Age of Empires IV

Age of Empires IV is a real-time strategy game from Relic Entertainment and Microsoft, which originally launched on PC in 2021 and arrived on Xbox Series X and S in 2023 as a port adapted for gamepad control. The game continues the series' tradition based on building medieval civilizations, gathering resources, developing technologies, and waging wars across historical periods from the early Middle Ages through later eras with gunpowder, siege engines, and early artillery.

Each of the playable civilizations, from the English through the Mongols to China or Delhi, has its own units, buildings, and strategic advantages drawn from real history, which sets the game apart from pure fantasy fiction and gives it an educational dimension supported by accompanying historical documents and short documentary videos. The console controls translate a genre traditionally played with mouse and keyboard into a form suited to a gamepad using radial menus and smart unit selection, a nontrivial task for strategy games on consoles that many earlier console adaptations of the genre failed to solve satisfactorily, which is one reason real-time strategy games have long appeared only rarely on consoles.

Critical reception praised the successful adaptation of a complex strategy game to gamepad controls and the preservation of the campaigns' depth and multiplayer competition, including the ability to play against PC players thanks to shared online infrastructure connecting both platforms into a single community. Age of Empires IV is thus one of only a handful of quality real-time strategy games available directly on consoles, giving genre fans without a PC full access to one of the most significant historical RTS titles on current-generation hardware, without having to compromise on the game's depth and scope.

Why play it: For real-time strategy fans without a PC, it offers full access to the depth of the campaigns and multiplayer thanks to shared online infrastructure connecting console and PC players into a single community.