I enjoyed plenty of phone and tablet games back in the day, when it all started (god I feel old). When there were both amazing free and paid games. But then they started including ads, and microtransactions, and then battle passes, and then unskippable ads and promotions, and then progression got locked behind paywalls, etc.
I'm sure there are a few good games out there, but the few attempts I tried a few mobile games again it feels like I always run into having to pay to progress sooner or later. It's most definitely nothing like the golden ages back around 2010.
But a real Age of Empires game? Hells yes. This was announced not long after the AoE2 and AoE4 ports to console & controller had shown to be successful (at least critically—no idea how they're doing commercially). So I thought that they had cracked a way to do satisfying RTS gameplay on a mobile device. It'd be great to be able to play a quick Skirmish on the bus, or while spending time away from home without my computer.
So when a few aoe creators showed previews of the game back in February this year, I was rather surprised and very disappointed to see that the game has absolutely zero resemblance to an Age game. That the worst fears of it being a shitty rip-off were completely true. Thanks to those previews, I was not surprised on release this week—though the extent of just how bad even the narrative side of this is was still overwhelming.