Lords of Everquest Review

For what it's worth, the AI routine in Lords of EverQuest provides a steady and challenging atmosphere. Enemies will refuse to hurry blindly into an obvious trap. After figuring out the odds, your opponents will often resort to tactical approaches rather than mindless rushes. Also, it appears that each time your foes attack they successfully use their skills and capabilities. Unfortunately, certain enemy formations refused to march into the fray even though their comrades were being sliced and diced close at hand. I have to admit, however, that I was pleased with some aspects of the friendly AI. To my surprise I never encountered any pathfinding issues, even when my units were given the order to march a great distance.

Technically, the game did not give us a hard time ... except for an occasional drop in the frame-rate. (Test rig: AMD 2200+, Radeon 9700PRO, 768MB of RAM) Other than that Lords of EverQuest ran smoothly, without apparent glitches in the engine code or visual bugs. Sadly, when it comes to your standard eye candy there's not much to witness in the game. At first glance, the game will strike you as being slightly outdated, with low-poly character models and a moderately detailed backdrop. The surroundings ought to have been enlivened with animated trees and plants (all of them are frozen stiff). Even though the ambiance may not be as vibrant and colorful as in Warcraft III, there are some distinguishing features that improve the situation a bit. To begin with, there's an agreeable selection of impressive-looking spells to wield throughout the scenarios. Creatures and characters were convincingly animated, so it will be nice to behold a diversity of moves that are performed in combat. Perhaps the in-game models should've been beefed-up with a few extra polys, which would certainly give the game a proper boost in overall visual quality. But my main objection to the visuals has to do with the rather bleak and bland appearance of the game world. It's obvious that SOE was going for that Blizzard experience, but it just so happens that the art design and texturing paint quite a different picture.

The game doesn't exactly offer any revolutionary moments in sound design either. Still, players are treated to some pleasing sounds in the backdrop, a decent range of responses from units, and enough tunes to spice things up a bit. I guess the only thing I could really object to here is the somewhat average character voicing. It's not crappy acting, but they could've done a slightly better job on it.

Although the single-player campaigns may not draw you back into the game once you're all done with it, hard-core fans will probably want to come back to it for a few multiplayer matches. It would appear that SOE lives up to its reputation of providing top-notch online entertainment. Lords of EverQuest comes with plenty of nicely designed multiplayer maps, all of which are playable in online and LAN variants. Online matches can be experienced via www.soegames.net servers and do not require any subscription fees. The only question here is whether SOE has given sufficient incentive for say, strategy gamers who like playing Warcraft III online to even consider Lords of EverQuest. In all honesty, that's a pretty unlikely scenario, but that doesn't mean that EverQuest fans won't enjoy a go at it.

Since the game carries such an uncommonly popular label, it's a fair assumption that a majority of gamers will expect a top-notch PC game. The truth is that Lords of EverQuest is not a breakthrough in any way, nor does it bring any innovations to the RTS genre. However, while it may not hold the attention of Warcraft III vets, it still offers a fair slice of enjoyable classic RTS gaming. Its simple approach and fluent gameplay will keep you going through all the single-player campaigns, and maybe even jumping into a few online matches.