Immortal Pillars is the first major content drop for Age of Mythology: Retold, and it does what a good expansion should do: it adds a genuinely distinct mechanical identity rather than just bolting on reskinned units. The Chinese pantheon plays differently from the Greeks, Egyptians, and Norse in the base game. Your god choices feed into a different rhythm of power accumulation, and the myth units pulled from Chinese legend bring new threat profiles to team fights and late-game pushes. If you have been running the same Greek age-up sequence for fifty hours, this expansion forces you to rebuild your mental model from scratch, which is exactly the kind of friction a strategy game needs to stay alive. The campaign is the headline feature for single-player buyers. It draws on source material that Western RTS games rarely touch, and World's Edge has put visible effort into making the story feel grounded in that mythology rather than treating it as exotic window dressing. Mission design follows the familiar Age of Mythology structure of base-building scenarios mixed with hero-focused set pieces, so returning players will find the pacing comfortable even when the god powers and unit rosters are new. It is not a campaign that reinvents the genre, but it is a confident and coherent one, which is more than most expansions deliver. On the competitive and skirmish side, the Chinese civilization adds real strategic variance to the multiplayer pool. The god power selection creates decision trees that feel meaningfully different from existing factions, and the myth unit lineup introduces matchup-specific counterplay questions that serious players will spend weeks optimizing. The 85 percent positive Steam rating across over 600 reviews suggests the community reception has been strong, though the sample size is still modest compared to the base game. Balance will inevitably need patches as the meta develops, but the foundation looks solid. The weaknesses are mostly structural rather than content-specific. Immortal Pillars is an expansion, so it inherits whatever friction exists in the base Retold experience, including AI behavior that can feel mechanical at higher difficulties and a tutorial system that remains better at teaching the original factions than guiding players through new ones. If you came into Retold as a newcomer and found the learning curve steep, the Chinese pantheon will not ease that on-ramp. Veterans, though, will find the new faction approachable within a few hours of skirmish play because the underlying game systems are already internalized. For strategy players who are already in the Age of Mythology: Retold ecosystem, Immortal Pillars is a straightforward recommendation. It adds hours of single-player content, a new competitive faction with genuine mechanical depth, and enough mythology-specific flavor to make the expansion feel like a deliberate creative choice rather than a content quota fill. Players on the fence about the base game should start there first, but for anyone who has put meaningful time into Retold and wants a reason to return, this expansion delivers the necessary disruption. Diego, Scout Team