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Not the Greatest, but Still Worth a Look

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: December 24, 2003
Author: Amazon User

In the already overcrowded Real Time Strategy game genre, can Sony offer a fun, competitive product that meets or exceeds the standards set by it's contemporaries?

The answer is a rather uninspiring yes and no.

Developed by Rapid Eye Entertainment, a group of former New World Computing programmers (responsible for the Heroes of Might and Magic series), LoE tries to take the Everquest MMORPG experience and squish it into the confines of RTS wargaming. The game centers around your "Lord", which, like the "Hero" unit in Blizzard's Warcraft III, is the leader of an army of creatures you work to upgrade and develop into a conquering force. Lords are members of several different "factions" which determine what kinds of armies you can raise. As with both Warcraft III and Everquest, you need to level up and advance your Lord by defeating other enemies and obtaining experience points as well as complete mission objectives in order to advance in the game. Unlike WCIII, however, you can actually level up your troops and even "knight" up to two troops to give them powers nearly equivalent to your lord. This feature alone is what sets LOE apart from any other RTS on the market today and presents some very interesting and unique gameplay strategies.

As with all other RTS games, you accumulate resources to build buildings and purchase upgrades to train and outfit your army. In this case, there is only a single resource: platinum. The "money" system is simpler than in other RTS games in that the challenge lies in budgeting your platinum on buying the right buildings and units rather than trying to acquire a wide variety of different resources.

But with the leveling system, it's quite possible to take a group of basic troops up to very high levels without ever needing to create specialized units.

There are two primary modes: a single player "campaign" which involves completing a series of scenarios with some light RPG elements interspersed in between, and a multiplayer mode where you can fight other players online. The single player game is servicable at best, with an only casually interesting storyline (disappointing, given the amount of history and lore in EQ). Many of the maps seem somewhat linear in design and the objectives are nothing any RTS gamer hasn't seen before.

In fact, many will argue that besides the leveling aspect, there isn't much in LOE that hasn't been done already, and implemented better. In particular, the AI/pathing is irritatingly bad with units often taking the longest, most baffling route to get to whereever it was you wanted them to go. They also have an annoyingly short attention span and will sometimes disregard orders to stay put and go run off and attack things when you don't want them to.

This alone is what really hurts the game in the long run. The RTS field has reached maturity to where these types of problems simply aren't acceptable anymore and most players will pass on the game because of it.

Which is somewhat of a shame, since underneath the rough elements is a relatively intriguing RTS game. The graphics and animation in the game are quite good, with realistically-drawn 3D models and cool spell effects. In addition, one of the most entertaining aspects of Everquest, the level up "Ding" sound, is retained here and is just as satisfying as it was in the MMORPG.

Also, the idea of leveling up troops does create an extra dimension of strategy, especially in multiplayer, where you can try to kill NPCs to gain more experience before attacking your enemies.

Unfortunately, many reviews have complained that there aren't enough differences between the units of each faction to make battles interesting. Those people inevitably rely on the obvious warrior-healer strategy for their army, but more inventive players will likely find other ways to develop their forces.

So here's the rundown:

Pros:
Graphics & Animation are solid--the zoom feature is nice.
The level up system is entertaining--all troops can advance!
Some RPG elements to break up the monotony.
Buy and register the game with an EQ account in good standing before Jan 3, 2004 and you will be invited to EQII Beta

Cons:
Atrocious AI and Pathing algorithms
Units don't always respond to commands
Game balance: there is little incentive to find different strategies to win
Units can seem too similar no matter which faction you play

Overall, this is an average game with limited entertainment value. I thought most of the reviews of the game so far were too harsh, but agree there are enough issues with the game that prevent me from making a recommendation (especially at the retail price that Sony wants you to pay). I would recommend obtaining the demo first, then purchasing the game at a discounted price if you decide you really want it.

Way better than Warcraft 3

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 13 / 21
Date: December 02, 2003
Author: Amazon User

This game is soooo cool. It takes the role playing aspect of the online Everquest and adds it to a great rpg model. All my units can level up, not just the lord; which is a huge improvement over Warcraft where just the hero could level up. Plus all my soldiers and such and hold items too! so I can make them stronger and even knight them, so they gain Lord like abilities. I've heard what people say about it against warcraft and i don't see what they talking about- LoE is so much better in what I can do with my armies in an individual level it's not even funny. And the art and game play is sooo much better than WC3's that there is no comparison. LoE just simply plays better, looks better and everyone should play it b/c it's a great game.

You mean Warcraft Killer!!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 10 / 16
Date: December 02, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Lots of hype about this being a Warcraft 3 clone. Yes, it is an RTS. Yes, it is fantasy with elves and dwarves. Beyond those, Lords of Everquest is clearly a game that can stand on it's own. After playing through the first 5 Shadowrealm missions, the game has taken on a different feel than any other I have played. I found myself grouping my favorite units together, and naming them and I am able to play through a lot of it with this small group. It has a very RPG feel to me with the stradegy aspect that I really enjoy. I hope this is the first in a francise for Lords of Everquest.

Great game...period.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 10 / 19
Date: December 02, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I got my copy this morning when the stores opened and I've had so much fun playing through the first few missions of the Elddar Alliance campaign that I had to get online and buy a copy as a gift for a friend of mine.

Some of the reviews here were not of this game, so make sure you read carefully. I researched quite a bit about this game and most of the sites I checked had great things to say about it. After playing it myself, I'd have to agree that this is definitely a game for RTS fans. If you're new to the RTS genre, you'll love the story and look of the characters. If you're an RTS veteran, you probably already know that this game has some great elements that allow it rise to the top.

If you're one of the masses that KNOW that the best RTS game to be produced within the last 15 years was Starcraft, then you'll be pleasantly surprised to play a game that may (only time will tell) be as equally balanced and enjoyable as that great title.

It's one thing to come out with nice movies and intro's for your mediocre game...it's something completely different to actually spend your money and effort on the things that make an RTS great...and that's balance and diversity, something Lords of Everquest has O'plenty.

Great game for any RTS fan!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 9
Date: December 02, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I played all the way through 2 of the 3 campaigns in this game. It took around 40 or 50 hours...and I had a great time playing! The experience was well worth the money spent. The look of the game is spectacular, head and shoulders above anything else within the same genre (compare WCIII characters next to LOE characters and you'll see what I mean). The Lords are extremely fun to play and control. I played through the Dawn Brotherhood campaign with Sakti the Monk and she was so powerful late in the campaign that I would walk her into some of the smaller battles alone, just to gain all the experience. This game is all about leveling your troops and being smart about your Lord and Knight aura's. So, I don't see how this game can be compared to the cartoony WCIII which doesn't have leveling and aura's.

If you don't believe me, check out some of the reviews on the big gaming sites...they all love the game.

A Festering Pile of Mediocrity with a Dash of Apathy

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 9
Date: December 16, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I'm actually in shock that this game was released. Regardless of the investment in development, Sony should have looked at the final product, cancelled the whole project, and swept it under the rug.

Let's get specific, shall we?

Storyline:

Utterly uninspired, rehashed, redone, predictable, and dull. Voice acting so awful you'd swear it was intentional. With four years of world-building in the Everquest franchise, you'd think they could make up something at least passable. Wrong.

Graphics:

So terrible that it's difficult to comprehend that this game isn't something you bought three years ago and forgot about, then found in the bottom of a drawer. Units are awkward, poorly crafted, unoriginal pieces of dung that don't withstand any scrutiny.

It isn't so much the painfully low polygon count on units as the poor artwork that led such things to exist. I've heard that a lot of companys are outsourcing programming work overseas to bottom dollar workers, but I didn't know that applied to artists and designers. It's painful to look at a "hero" unit with a giant smile frozen on his one-polygon face while he laments the death of his closest friend in a melodramatic tone.

Gameplay:

Unintuitive, tedious, and one-dimensional. There is no need for strategy. Simply select all your units and send them at the enemy, then pick your nose like a slack-jawed dullard and watch for several minutes as the overwhelmingly stupid AI eventually kills something in spite of itself.

Units wander aimlessly in circles while other units blindly flail at them from behind. Troops stampede recklessly to persue their foes to whatever end. I would estimate that the unit AI took approximately three minutes to jot down on the back of a cocktail napkin at 2:00 AM after consuming about a gallon of vodka directly out of a plastic bottle.

Interaction with the environment? Nonexistent. Despite some awkward attempts at eye candy, it's almost entirely meaningless in terms of affecting strategy.

Sound:

Turn it off. Enough said.

Summary:

Everything about this game has been copied from somewhere else. Most of its game mechanics are ripped directly from Warcraft III. Unfortunately, Sony lacks the talent of Blizzard. They lack the attention to detail, they lack the standards of quality, and they lack the vision.

My question to Sony is this: If you're going to do something that's already been done, and do it so poorly, why do it at all?

This game is a blatant money-grab. Sony is banking on the uninformed consumer and die-hard Everquest player to buy it without thinking.

Don't prove them right. If you need a RTS game, go buy Warcraft III. If you already own it, go play it again. If you want Warcraft III to have that "Everquest" feel, punch yourself in the groin, stab yourself in the eye with a pencil, and play Warcraft III. Just don't buy Lords of Everquest. It brings a new definition to the word "Pain."

Sony did this?

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: December 22, 2003
Author: Amazon User

First off let me just say that the only reason I bought this game was for the invite to EQ2 beta... Now then, after loading it up and playing it for all of maybe 8 minutes, I turned it off and went back to CoD. I have been playing EQ since 99' and i have to say that in 4 years I have never really been disapointed at Sony. That changes today. I can't for the life of me figure out why a company that is making as much as they are on EQ, would waste so much time and money developing a title such is LoEQ... Playing it has made me anticipate EQ2 more, for the fact that I need a good game to wash out the vile thoughts I have had about how to best get rid of it. One thought was throwing it off a building, although I would feel for the people at the bottom, having crap rain down on them from above..

This game was a waste of time, not so much money for the fact that there is a beta invite in the package, but this game is by far the worst game I have played since "Real War". And another thing..dont you think that if you can only register your product for the beta one day, 23 hours and 59 minutes, that the site will be lagged out or down most of the day? That sounds like a trap, like a gamble, they say you are sure to get a slot when you register, but whats to stop them from saying " The server was up, but you thousands of people just forgot to do it, no, this is a gamble, be warned... There is no guerantee anyone will get into the Beta of EQ2 this way. I hope they take into account long time users of EQ, I'm still playing it, even after all these years.

5 stars or one star? hmm look at the conflict here!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 8
Date: December 17, 2003
Author: Amazon User

How interesting it is that people either LOVE this game (give it 5 stars) or HATE this game (give it one star).

I find it very strange that there is a long string of successive GOOD reviews of this game. I really makes me wish I had a ton of money I could spend to investigate who these good reviewers are, because having just read them all very closely, I have some strong suspicions.

Why? Simple - this game, as any TRUE RTS lover will tell you, SUCKS!!!!!!!!

Look, Sony does NOT deserve a dime for this title, not a dime.

They bribed Everquest players into buying it by offering them a guaranteed spot in Everquest 2 beta if they purchase LoE. Why? Simple - the Everquest community is for the most part a very hardcore gaming community who knowwhat's up. They don't just play EQ, they are the hardcore gamers who know all about games like warcraft. They know how to find out if a title is worth buying before they make the purchase.

The word on the streets is this, my gaming friends:

Lords of Everquest is a quick money grab campaign; an attempt by Sony to quickly get a piece of the RTS pie, and then run with the cash while all the dissapointed gamers moan and groan about what a terrible title it is they bought. How can they accomplish this ultimate goal when people come to places like amazon only to read negative after negative reviews? They can't. Hence the 5 star reviews you've read. Look at them closely. Look at how cliche' they are, how utterly adolescent. They were written that way for a reason, if you ask me. To se4em believable. Look close, don't let 'em fool ya.

Do not buy into these good reviews you read. Do not buy this game. I just don't nkow what else to say.

Buy Warcraft 3 instead folks

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 15
Date: January 05, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Lords of Everquest is obviously an attempt for Sony to get revenge on Blizzard since Blizzard is taking their Warcraft world into the Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game Genre(a genre that Everquest put on the map). Only problem is...Blizzard knows how to translate Warcraft(Real Time Strategy Game)into an MMORPG...unlike Sony who obviously does NOT know how to translate Everquest into an RTS game.

I laughed at my friend when he showed me he bought this game for his PC. He was like "Shut up, how was I supposed to know this game was garbage!!" LOL! Funny stuff.

I suggest you only buy this game if you can get it for under 20 dollars otherwise invest your money into WarCraft.

Top Tier budget, graphics, voice talent, low tier design!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: May 17, 2005
Author: Amazon User

It's funny that I have so much admiration for a product and company that has so little admiration for me... Hmm..deep statement. But anyways, I've been reading the reviews and I can tell that most of the people who have reviewed this game are obvious Warcraft fanboys. Meaning they won't even bother to give this game a critical review. So I decided to type up my own review on Lords of Everquest. As my title suggest there are a lot of things that are quite spectacular about this game. It is certainly worth more than 1 or 2 stars. I'll start with pros (good news) amd finish with the cons(bad news).

The pros are that this game has great graphics. The units are more true to size ratio to buildings and the graphics have a more photorealistic look as opposed to the big, blocky coloring book graphics of Warcraft 3. Also this game has a true population limit of like 45 units. This is a true 45 meaning you can actually build 45 units. In Warcraft 3 there is a point total of 75 and some units cost more than 1 point. In fact some units in WC3 cost like 8 points. So even though you have a population limit of 75, that population could be comprised of like 7 dragons and a few grunts. In LOE you will have room for 45 no matter how big the creature you build is. Also LOE at times pays some real nice attention to real world physics. For instance when units cross shallow water they move slower, which is how it should be but in WC3 they still move the same speed. LOE has a good deal of upgrades, some of them I found quite cool. And like all good RTS games there is that one army this is obviously head and shoulders above all the rest. In LOE, the Elddar Alliance is the Protoss of the game. Every game should have an unbalanced superpowerful army if for nothing else than to give the players something to log onto message forums and bitch about. Mounted units can be thrown from their mounts and then say funny phrases when they now have to walk around. Speaking of phrases this leads to the biggest bonus feature of LOE. The voice talent. LOE has assembled the best voice talent probably in the history of voice acting in one game. Some of the legends in anime have lent their voices to this game like Wendee Lee from Cowboy Beebop, Kevin Conroy from Justice League, and even the guy that plays Bato from the Ghost in the Shell anime. They have lots of other B+ voice talent too like Fairuza Balk, Cree Summer, and Claudia Black. It's really just cool to hear all these celebrities in a video game, which is kind of an indicator of the budget this game had. Which in turn makes you kinda wonder how they went so wrong in the gameplay development.

This leads me to the cons of this game. First off this game has tons of bugs. For instance, if you send flying units off across the map, they don't fly over cliffs or bodies of water but rather they will fly around cliffs and travel across shallow bodies of water like the ground units do. Also the A.I. is pretty bad. Unit's don't always attack when you tell them too and for units that are so undisciplined their should be a button that allows you to give them an "attitude" similar to the ones in the Warlord Battlecry game. So like you could tell your units to have a defensive attitude so even when you move them around they won't go running after anything they see but in this game they do and this can be frustrating. Also the range on some of the archers like the Wood Elf archers is a joke. These guys have a maximum range of like 15 feet it seems. There is almost little benefit to having range units beside the fact that they can seem to just barely shoot over the shoulder of the fighters. They have also copied Warcraft in having their units say some funny things if you click on them over and over again. The campaign battles can be deceiving about this game. In the campaign the battle are all just a small warband run through a series of winding, twisting forest. Good RTS games have large battles on open frontiers with a few, scaled down "seek and destory" quests thrown in the side. But if you can manage to play the game single player you will be able to play some of those wide open, large battles. That's another bad thing, the single player skirmish option is broke. You can get around this by hosting a lan game and selecting a computer opponent. But this shouldn't have to be done. Also there is a severe lack of nice scenery for the battles. Most of the fighting takes place on wide open, barren wastelands, with no eye candy like temples, shrines, castles and bridges. Just a few gnoll campsites here and there. Also this game suffers from the same defensive shortcomings as WC3. No walls. Not that I'm in love with walls, it's just that in some cases a large band of enemies can just charge right around your turrets and weave their way through your buildings and start slaying your workers. Walls could prevent this. Casual RTS players don't see this but the pros take note of this.

All in all this game is okay. You can tell that by the way they got some things spot on and some things terrible that this game must have been rushed. It certainly wasn't because of budget. But there is still not excuse for this. The players, namely myself, gave those guys tons of advice and they did not seem to take it. In all I'd say this game falls just a notch behind Warcraft 3, but it's certainly worth more than 2 stars if you can find a crafty way to get single player and multi player lan games going. On its own it's worth about 3 stars. If you thrown in the great voice talent, then its' worth 4 stars.

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