I played this game tonight with my little 3-year old girl for almost an hour.
Nile map type, so I had basically total protection from the AI and we just built a town. I picked Egypt for the animal mythology. She really loved building giant kitties (Sphynx), Scorpions, Elephants, Giant Turtles to swim in the river, etc. She also liked calling down a meteor storm on "the bad people" when we found their town.
Though I have to say, I think the highlight of the game for her was hunting down and eating a hippo. There was a hippo near my town center early in the game, I used a few villagers to hunt it for food. For the entire rest of the game, she kept urging me to hunt down everything in sight. Saw a few antelope, goats, chickens, even wild elephants; she would said "go eat them, Daddy! Let's eat them!" Slightly disturbing, but humorous. Hey, you gotta learn that we eat animals somehow. Why not through video games? Hahahahaha
There was enough "change" from second to second to keep her attention, cartoony violence that doesn't really eclipse Tom & Jerry, fairly nice graphics that are pleasing to the eye, and building a little town was fun. She really liked the resource gathering aspect and building giant animal units.
So if you have a little kid, you might want to play a few skirmish games of AoM, if you have it in your archives.
So far, it has kept my daughter's attention the best of any game I have tried so far (Pirates, Railroads, we even played the first part of KOTOR2 where you fight droids).
Though now I wonder if maybe we should graduate to Civ4. She really likes the "building our own little place" dynamic.