After 16 years of waiting, the venerable real-time strategy series Age of Empires has today officially received a new entry with Age of Empires 4.
The game is set in the Middle Ages and is available for download in the Windows Store, on Steam and through Microsoft’s gaming subscription “Game Pass for PC”. While our Notebookcheck benchmark of Age of Empires 4 is still pending, Digital Foundry has already put the game developed by Relic Entertainment through its paces and posted a thorough tech review video on YouTube.
In said video review, Age of Empires 4 receives much praise for its gameplay, even though a few technical shortcomings slightly diminish the otherwise good gaming experience on PC. Like most real-time strategy games, Age of Empires 4 turns out to be quite heavy on the CPU, which is why it turned out to be a bit annoying that the game supposedly fails to fully utilize modern processors with many cores.
In the conducted benchmark shown in the video review, Age of Empires 4 often fully utilizes one single core, partly utilizes another three cores and then almost completely ignores the remaining CPU cores.
As a result, reaching high frame rates turns out to be much more difficult than it should be, and even a beastly Intel Core i9-10900K apparently can’t hold a steady 120fps in Age of Empires 4.
In addition, there seem to be a few performance hiccups when moving the camera in the game, and the reviewer at Digital Foundry was not completely satisfied with the available graphics settings in Age of Empires IV.