Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition
BANGER · Strategy · 2019
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $34.99.
- Length
- 43.8h
- Value
- $0.80/hr
- Reviews
- 95% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, 15 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS.
42 Civilizations, 229 Campaign Missions, Singleplayer, Co-Op, Multiplayer, In-Game Editor, Mods, Cross-play...It is good to be the king.
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
The lowest price on record is $4.99, set in December 2022. Its cuts run 60 percent off as a rule. There have been 43 in the 7 years tracked, about 8 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 8 weeks.
Value puts it in the top 1 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 98 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 99 percent. The nearest things to it, Age of Empires: Definitive Edition ($19.99, scores 69) and Age of Empires II (Retired) ($19.99, scores 62), are both worse buys on this math.
Critics scored it 84. Players sit 11 points higher at 95 percent, which usually means a game that plays better than it reviews.
Steam's global achievement data says about 1 percent of players ever finish it. On a 43.8-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. Of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 8 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written January 2026 to September 2026. That is fewer refunded reviewers than 8 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 2,864 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 2,432 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 81 percent of the 4,469 reviews written there were positive, against 95 percent overall, and those are 3 percent of everything written about it. It sells extras on top of the sticker price (cosmetic); the score docks it lightly for that.
Finishing takes 43.8 hours; clearing it takes 219, which is 5.0 times the campaign.
It came out 7 years ago and 13.5K were still playing it at the last check.
The drop-off
54% start to 1% finishMost players never reach the end. On a 43.8-hour game, that's a lot you pay for and may never use. Steam global achievements
Players
13.5K players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Brings back so so so many great memories as a kid waiting for my brother to get done with the family pc so I could play against bots and get destroyed!!! This remake is near perfect with easily a 100+ hours of fun. A must get!
So I played this game (the original) in the nineties and fell in love with it. Chasing the achievements now. It's a classic and I'd recommend this game to all history buffs. 10/10
I suck at RTS games but this game is a treat. Works great, native mod support, perfect balance of complexity but not overdoing it like the sequels. Gold standard for RTS games imo. Also game just kinda works flawlessly.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition scores 90/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/813780/age-of-empires-ii-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 12, 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.