Lands of Lore III review (part 1)
Lynn Moncrief
My review of Lands of Lore III can be read at:
http://www.mpog.com/reviews/software/rpg/landsoflore3/
Or here, if you scroll down. ;-D
Lands of Lore III
(Lands of Chore)
Rated: 3 stars
Lands of Lore III opens with a cut-scene where the main character, Copper
Legre, is sitting at a campfire with his father and bickering with his
half-brothers. Copper is the half-breed son of his human father, the king of
Gladstone, and his father's half-Dracoid mistress. Suddenly, a fiendish hound
from hell (a Rift Hound) leaps into the gathering and quickly slaughters
the king and Copper's two brothers. Copper dashes into the forest with the
hound furiously leaping after him. He is tossed into a pit by the Rift Hound,
narrowly escaping the fate of his father and brothers. But his soul ripped from
him by the hound in the process. He awakens near a cave where the game, now
having begun, leads you in tutorial fashion to pick up your inventory and
journal and in the beginnings of the art of combat. Soulless, Copper is
temporarily kept alive by a ward bestowed upon him by Dawn, head of the
Talamari (mage's) guild. Not only must he find his soul, but also he must
find and join the shards of a mirror to close the rifts between the dimensions
(which is how the Rift Hound got through). These are the two main quests of the
game.
LOL III contains very enjoyable innovations to the RPG genre. You chose the
class of your character by joining an appropriate guild. Your familiar,
depending on its guild affiliation, will perform a number of important tasks
for you, such as aiding you in combat, healing you, and finding objects.
There are four guilds to choose from: the Iron Ring (warriors' guild), the
Talamari
(mage's guild), the Order of the Finch (clerics' guild), and the Bacchanal
(thieves' "guild"). You can (and should) choose a familiar from any of the
guilds. (You can have only one familiar and cannot change your it once
chosen.)I strongly recommend selecting a familiar from a guild different from
the guild(s) you join so it will complement your abilities. I played the game
as a mage with a warriors' guild familiar. In many RPGs, the mage is the most
difficult character to play, but because of LOL III's familiar system, it is
quite playable even as a beginner. Another thing I found great about having a
familiar is that it reduces the "loneliness" of a partyless, first-person game.
The dual or multi-classing aspect of RPGs is duplicated by the ability to join
multiple guilds. However, advancement is slowed because experience is divided
among them (as in dual or multi-classing in other RPGs).
Unlike some other RPGs, character development and abilities are not tied to
stats, a boon for those who would rather not deal with them. Your character's
progress within his current level is graphically displayed by a vertical
"thermometer" in the "Guild's section of your journal. While AD&D aficionados
may not be pleased with this, I found it a welcome change, though I missed not
knowing how many experience points I gained for killing enemies or completing
quests (if any).
Determining which genre LOL III truly belongs to is difficult. The game
contains RPG and first-person adventure elements. As in RPGs, you can
select your character's class, accomplished by joining the appropriate
guild(s), increase your skill level and abilities through experience, and
go on quests (though this game has way too few of them). The similarity to
adventure games is that the game is filled with puzzles, including jumping
and "twitch" puzzles and those push the buttons (or move items) in the
right order puzzles that we've seen so many times before in first-person
adventure and FPS games.
LOL III is played from a first-person perspective and its similarities to
first-person shooters go beyond just the perspective. Though you don't see an
outstretched hand or weapon leading on the screen, as you do in FPS's,
movement using the keyboard is identical to Quake, Doom, etc., including
strafing movements. In fact, FPS gamers would feel right at home in LOL
III, because their FPS skills will stand them in good stead in combat, even
down to
deploying different weapons (or spells) on the fly by selecting them with the
number keys.
Apparently, this multiple-genre approach was intended to appeal to a wide
range of gamers (except women as explained later). Those who happen to
enjoy all of the genres that the game covers should, in theory, find LOL
III a rich,
multi-faceted experience.
But, this attempt to please a wide variety of gamers, with something in it for
everyone, ends up potentially displeasing purists or gamers who dislike a
particular genre. Those who expected this game to be a true RPG as I did
are likely to be disappointed.
Being that the story IS about Copper, not having other characters to chose from
is quite understandable. But the inability to choose lines of dialog, let alone
the direction it takes, diminishes the roleplaying experience. Clicking on a
NPC will usually get you a poorly animated (the jerky, repetitive head bobbings
and wild flailing gestures of some of these pixellated constructs are pathetic)
and poorly scripted dialog where the NPC imparts useless information and
Copper prattles about not being able to find his soul or the mirror shards.
Given this state of affairs, fortunately there aren't that many NPCs to
interact meaningfully with.
Another drawback to the multi-genre approach is that, if you don't like a
particular genre, aspects belonging to that genre in the game may be annoying
or downright irritating to some gamers. For example, I don't like many puzzles
and therefore don't truly enjoy point-and-click-forever,
twitch-at-the-right-microsecond, jump-onto-the-right-pixel games. Yes, I
did review and enjoy a point-and-click adventure game here (John Saul's
Blackstone Chronicles), but that game allowed you to receive the solution
to a difficult puzzle so you could move on if you became tired of it. In
LOL III, on the other hand, you must find the solutions to the puzzles or
you're stuck. Period. This made reviewing this game a pain at times,
because I had to slog through the puzzles and crawl endlessly along narrow
ledges, activities that I personally find tedious. (I don't mind slogging
through difficult battles over and over because I enjoy combat.) LOL III's
packaging and advertising led me to believe that this was a RPG, not an
adventure game, so I was quite annoyed to discover it had a lot of
adventure game elements, a genre I try to avoid. At any rate, my dislike of
adventure games doesn't affect the rating I gave LOL III because I know
that many gamers like them.
The interface is excellent. Inventory items are stored in belts that can be
easily rotated by the square bracket keys. The 30 slots, five to each belt,
seem to be sufficient, but you manage to quickly fill them, despite the
fact that identical items can be stacked in a slot. Spells are "stored" in
similar belts and are also readily accessed via hot keys.
(continued in part 2)
***********************************
Lynn Moncrief
(tech...@pacbell.net)
“Those who live by the sword get shot by those who don't.” -unknown
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