Posted on: August 24, 2012
seanjjordan
Игр: 824 Отзывов: 4
Dated, but definitely interesting
I was pleasantly surprised by the otherwise mediocre Lands of Lore 3 when it debuted because while it began as a typical fantasy RPG in the vein of the first two games (and thankfully, minus the annoying transformation gimmick of the second), it quickly diverged into a patchwork of different worlds that touched on sci-fi and horror. If nothing else, it was interesting. Like its predecessor, LOL3 is a first person RPG set in a 3D world, and though the graphics are blocky and dated and the combat is simplistic, the game does feature an adventure worth undertaking. The game begins in a castle called Gladstone Keep, and if you only play the first couple of hours, you'll find yourself wondering why you should even bother to keep playing. You do acquire a floating familiar that looks like the top half of a suit of armor, but the voice acting is really hammy and the characters are uninteresting. Eventually, you enter a rift that takes you to a lava world, and then another that takes you to a frozen world. This is all fairly typical fantasy fare. Then, things start to get nutty. You visit the hive-world of the floating, alien-like creatures called the Ruloi. You visit a strange horror world complete with a haunted house and weeping statues. And then you wander through a desert and emerge at... an old base sporting the Nod logo from Command and Conquer? And where your chief enemy is the Nod AI known as CABAL? As the realms get stranger, the game begins to lose any sense of its plot. It feels like a bunch of different games got slapped together into one. The promise of the first game's fantasy world is completely lost here, and many of the unfortunate choices from the second game (blocky levels, cheap deaths, persistent ceilings) are preserved due to the very limited 3D engine. The villain, Jakel, looks like the Ghost of Christmas Future and is about as personable. The ending is bewildering and anticlimactic. The game gets pretty tedious once you get through the out-of-place (though genuinely interesting) Nod base. The fully-acted movies from the second game are replaced with bad CG models in this game. And the graphics are particularly poor considering that the game was released in 1999 alongside far better games like System Shock 2, Unreal Tournament and the Half-Life expansions. Even if you liked the first two games in the series, you'll probably find this one to be less of a follow-up and more of a guilty pleasure. It's unfortunate that the Lands of Lore series never really rose up to become anything great, but maybe this was the best Westwood Studios could do amidst their financial difficulties. Still, it's an interesting, if flawed, gem, and worth a play if you really like 3D RPGs from that era.
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