I played this as a kid, and replayed it a few years ago. It's on Steam and GoG for a relatively cheap price. It's fun but pathfinding is REALLY bad.
Remember how in Age of Empires 1 unit groups wouldn't go into formation if you selected them all and ordered them to go somewhere, but kept their current hodgepodge arrangement? That also happens in Tzar, so you'll end up with large armies being very difficult to control.
Other than that, it's a good game. The campaign is its highlight, you get to lead a group of heroes through a high fantasy story. They carry over from level to level and keep their experience. Especially the wizard dude is going to become insanely powerful after a while. Like... half a dozen levels into the game, your heroes will one-shot every enemy unit, and nothing except for their direct counter units (like pikemen vs your king on a horse) can even harm them. During the course of a normal 1v1 skirmish, the leveling system won't turn your units into invincible supermen, but it's enough to make a difference and reward you for keeping your army alive. It's just the campaign with its hero-carryover that ends up being utterly ridiculous.
Missions tend to be pretty challenging so the OPness of your heroes isn't a bad thing. They're pretty varied and sometimes even offer alternate approaches. There's one mission where you have to steal an artifact from an enemy city, and you get a spy unit that can turn invisible but has to avoid patrols. If your spy is caught and killed, the mission doesn't fail but you take control of the wizard dude who now attempts plan B of building up a small base and launching an attack on the city. Pretty cool.
There's 3 factions: Europeans, Arabians and Asians. They all follow common high fantasy cliches, with the Euros being basically medieval England/France/Germany with knights and longbows and castles. The Arabs are your typical 1001 nights faction, they even have jinn (JINN EXIST :andhaira: ). The Asians are taken straight out of your typical samurai movie. They all play similarly but have a different flavor and different unique units. During the course of the campaign, you start out with the Europeans, then later go to the Arabians, and in the end to the Asians, so you get to play as all three factions.
The campaign is very long, so if you're only interested in the campaign you will get your money's worth.
Overall it's a competent Age of Empires clone with some unique ideas that are somewhat broken, and utterly horrible pathfinding which is the only real downside of the game.
It's worth a try for sure.
