Lands of Lore III

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Review: Lands of Lore III

This time out, you're Copper LeGre--the half-Dracoid nephew to Gladstone's king. You're enduring some grim bonding with your father and hostile half-brothers when the party is set upon by a pack of rift hounds. Your erstwhile family is killed and your own life barely saved by magical intervention. Your soul, however, is missing, and the quest to recover it will take you to five dimensions via portals in the Gladstone countryside: a lava world, an ice world, a desert world, and so forth.

The developer's stated goal in Lands of Lore III was to draw the series back toward its role-playing origins. The original 1993 game was an extension of the developer's two mainstream RPGs in the Eye of the Beholder series, but the 1997 follow-up was more a first-person action game and an adventure.

However, the designers haven't dragged it all that far. LoL3 doesn't have character creation or party management, and it uses just four character classes via guilds for clerics, mages, fighters, and thieves. (Copper can join as many or as few as he wants.) It's role-playing without the burdens of role-playing, and this keeps the game light and airy.

In fact, it's an immensely amiable game--one that wants badly to be liked, and that, within its means, is willing to do a great deal to secure the player's attention and affection. The sheer, happy sprawl of its vast levels ensures you'll be at it for some good time. (I spent one afternoon just uncovering all the loot sequestered in Gladstone proper.) The interface is almost endearing in its eagerness to alert the player to progress made and information uncovered. (However, the lack of discrimination between idle chitchat and vital information makes the game's record of your conversations effectively useless.) And the story, while preserving Guardian's sense of the epic, doesn't sacrifice its sense of the silly. Copper's overwrought declarations in combat will make you smirk (until you get sick of hearing them), and his exchanges with the Draracle's oh-so-difficult former assistant will make you laugh out loud.

However, LoL3, built on the same engine used in Guardians, often doesn't have the feel of a true 3D game. In fairness, this is not always an issue. For instance, at the game's crossroads in the city of Gladstone, you can cross a bridge over the central river, and then hop off and walk under it without ever feeling you've bumped up against a limit of the game engine.

But graduates of games created under the "2.5D" engines of the mid-'90s will quickly recognize LoL3's drunken perspectives when looking up and down, in the pixilated population of Gladstone and in the unrealistic slither of 2D objects within the game world. The bottom line is that, despite some striking backdrops (as in the grotto where the game begins), it feels old, and while I don't suggest a direct corollary between high technology and fun, that's a bad feeling on which to begin a game.

Moreover, the game doesn't enforce a rational code of conduct. The guards in Gladstone allowed me to slaughter virtually everyone in town for the contents of their pockets--tradespeople, innocent passersby, back-alley ne'er-do-wells--only to finally balk when I sought to extend this special brand of hospitality to Guild elders. The supposedly smart autosave system managed to record over my character's progress while he was in prison (i.e., dead), and again while he was falling into lava (i.e., about to be dead). While the level design is relatively open, the designers still don't really know how to handle water, and certain dungeon segments are unaccountably dreary. The enemy AI is of the fight-until-dead variety.

While Copper will pipe up with a helpful comment--for instance, that the rat-infested warehouse you have to clear early in the game is empty--the game is oddly silent on other issues. (In the Frozen Waste, he can drop into water at one point with no ill effects, while, in another, identical-looking water kills him instantly. Combat with the bikini-clad Amazons invariably led to break-ups in the sound and a plummeting frame rate. And when I revisited the world to follow a road-not-taken, the game crashed persistently in combat with the two-headed tigers.

Overall, it's a mixed bag--weak enough at the technical end to disappoint, and strong enough in substance to encourage. If Lands of Lore ever really gets back to its roots--when its content and technology converged--watch out.

And, even now, watch and enjoy.-- Peter Olafson / GamePro