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Wow. All I can say is wow.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: March 27, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Ok, I can say a little more. A lot more actually. Where to start? I still consider LOTR2 to be one of the best games I've ever played. The AI was dumb but it was a super fun game - 5 stars all the way. I've patched and played this one now and would like to point out the following to anyone thinking this is going to be like LOTR2:

1) No documentation! The manual isn't even close to sufficient and online/on cd adds nothing. This will be a recurring theme in my review.
2) Heavy hardware required. I'm running an AMD 2200+ (clock rate ~1800MHz), 512 DDR400, and a Radeon 9700 Pro with latest drivers. I can watch the arrows move frame by frame during sieges with only 2 of their units fighting 3-5 of mine. "Recommended" hardware is 1500MHz and a Radeon 8500. Liars.
3) To upgrade your castle you save money. My money keeps getting stolen after saving for 30 real-world minutes. They take almost all of it and I have no idea how or how to stop them (DOCUMENTATION!!!).
4) You can accidentally downgrade your castle since they present inferior designs as upgrade options, yet still charging you money to do it. There are no descriptions in the game or in the manual describing what different castles are capable of. DOCUMENTATION!!!
5) Hiring mercenaries is a guessing game since the in-game description simply tells you there title, like siege engineer, and says he "does not serve you". No help in manual...getting tired of typing DOCUMENTATION.
6) I accidentally clicked on an ally's territory with my army and was immediately at war, despite being 2 territories away and changing back immediately. Stupid.
7) You can't zoom in or out during battle, which means it's *very* hard to tell which troops you are facing. The graphics are not that good despite being so hardware intensive.
8) During a siege I decided to go around to the castle's back wall since the defenders were all ammassed on the front walls. The defenders did not re-position themselves to meet me. Even worse, Once I climbed the walls my guys just kind of milled about, ocassionally doing something I ordered them to...kinda. Even worser (new word), once I was finally inside the courtyard, I could not target the defenders! So I just sat there gaping while my guys stood right next to the defenders who had about 3 archers and killed all my guys. I tried this a few times with the same results.
9) You can't conquer outlying territories and annex them anymore. You can devastate them, but you have to conquer the main castle, at which time you get all of the territories. This took a huge element of the game away for me.
10) As previous reviewers noted, all micro-management is gone. You drop a merchant on to a piece of land and never come back. Same with a peasant for food. No control, no fun. Maybe there are more options but there is no DOCUMENTATION!!!
11) Attacking an army on the field is lame. If you set up two units to attack one unit from different angles, both your units just bee-line right for the center of the enemy unit anyway. Not anything like the cool tricks you could play with the Total War series. No usage of terrain or weather or anything.

I work at a telco, I understand what tough times mean to a company but this is ridiculous. Sierra has fleeced me and I'm angry.

what a waste

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 23 / 31
Date: March 21, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Not only did I waste my $20.00 on this game but I wasted another $20.00 on the strategy guide. Keep your money and play the old Lords of the Realm games. I will have to think long and hard befor I buy another game by Sierra.

Not even value for money at $20. It's just not fun.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 21 / 22
Date: March 19, 2004
Author: Amazon User

LOTR2 was a classic game. LOTR3 should have expanded on the things that made LOTR2 good, but strangely removes all the interesting bits in managing your lands, and leaves you with kind of a weaker version of a "Total War" title.

Everything happens in real time, which means armies *crawl* across the global map far to slowly. This would have been better handled as a turn based element. Not fun.

Individual parcels of land don't seem to be anymore valuable than any other parecls of land. You don't seem to get invovled into that "damn I really need that mine/deposit/wood". No choke points on the maps either. Not fun.

Actual battles are frenzied, quick, and extremely hard to control. Calvary types can get arcoss the battle maps faster than I can even select my troops and get them into some sort of logical order. Not fun.

There are many possible formations and stances for individual troops, but no logical formations for groupings of more than one troop type. I.e. if you select a troop of archers and a troop of pikemen for instance and tell them to march to a location, they march off as if the others didn't exist. That means the faster moving archers arrive first and get wasted by melee types, then the pikes arrive, who engage the enemy melee types, but get mowed down by the enemy archers. Lightly armored ranged troops should fall in behind melee troops. Other games have been doing this for years now. Whats the problem? Not fun.

Not too much point trying flanking with calvary either. The lighter faster troops arrive first, so you may as well just plough straight into them. My battle tactics have simply been to pause the game, select all troops, and direct them all to attack en mass at the center of the enemies ranks. Mindless. Not fun.

Attacking castles is painful. You can't seige them as in LOTR2, you just attack with your current troops straight away. Troops scale the walls etc, but this combat seems buggy and confusing. Units appear to get get trapped up on the walls, and no quick capture the flag to end battles. LOTR2 is *much* better in this aspect.

No skirmish mode. Yep. NO SKIRMISH MODE. Not fun.

I'd suggest looking around for "Kohan Immortal Sovereigns", or a "Total War" game over this one.

Disappointment

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 13 / 13
Date: April 04, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Well to start, I should have listened to the reviews. I read the negative reviews and thought that they could not be accurate. As a big fan of Lords 2 I felt that Lords 3 would be at least as good. Well I was totaly wrong. This game is a total disappointment. The only action is in choosing vasels to run your realm. Well as in Lords 2 I enjoyed runing all aspects. What made Lords 2 a great game were many little fun things to do such as choosing which weapons the blacksmith would produce, choosing what to put on which field, coming up with battle strategies and repairing damaged castles. Lords 3 has none of this. I say to Sierra shame on you, and I will think long and hard before buying a Sierra game again. You should save face and refund the fans money. To the game producers go play Lords 2 and see how you ruined such a good title. To the fans, do what I did not do and trust the reviews.

Not nearly as good as the second one!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 16 / 17
Date: January 29, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This is unbelievable. All the great things about the Lords of the Realm II have been removed and nothing good has been added. Gone is the management of the territory resources, instead you simply assign a vassal to an area and they produce just one type of resources. To make matters worse, you armies are produced automatically so you dont even get to choose your army types. The battles start automatically but you are not even taken to the battlefield automatically so you can ened up missing the battle if you dont go there right away. I read the other reviews but I thought the sencond one was such fun I should give this one a try. Big mistake save your money.

Awful and insulting to player's intelligence

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 12 / 12
Date: March 29, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Who does Vivendi take us for? I am so insulted by this game that I would not let a 2-year-old kid play it, because it would be so far below his intellectual capabilities that continued exposure would eventually decrease his IQ to the equivalent of that of a can of tuna fish. This game should have a player upper age limit of ONE!!!

Or maybe I am wrong, and maybe there is an upper IQ limit of 20 or 30 specified in the nonexistent game manual which came with the European version of the game.

The user interface is sad, empty, and devoid of life, detail, and options. The gameplay is just not there - it's like driving a car in which you don't even have to hold the steering wheel, you just assign vassals to do it for you. And there is not much to be done to begin with. 4 types of vassals, you assign them and then you are done with them, and then you have to watch your armies crawl across the land and that's pretty much all there is to do in this game.

No cows, no sheep, no blacksmiths, no making your own weapons, and your money gets stolen every 30 minutes or real time, with no way to prevent it or otherwise do anything about it. Even the diplomacy is worse than in Lords 2. They say that there is in-depth diplomacy in the game. However, you cannot even order an ally to attack an enemy. Where is the depth?

The battles are sad. In the good old Lords 1 & 2, I was able to control every single soldier, and in this great new sequel I can only control complete companies. Gone is the beauty of luring the enemy archers with a knight into a group of knights waiting on the other side of the forest.

There are no terrain obstacles, there is no real strategy in the battles, and even if there was, the units move far too slowly so it doesn't matter anyway. Also, when units climb castle walls, they tend to get stuck in them, and that is not cool - especially if the enemy has archers on another castle wall - then you have automatically lost the battle. The castles look ridiculous - they look like children's toys, and there are no moats or anything like that.

The game took very long to load, and I have AMD Athlon XP 2400+, 1 GB RAM, and 128 MB ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, under Windows XP. If that is not good enough, I don't know what is. And for taking so long to load, the graphics were not even decent by today's standards.

I liked the music, it was pretty interesting. But that is about the only decent part of the game.

There is no information given about anything in the game. I can understand that they wanted to get away from resource gathering, but this is ridiculous. There is not even a report on how many counties I have, whether the people are happy - perhaps the game is trying to be realistic and to show us that in the Middle Ages the kings didn't care about whether their subjects are happy but I do care about that.

There is a very old abandonware RTS game called Metal Marines, which one can find in the Home of the Underdogs. The game is ancient (poor graphics, poor sound, poor music, but GREAT spirit) but it is so much more fun than this 21st century piece of bad software. Lords Of The Realm 3 has absolutely no spirit whatsoever, not to mention the complete and utter lack of replayability.

I hate the fact that there is no return policy for the game in retail stores. It's not like I am going to make illegal copies of this game - I don't see why anyone would, it's absolutely horrible. No wonder the price was reduced to $20 so quickly - but the game should be recalled - I wouldn't take it for free now that I know how bad it is.

Even the Shockwave-based catapult game which is offered for free download at the Lords 3 official website is a better and more fun game than Lords 3.

My advice is, whoever you are, whatever you like, stay away from this game, because you won't like it - especially not if you liked those wonderful games Lords 1 & 2.

33 Reviews deleted again?

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: March 28, 2004
Author: Amazon User

The reviews of many unahappy gamers seem to have gone missing yet once again.

If you are a fan of the first 2 Lords of the Realm games you will be very dissapointed with this game. The fun aspects of the turn based strategy game have been reduced or completely cut and the real time strategy is buggy, slow, tedious and boring. Even though the price has been cut in half, I would not play this game past a few minutes if it were free.

Terrible Gameplay

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 11 / 13
Date: March 19, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Being a huge fan of Lords of the Realm 2, I had high expectations for Lords 3. After playing it, the $20 price tag makes sense. In my opinion, the game is horrible. They've taken all of the best aspects from Lords of the Realm 2, removed them, and fixed up the graphics a bit (which aren't too impressive). Most the economical aspects of Lords 2 have been destroyed, and the battles are fairly boring and somewhat buggy. After waiting for a long time for this release I'm extremely dissapointed. If I could return this game for half the cost I payed for it I would.

DO NOT BUY

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 11 / 11
Date: July 18, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Worst game ever... it's as if the game has devolved back to the level of LOTRI...unbelievable waste of money. Clearly some things must have been rushed (siege equipment, lack of micromanagement of your vassals and their lands, etc.). For anyone who loved the balance of state management w/ diplomacy and war that made LOTRII great will be sadly disappointed. Hopefully they're redeem themselves by making LOTRIV less like the crap game I just wasted $20 on.

WHY MUST STUPID PEOPLE RATE A GAME NOT OUT

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 10 / 12
Date: May 05, 2004
Author: Amazon User

THIS IS TOWARD Pierre, games not out and you give it a five star rating.PLEAAAAASSSSEEE!!!!. Get the real deal not a beta version before rating, and dont rate it off of old games.

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