Game Review: Age of Empires Online

I have to say I was hopeful about the educational possibilities when I heard about Age of Empires online. It's not a game designed for education, but it is similar in a lot of ways to the Civilization games, which seem to be one of the more commonly used commercial game lines in education. Also, it's free to play the basic version on any computer with the Internet, a definite positive.
Age of Empires Online is a real-time strategy game based on historical civilizations. Your goal is to perform a series of tasks, from fighting off invaders to developing technologies and building things, to make your civilization grow. The entire game is quest-based, allowing you to play in short bursts of time. I have been sticking to the easy beginning missions so far, and have found them to take anywhere between 5-20 minutes. Any given quest has one or several objectives (such as building specific buildings, rescuing kidnapped villagers, protecting a defenseless village), offers in-game rewards for completing it, and allows players to retry the quest if necessary. It's a relatively fun game, although for non-gamers it will probably have a pretty big learning curve. Some of the controls seemed very counter-intuitive to me, and I ran into a lot of glitches (although I have to say that out of the three people I played with, I was the only one to encounter most of these).

While you could use this game to work on some problem-solving, goal setting and planning skills, the tutorial stage lasts for a very long time, and there doesn't seem to be a way to side-step those quests very easily. There are, however, multiple opportunities for students to set goals and achieve them. For example, the student could choose the goal of making villagers more efficient, and select technologies and buildings that helped those villagers gather and store food better and stay healthier. Again, the downside to this plan is the time commitment to get that far. For students who enjoy gaming and are good at it, the time investment would probably be significantly less, and this game could be used to address educational goals. If you have students who are unfamiliar with games, however, this game may not be worth the time they will need to invest.
The historical value of the game is also, at least so far in my experience, negligible. You can choose to play as one of several different civilizations (Egyptians and Greeks are free options), but beyond encountering a few historical person and place names in passing, there is no historical information particular to the civilization. Again, this may change much further into the game, but for the first several levels and hours of the game, there is not enough content to easily focus education around history in this game.
All in all, Age of Empires online is a relatively fun game, free (although there is extra content for sale) and accessible from any computer with an Internet connection that can download the game. However, it has a learning curve and is time consuming in order to get to a level where you can easily focus education around it. The primary use I can see for this game would be for teaching goals, problem solving and planning or strategy.