Age of Empires: Definitive Edition
Worth it · Strategy · 2019
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $19.99.
- Length
- 32.7h
- Value
- $0.61/hr
- Reviews
- 84% positive
Recent reviews trending up: 96% over the last 30 days against 84% all-time.
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Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, 20 GB of storage. Windows only.
Age of Empires, the pivotal real-time strategy game that launched a 20-year legacy returns with modernized gameplay, all-new 4K visuals, 8-person multiplayer battles and a host of other new features. Welcome back to history.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
November 2020 is where it bottomed out, at $4.99. Its cuts run 75 percent off as a rule. There have been 46 in the 7 years tracked, about 7 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 13 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 7 weeks.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 3 percent on value. It is pricier than 90 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 87 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition ($34.99, scores 90) beats it on value, while it beats Age of Empires II (Retired) ($19.99, scores 62).
Critics scored it 69. Players sit 15 points higher at 84 percent, which usually means a game that plays better than it reviews.
Players rate it 84 percent positive over its lifetime, and the last 30 days run 96 percent. It is aging into a better game than its average suggests. 4 of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written December 2023 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 61 percent of the 1,326 reviews written there were positive, against 84 percent overall, and those are 9 percent of everything written about it.
The main story runs 32.7 hours. Doing everything runs 75, 2.3 times as long.
7 years after release it still had 559 people in it at once.
The drop-off
38% start to 2% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
559 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
Age of Empires: Definitive Edition scores 69/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/1017900/age-of-empires-definitive-editionThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 18, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.