and so polyglot in army composition that the original European nations seem downright dull. Part of it is the appeal of the new, but a good deal of the appeal is rooted in how kickass the Asians are. There could be some balance issues here, and even rookies should have no trouble leading Chinese hordes to victory over the Portuguese or Iroquois on the default difficulty level.
But where the novelty of the natives in WarChiefs forced you to re-examine your European strategies, the Asian factions stand almost to the side of the game. Not only are they playing by different rules, none of them are as extreme as the all infantry Aztec or cavalry heavy Sioux. Each Asian army is reasonably balanced, so there’s no real need to rethink how your French will deal with the incoming Japanese army. The Chinese pose a minor puzzlement since their banner armies come in clumps, but resource scarcity and the present Age make it fairly easy to predict what they have coming.
By adding more hotkeys, Big Huge Games has streamlined a game where you were often bumping against the limits of original interface. Now, for example, you can muster all your troops at single location without worrying about the unit-selection threshold. Click Alt-Y and go. You’ll need to print out the accompanying readme file to find them all, but online battles for mastery are won or lost on the hotkeys. Now you have even more to memorize.
Asian Dynasties is certainly a worthwhile purchase, though there were clearly limitations on how far the usually innovative developers could push the envelope in someone else’s playground. The three new factions certainly feel distinct from each other, which was more than you can say of most of the European nations. So long as you keep the long sweep of history in mind, you never feel odd setting samurais to work chopping up redcoats or dog warriors. If you haven’t taken to the Age of Empires series, Asian Dynasties won’t be different enough to change your mind. But it’s nice Eastern breeze for veterans and dabblers alike.
