Golden Age Game Review

Golden Age is a free to play browser based video game available to play online. One of the best things about Golden Age is its ease of accessibility. All you need to have on your computer is to install flash onto your web browser. If you have already done that, virtually anybody will be able to play the game. There is no need to wait to download the game which is nice considering most recent free to play video game require you to download up to three or four gigabytes worth of data.

Upon playing the game, you are prompted to choose which faction you want to join. It doesn’t matter which faction you choose as all that really matters is that you choose a main character to be. Unlike in many other video games, Golden Age does not allow you to alter the appearance of the main character you want to be. Although you are able to play choose between a female or male main protagonist, you have to stick to the game’s blonde person’s preference. Once you’ve chosen the type of blonde person you want to be, you’re off to start the game of Golden Age. Golden Age is technically a RTS game at heart but there are a few RPG elements included into the game to keep things fresh. One thing that sets Golden Age apart from other RTS games is the ability for your main character to roam and talk to NPCs in town-like segments.

Roaming around towns in Golden Age is unlike that of traditional RPG video games however. You can only walk from left to right as if the game was a side-scrolling platform games. The game design in Golden Age reminds me of other RPG games such as Resonance of Fate and Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmera. This is because the character models themselves are rendered in 3D despite the limitation of walking on a 2D playing field. Controlling your character during these segments is easy to maneuver as all you have to do is point and click and your character immediately walks and talks with other characters. The heart of the game lies in its main RTS style of gameplay. Much like most other games from the RTS genre, things start off really slow in the beginning. This is mainly because it takes a lot of time for you to gather resources and build up you army. At the very beginning of the video game, I was told to make 5 soldiers so I can venture out and proceed to the next area. I accidently clicked to manufacture 12 soldiers instead so I had to wait a full 30 minutes for this to be completed until I could proceed to the next part of the game…

Another thing about Golden Age is that battles are fully simulated. Once you build an army, you don’t have any control of them on the battlefield whatsoever.  You just click on the area you want to conquer and the compute virtually does all the work for you. You can choose to view battles but all you see is a deck of cards duke it out much like a game of Magic the Gathering. Fans of more action-packed RTS games like the Command & Conquer series will be disappointed by Golden Age’s lack of cinematic action sequences.

As it is in most RTS games, your main goal is to build a large army big enough to conquer and take control of the land. Once you reach level 30, you are then able to establish yourself a second city to build. There are other real-life players playing Golden Age and it’s up to you what you want to do with them. You can choose to be allies with them or even declare war to try and burn their city down. You can choose not to interact with other players and just accept quests to complete which are given out by the many non-playable character littered throughout the entire game. Golden Age is an enjoyable free-to-play RTS game. There are a healthy number of players currently playing the game so you know the community is alive and well. Not to mention the game requires no download so almost anybody with a computer will be able to play it. Some gamers might be out off by Golden Age’s lack of action and suspense but RTS fans will still have fun with it. Golden Age may not be a revolutionary title but the fact that it’s free-to-play means there is no harm in at least trying the game out for yourself to see if it’s your cup of tea.