In Age of Mythology, you start from humble beginnings and build up your town from a small settlement to a gigantic empire. (Note that you can only build a town center on already existing town settlements and that town settlements cannot be created.) You can choose to play a random map game which composes what was said above, play the campaign which guides you into a plot starting with troy and eventually taking you to Egypt and beyond, or play online with GameRanger, direct IP or lan. The campaign has strikingly good movie clips between each level which guide you through the story and let it come to life. Another good touch is when the proceeding the movie to the level is over, the top and bottom black areas fade out and into the game interface leaving you to directly attend to what happened in the movie without having to wait for the game to load. The campaigns are easily spaced with difficulty chosen accordingly making it so that the first few levels are easy but not to easy and later levels being increasingly harder. If you think your more then up for the challenge you can change the difficulty setting from easy to moderate, hard, or Titan. You can also create your own campaigns and make them however you like with triggers among other things, if you so desire. One thing that could be improved is the interface of the campaign editor. It doesn't have the interface of the traditional Mac OS and has the ugly gray color of Windows which hurts your eyes and makes it hard to read. If MacSoft had bothered to put more effort into porting this part then it would make it a lot easier to make your own campaigns.

One word about the graphics: awesome. In the game if your near the beach you can hear and see waves splashing against the shore. Under the water you can see lilly pads, dolphins and other cool animations. When you destroy a ship it falls apart and sinks under the water. Very cool. What you use to build ships is a dock which actually looks like a platform with a lighthouse. While this is kind of strange, you can build an actual really big lighthouse if you are the Egyptians (while the other cultures can only build a wonder). Instead of being locked into building only human type units, now you can also create animals and living mythical units. One being the War Turtle which kind of eats or throws the ships out of the water. That's just one of the mythical units as the game has a lot, and different ones for each culture, whether your playing Greek, Egyptian or Norse.

Another good thing to see happen is that you can build essentially anywhere on the map and you are no longer locked into building on a grid like fashion. Though you can't turn the buildings around themselves (except for the dock), you can rotate the view 360º by using your scroll wheel on the mouse (if you have one) to see things that might otherwise be blocked from view. But even if a unit is hidden behind another building, the person colored is solid blue unlike in AOE2 where the person is only outlined in blue making it easier to see them.

With this direct port from PC to Mac, there are still some remains of Windows visible. For example, under the preferences one of the options is "Enable IME" and it says "Consult your windows documentation for more information." I'm not so sure that that is even needed because Mac OS X has built in localization for different languages. Another thing is on the guide where some of the quick key commands state to use the key alt. This isn't a real big deal but the alt key doesn't exist on Macintosh. Though judging from this keyboard, I'm supposed to use option instead of alt, due to the tiny writing of 'alt' above the option key. It wouldn't have been that hard to go back and change that to make it more clear.

One other problem not really dealing with the game it's self is the culture guide which comes in the box. It has a list of what each culture can build and where, including upgrades and other details, similar to the AOE2 guide. For some odd reason it has serrated edges and falls apart really fast, which kind of sucked because I would have liked to keep it in a way that I could fold up instead of having 3 different pieces to keep track of. Maybe it was designed this way so that people could have a smaller piece for the culture you are playing instead of having to keep the whole thing there. Though for me it leads me to think that people would be more likely to lose it.

One good thing about the guide that came with the game is that even though it's really short, it's clear (aside from the back page where it uses alt) and well thought out and tells you mostly what you need to know. Aside from strategy, if you need that you'll have to look online or go out and buy a good book. The actual selecting of units and where you can build them is not told in the guide but rather in the in game tutorial, which is also very easy to understand. One thing that is kind of confusing in the tutorial is how you gather food. For veteran players you would think that you might build a farm if you cannot find any goats or berry bushes (note that the berry bushes don't exactly look like berry bushes as much as they did in AOE2). Generally while there seem to be more goats in AOM, there are less berry bushes (at least in the campaign) forcing you to either kill goats or build farms. But if you are playing the Greeks you can't build farms until you advance to the Classical Age, and since you start at the Archaic Age in the tutorial it makes it a little confusing. While we're talking about farms, one good thing to see is that you no longer have to queue reseeding for farms because the process is automatically.

All in all this game is great and should be bought, although there are a few minor problems that should be worked out in the next version coming out soon.

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