Age of Mythology: Retold

A remaster that earned its critical acclaim on the strategy game alone

Age of Mythology carved out a distinct identity within the Age of Empires family back in 2002 by trading historical civilisations for Greek, Egyptian, Norse and (in a later expansion) Atlantean mythology, giving each faction access to genuinely game-changing god powers and mythic units alongside conventional RTS base-building and combat. Retold rebuilds that game from the ground up for modern hardware, and by the measure that matters most — is the strategy game itself good — the answer from critics and the large majority of players is an emphatic yes. It sits at 83 on Metacritic from 57 critic reviews, solidly "Generally Favorable," and Steam's own userbase agrees even more strongly, Very Positive at 90.6% across nearly 21,000 reviews. Reusable god powers tied to a favor resource, rather than the original's one-time-use restriction, draw particular praise as a genuine strategic improvement, and the visual overhaul is extensive enough that veteran players directly comparing it to the 2002 original and its later Extended Edition consistently credit it as a real, worthwhile leap forward.

The always-online mistake, and how far it went before being reversed

None of that critical goodwill is what dominates the game's most-upvoted Steam review. In December 2024, an update introduced an always-online connection requirement that applied even to single-player campaign missions — content that runs entirely on the player's own machine and has no logical reason to depend on a server connection at all. Players reported a specific, infuriating failure mode: a brief internet hiccup during a mission would silently flag the save as "ineligible to progress," discovered only at the mission's end when the game informed the player their result wouldn't count and the mission needed to be replayed from scratch. The single most-upvoted negative review on the entire Steam page, sitting at over 1,700 votes from a reviewer with more than 138 hours logged, is specifically about this decision rather than anything to do with the RTS design underneath it. To the developers' credit, the requirement was walked back: campaigns and skirmish modes can now be played fully offline, with an online connection required only for the separate Arena of the Gods mode and actual online multiplayer, where it belongs. But the episode is a real, documented example of a beloved single-player-capable classic briefly being treated as though it needed the always-online assumptions of a live-service game, and it's understandable that the reviews from that specific window remain some of the most viscerally frustrated on the page.

Content removed, then resold

A second, more persistent sore point concerns Blood & Bones — quite literally. The 2002 original shipped with blood, skeletal remains for undead-adjacent units, and progressive corpse decay as standard, unremarkable features of its combat presentation. Retold's launch version removed all of it: skeletons became, in one reviewer's memorable phrasing, "pale skinny dudes," combat lost its blood entirely, and several goddesses including Aphrodite, Hekate and Rheia were redesigned with noticeably more coverage than their 2002 counterparts. Reasonable people can disagree about whether any specific one of those changes matters to them. What makes this a genuine consumer-trust issue rather than a simple aesthetic debate is what happened next: the removed content was eventually reintroduced, but only as a separately sold "Blood & Bones" DLC pack, bundled specifically inside the paid Expansion Pass rather than patched back into the base game for free. Reviewers who'd bought the Premium Edition specifically note that even that higher tier didn't include it, describing the situation as the exact opposite of what they understood the premium purchase to cover. Whether or not the original removal was driven by regional content requirements, as some players speculate, the pattern of stripping a free 2002 feature and selling it back years later is the more concrete, verifiable complaint, and it's a familiar shape this review has seen elsewhere in 2024's biggest remasters.

The rest of the friction

Beyond those two headline issues, a handful of more conventional technical complaints round out the negative review sample. Multiple players report the game's anti-cheat or anti-tamper protection closing the application outright when it detects certain running background processes, including legitimate diagnostic tools, with no in-game explanation of what specifically triggered the shutdown. Private, LAN-style multiplayer sessions are separately reported to desync reliably after 10 to 15 minutes even in unmodded games — a real problem for a title whose original audience frequently used exactly this kind of casual local play. And at least one detailed veteran review raises a fair, specific strategic complaint about changes to Titan and Wonder victory conditions reducing the viability of defensive playstyles that worked in the original, a legitimate design critique rather than a technical one.

Verdict

Age of Mythology: Retold is, underneath everything above, a genuinely excellent remaster of a beloved fantasy RTS — critics rate it highly, the large majority of its own massive player base agrees, and the specific gameplay refinements around god powers and quality-of-life improvements are real, substantive upgrades over the 2002 original. What keeps the full picture from matching that critical consensus is a run of decisions entirely separate from the strategy game itself: a since-reversed always-online mistake that briefly broke offline single-player, and a content-removal-then-resale pattern around Blood & Bones that remains unresolved as a point of consumer trust. Buy it for the RTS, which deserves its acclaim, and go in with clear eyes about what the premium tiers do and don't actually include.