Well, I have played the demo. It is as fun and as cool-looking as the screenshots suggest. The buildings fall apart, the soldiers load there rifles accurately, the flocks of geese fly across the screen. It is beautiful. But you barely notice that when playing because it is so incredibly fun. Performance wise, it seems to work great on our year-old Dell. The processor and Ram work with it well, though the video card doesn't give anything close to optimum detail. The minimum requirements are 1.5 Ghz with 256 RAM, though any spyware would probably send that kind of system to the floor. AOD--the best AOE yet.