Ancient Empires II, from Glu, is a turn-based strategy combat game where you create and move small groups of units, each with unique abilities, on a game board against up to three other opponents. Although the name is clearly a reference to the popular PC series “Age of Empires,” it’s closer in spirit and game play to Advanced Wars. If you’re a hardcore Advance Wars addict and need a mobile fix no matter what, this and “Age of Empires III” will be your best bets.

If you haven’t played these sorts of games before, let me give you a brief overview. (Feel free to skip this paragraph otherwise.) You and your opponent will start on opposite ends of a game board or map with many small structures scattered across it—houses and factories, in this game. You take turns producing units, capturing houses to generate gold, then using the gold to produce more units via the factories you capture. And then you fight—your units and your opponent’s will clash and, based on firepower, defensive capabilities, and a little luck, someone will take a lot of damage or even be destroyed. Eventually, one side will prevail.

In some versions of these games, you can play in real time, which adds another layer of challenge to the game. Ancient Empires II is turn-based, though, so you have all the time you want to look over the map and plan your moves.

The graphics are simple but clean, and the interface is well-conceived—one of the reasons I return to this game so frequently is that it’s so easy to move the pieces around and make the appropriate menu selections. There’s a main story mode that begins with a tutorial battle and quickly advances into fairly challenging battles. Unfortunately, right when you’re starting to get good at the game, it ends.

There are a few small problems with the game.

• The start-up screen is far too long—you’ll be incredibly tired of it by the 50^th time you’ve launched the game.
• There’s no volume setting for the audio, so I’ve never tested the audio. Lack of a proper volume setting, or the ability to use the handset’s de facto volume toggle switch, makes audio a dealbreaker for me.
• In the first half of a game, rounds can go on for several minutes as all the pieces are moved by the phone’s AI. This will invariably trigger your N95’s energy-saving screen or screensaver, which will pause the game. I’ve discovered that in order to prevent the pause screen from kicking in, I have to press on the dpad occasionally while watching the AI play through its turn(s).
• The game rules are a bit soft and the AI isn’t smart or aggressive enough, which makes it too easy to beat the AI with tried-and-true strategies that you never have to change. It also makes predicting your opponent’s next moves remarkably easy once you’ve learned the AI patterns.
• Finally, the game is a battery-drainer—it kills my phone’s battery reserve quicker than any other of the 50 or so games I’ve played on it.

However, there’s one crucial reason I can’t recommend this game or “Age of Empires III” for purchase, even if I love them both: there’s no map editor. You have a criminally small selection of maps and once you’ve played them a couple of times each, you’re done.

Although the Glu website demos the game as having an online component where you can download maps, in reality there is no such thing; you have approximately a dozen maps and no more, and there is no online component for the N95. What that means is that this game ages fast and it ages poorly; I’d go so far as to say it’s one of the few games I’ve ever played that you can actually use up by playing too much. I don’t want to encourage developers to create more games like this, games that are so disposable they can’t be revisited from time to time over the course of a year.