Lords of the Realm 3

Rating:
Summary: Unfortunately not what I expected
Review: Of course being a LOTR II fan, I had high hopes for this game. After a few hours of play and being really bored, I thought to myself, "maybe I just don't know how to play this game yet." Don't bother reading the manual, it doesn't help at all, it just gives a real vague overview of the game.

Now after reading other's reviews I know I wasn't alone in being rather unexcited about this game. I give it two stars because I like the battle scenes a lot more than in the first game. But that is it. It's true that the land management being gone makes this game a lot more boring. It just feels like the player places their vassals and occasionally fight some battles with armies moving slower than molasses and spends a lot of time just waiting. Don't bother with this one.

Rating:
Summary: This is just the demo right? Right?!
Review: It's a trick, get an axe! I just bought it. Save yourself the heart-ache. Sierra is obviously having some problems, and this is not pretty. Just say, "No." Don't make me say I told you so. Buy StarCraft by the same company. Buy Lords of the Realm I, II, or the Siege Pack. Try HomeWorld. They didn't finish this game and released it anyway. It is so bad, you'll just about cry. Hint: If it was 1987, I'd give it a 4. And, I'm not just writing for fans of first person shooters. Oh, those people will climb the walls. RTS people won't like this either.

Rating:
Summary: One of the worst games I ever played!
Review: Lord of the Realm I and II kick ass compared to this game. I couldn't even get into it. I gave it a chance because I waited so long for this release. If this was any other games I would of dropped it in the first 15 minutes. Luckily, I didn't pay for it and tested it out first. I knew something was up when it dropped from $50 to $20 and was delayed for years. Do not buy! total rip off! I could make a game better than this.

Rating:
Summary: what a mess
Review: What a huge mess. I was so excited last Christmas when I realized that they were making a third installment to Lords of the Realm. I checked its webpage almost daily. I could hardly wait to play a new and improved version of a game they made in 1996 that was flat out terrific. I even drove to a town 30 miles away in hopes of getting it on its supposed release day of March 16 (it actually was released on the 17th). I bought the strategy guide and a new video card in order to get it to work. Never in my gameplaying life have I ever felt so fleeced.
They took a perfectly good turn based strategy game and turned into colossal RTS mess. WHY!!??!!?? It has three platforms(strategic, political, and battle) that are all running at the same time. You can't spend enough time in any of them for fear that something will happen without your kwowledge. There is just too much going on at the same time. Now I thought the idea of regions divided into parcels and estate parcels was interesting, but i realized that you have to concure the estate parcel to do any good. You simply ignore the other parcels. Now i read the strategy guide and I will say that this game had loads of potential. Agents such as thieves, blacksmithes, corrupt priests, etc. Tons of new soldier types. All is wasted in order to try to make this more multiplayer savvy. Had they simply tried to improve on the first two versions, we might have had an awesome TBS game. I mean, this is what 8 years of ideas gets us??!! Med. total war is the closes thing I can think of to what I was hoping for. It won Game of the Year in 2002, AND IT IS TURN BASED!!!! I should have listened to the alarms that were going off when the price of the game dropped from $50 to $20. If you loved LOTR II, stay as far away from this one as you can.

Rating:
Summary: Awful and insulting to player's intelligence
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Lords of the Realm 3 (the Travesty)
Review: Those of you that were waiting for this title to be released because of your enjoyment of the previous versions do not bother buying this title. They changed the format to a continous real-time-strategy (and strategy is used very losely here) game. The game play is nothing like the previous games. Limited army creation, no manipulation of serfs to ensure the best allocations of production. You only need gold, which is constantly stolen, to create castles. To be honest I am finding this title very boring and if I had spent more than the $20.00 I would be very upset. "Lords of the Realm" should have never been in this title! It is very misleading because the great game play features of the previous title are lacking. It even flounders as a RTS!

Rating:
Summary: 33 Reviews deleted again?
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Horrible waste of time/money, previous reviews disappeared
Review: I don't know what is going on. I wrote a review for this game yesterday and checked to see if it was up today and there are now zero reviews! There were about 2 dozen 1-star reviews and a smattering of 4-5 star reviews from ppl who hadn't played the game yet but were sure it would rock. Amazon are you caving to vendors now?

Anyway, here is my review...again.

This game is a complete ripoff. LOTR2 is one of my favorite games of all time; if it ran on win2k I'd still play it (tip: it runs on XP in compatibility mode). LOTR3 is nothing like it. In fact they seemed to take everything good about LOTR2 out and replace it with ... nothing. Specifics:

1) Terrible documentation!!! The booklet that came with the game is completely insufficient and online/on cd docs are almost identical to the printed one. This is a recurring theme in my review. You are basically sitting there looking at stuff you can't click on wondering what to do.
2) All micro-management of resources is gone. You assign a peasant to a parcel of land and then ignore it completely as he makes food automatically. Same goes for soldiers and money. No ability to change what type of soldiers or food. Or maybe there is but there is NO DOCUMENTATION!!!
3) You can't conquer pieces or territory anymore. You can only devastate them and you have to take out the main castle and then you get all of the territories at once. This took a large part of the strategy out of the game.
4) Hiring mercs is a gamble because you only see their title like "siege engineer" and a tiny piece of info, which didn't include the cost of hiring them. Maybe there is a way to find this info, but there is NO DOCUMENTATION!!!
5) You can't upgrade the castles except in your main province. Read that line again. They took out one of the most fun aspects.
6) Upgrading your main castle is a crap shoot since you have the option to downgrade, but still pay money to do so. So you have a level 5 castle and can buy and build a level 2 castle thinking you are getting an upgrade. The in-game descriptions of the castles consist of the castle name (ie "strong stone castle") and a really small picture - nothing else. NO DOCUMENTATION!!!
7) You upgrade castles by saving money and buying the upgrade. After about 30 real-world minutes of saving someone steals my money every time. I have no idea how or how to stop them because there is ... (boy I'm getting tired of typing this) NO DOCUMENTATION.
8) During battle scenes you can't zoom in or out which makes it difficult to manuever your forces or even tell what troop types you are facing. The graphics are not that good despite being *very* hardware intensive (more on that coming up).
9) The graphics are *very* hardware intensive (told ya ;-)). "Recommended" specs are 1.5GHz, 256RAM and if you use ATI, a Radeon 8500 or later. I have a 2200+ CPU (clock speed ~1800MHz), 512MB DDR 400 RAM, and a Radeon 9700 Pro. During sieges I got to watch arrows fly at my troops *frame-by-frame*. That was with 2 enemy units vs 3-5 of mine, not a massive battle at all.
10) After allying myself with another county I accidentally clicked on that county while controlling my army. I was automatically at war despite being 2 counties away and immediately clicking somewhere else. Lame.
11) Sieges. The crowning achievement of LOTR2. They suck in LOTR3. Instead of attacking the front of a castle where the defenders are massed, I went around the side. The defenders didn't reposition themselves. So I climb the walls, get all my guys on top of the wall and they ... mill around randomly. They almost completely ignore my commands, and the worst part... I CAN'T TARGET THE DEFENDERS! So I sit there gaping while 2-3 archers (not 2-3 units of archers) mow down my 3 units who are standing right next to them. I repeated this experiment several times with same results.
12) 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.

Summary: This game is actually *less advanced* than LOTR2 in a lot of ways. The only advancement I saw was in graphics, which were sub-standard anyway. If you cherish LOTR2 like I do, AVOID THIS GAME!

As for you amazon.com, I check my reviews periodically. I'm saving this one in a text file and I will upload it as needed from different accounts and IPs if you erase it again.

Rating:
Summary: mediocre
Review: Hey, for $20 what do you expect? The game is OK, but not great. I liked the graphics and the GUI, and the game is still fun to play. I have 2 problems with it, though. Firstly, they took out too much of the management side of the game - this version is really all about the warfare side of the game. Secondly, it crashes my system constantly. Very buggy.

Rating:
Summary: Wow. All I can say is wow.
Review: 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.