Lands of Lore III review (part 2)
Lynn Moncrief
Documentation, both in the manual and online, is abysmal in some respects.
The manual barely tells you enough to play the game, leaving you to your own
devices to discover some aspects of gameplay. The online "help" is identical to
the sparse contents of the manual. For example, the documentation doesn't tell
you that you can get into some spaces by using the crouch and jump keys
simultaneously. Nor does it tell you that you can pick up multiple identical
objects easily by repeatedly clicking on them (then repeatedly right-clicking
on your inventory bag). The manual (and online help) also contains baffling,
contradictory passages suggestive of someone with limited English composition
skills. And will someone please tell Westwood's writers that guilds have
"tenets", not "tenants"!
The journal is your primary source of information in LOL III, providing
information about items, creatures, conversations held, etc. It also
contains an Automap feature, quickly accessed by hitting Tab just like in
FPSs, that provides the most poorly rendered, confusing maps I've ever seen
in a game. However, one extremely useful feature on the Automap is the
ability to enter text comments at locations of your choice. (The amount of
comments per map
seems to be limited, though. I found myself unable to add more labels on a map
I had heavily annotated.)
And what was Westwood thinking when they decided to only provide useful
descriptions of items in the journal you pick up only after you use them?!
Apparently, the developers were trying to emulate real life in that you gain
more information about an object, spell, or creature by repeated contact with
it, but it is downright frustrating to click on some mysterious item or spell
during combat without knowing the full details of what it does. I've used
items that turned out to be pharmacopoeia constituents hoping they were
weapons, used spells that actually increased the power of the enemies I was
fighting, etc. Another effect of the paucity of information is loading your
inventory with unnecessary items because you have no idea of their
usefulness for a given quest. The journal also contains a bug that
sometimes notifies you that new information is available about a creature
or item, but gives you the same
information that you read before.
And speaking of bugs, this game is unfortunately full of them. LOL III crashes
way too often. Usually, the crashes occur during combat when there are a lot of
enemies or spell effects on the screen. At times, the game crashed so often
that I stopped playing in frustration. Obviously, it wasn't "soup yet" when
Westwood released this one. I strongly recommend waiting for a patch (if
Westwood plans one) before buying this game. Also annoying is the amount of
CD swapping you must do, coupled with long load times.
In this 3D-accelerated game, graphics alternate between the spectacular and
the abysmal. (A 3D-accelerator card is not required, by the way.) Buildings and
structures are beautifully depicted with lush detail and colored lighting
effects abound. The White Tower interiors, for example, are gorgeous. A
favorite effect I enjoyed was the colored lighting produced whenever I
summoned an Ancient Imp who hurls plasma(?) blasts at your enemies that
would light up
the entire area with a purplish glow. But, as in many games, colored lighting
effects are sometimes used with no apparent colored light source as if to say,
"Hey, look at this! We know how to do colored lighting." On the other hand,
graphics in the forest are downright tacky in some places. We're talkin' UGLY!
The forest canopy looks like a flat "painted" ceiling and spaces between the
trees along the paths are flat "painted" walls, giving a distinct corridor
effect. "Seams" and other oddities abound in some areas. Curves are
painfully nonexistent, ruining otherwise excellent graphical effects in
some places. The
"tunnels" of molten lava in the Volcano world are a good example of this. NPCs,
when viewed close up, are terribly pixellated. Westwood is not alone in
committing these particular graphical goofs. But it makes me wonder
sometimes about our spending hundreds of dollars for 3D accelerator cards
in order to be treated to such ugliness. Yet, the 3D effect of plants
growing in forest paths is excellent. Graphical glitches, including
clipping problems, abound. For example, during battles, monsters often
halfway disappear into nearby walls.
Monsters apparently respawn slowly and on a limited basis in this game.
Certain creatures don't respawn at all, while others do. I took advantage
of endlessly respawning bandits by using them as a primary income source,
being that they usually carry coins and other items. (A few times I
actually saw them respawn, suddenly appearing before my eyes.) Monster AI
is uneven and occasionally leads to ridiculously comical situations. Very
often, bandits are seen talking to and gesturing at walls. Often, they will
stand still when attacked or jitter in place.
Westwood has totally disregarded the fact that an important segment of the
gaming community is female and has written this game to appeal only to men.
As a female gamer, I strongly resent this. One quest is given by a
barbarian woman who offers to spend the night with your character if he'd
kill the stark
chickens infesting the tower. This scene may appeal to a few of the 16-year old
boys this game seems to have been written for, but is a total turnoff to
straight women. The whole section of the game devoted to the barbarian women is
indelibly marked in my mind as the "Bimbo Quest" being that they strutted
around as scantily clad pixel constructs, acting like a bunch of bimbos. Nor
could I relate to Copper's remark after seeing a towel-clad woman in Glad
stone of "What a babe." (But I cracked up when my warrior familiar replied
"Towel not good armor." This game does have its humorous moments.) Playing
a character of the opposite gender, in itself, is not at all a gamebreaking
experience for me, as I've enjoyed games where the protagonist is male. So
this isn't some shrill diatribe about not having the option to play a
female. But when the developers seem to have expected that gamer is male
and pander to what they think that only males only would enjoy is a direct
turnoff. In effect, it says to me that they don't care about women as game
buyers and I've personally given them quite a few gaming dollars over the
years.
Despite these serious flaws, I often enjoyed myself while playing the game,
which is why it barely eeked out a 3-star rating in my opinion. Apparently,
Westwood didn't care all that much about this particular game because they
didn't even bother to give it a subtitle like the first two LOLs in the
series and obviously rushed it out the door. If you can play past the often
horrendous
graphics, enjoy adventure games and RPGs (albeit weak), can wait for a patch
(hopefully), LOL III will give you some hours of amusement while waiting for
something better to come along.
System Requirements
Windows 98/95/NT 4.0
Pentium 166 or higher
32 Mb of RAM,
450 HD space
4x CD-ROM drive or faster
16-bit DirectSound compatible sound card
DirectX 6.0 compatible video card with 1Mb of RAM (2Mb recommended)
Microsoft compatible mouse and mouse driver
Native support for Voodoo and Voodoo2 3Dfx chipsets. All other 3D hardware
support via Direct3d
***********************************
Lynn Moncrief
(tech...@pacbell.net)
“Those who live by the sword get shot by those who don't.” -unknown
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