I've been waiting for this for a while, and just yesterday I wondered if it would ever make it up here. Best game of its type I've ever played. It has a few drawbacks (outdoor combat is kind of repetitive and can be diabolically difficult). But overall, 5/5 for the sheer fun factor.
Even after all these years, AoW still holds up VERY well. Sure, the animations are virtually non-existent, but the gameplay is still as compelling as it was in its day, and the graphics surprised me at how perfectly acceptable they are in 2010. Reading through the manual, I was reminded of how many really nice features the game has, one of the nicest being the ability to place multiple armies in adjacent stacks to an enemy, then attacking will all of them at once. And best of all, it runs flawlessly under Vista-64. I gave it 5 stars rounded up from my real score of 4.5 since the only real problem I have with it is that tactical battles can be very long to resolve tactically, but it's not much of a complaint. If you never played it, get it. If you did play it when it came out, get it anyway.
