Customer Reviews

Lords of the Realm 3

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(60)

 

 

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.

This game was on my top 10 wish list for games I wanted. I could not wait for it to come out. Now that I have it, how dissappointing it was.

When I first got Lords of the Realms 2, I played it the first day for 15 staight hours. It was my first taste of real time strategy and started my conversion from puzzle games to RTS and FPS games. With Realms 3, it took all of the good things from Realms 2 and got rid of them. You can no longer control the resources you collect like rock, trees, and your food. You now place a vassal on a vacant plot and you get either gold or food. Thats it. You also can't raise an army. The only way you can get an army is to place a Knight on a vacant plot or buy mercanaries. But if you don't own enough land, you can only have so many Knights or you will not have enough money or farms. If you are short on farms, your army will abandon you. The longer your Knight is on the board, the more men he will collect, but it takes a very long time to collect a very small amount of men. You used to be able to control your lands easier and make your city grow, then raise an army. But not now.

The most irritating thing is fighting. If you go to an enemies lands and take out his farm, if you don't leave an army back, they will instantly place another vassal for a farm. Even if you take out their castle, you still can't take over their land until you do more damage to their land.

The next irritating thing is the armies. You can kill all of the enemies armies which leaves his plot open. He will then place another Knight to replace his beaten Knight and then attack you and somehow he has an army twice your size. I beat one enemies Knights completely 3 straight times and he still came back with 2 large armies and force me from his land. Not sure how that happened as I went through every Knight of the Realm and never found a large army once. When an army takes damage, their color changes. When they get to red, they are discouraged and they disband during the fight. So how he can keep coming back is beyond me becasue your army needs time to heal.

And the last irritating thing is the battles. It seems like every time I go to the battle screen, another army attacks my lands. That is because there is no pause in the game when try to fight the battles yourself. If you let the computer do it for you, you lose alot more than you should plus you don't get to play the game. There needs to be a pause during battles so you can enjoy the game more. You also can't build siege weapons. You have buy siege mercanaries. Not cooll at all.

The games doesn't totally suck. It is challenging (although very repititious) and the graphics are pretty good (although I haven't been able to see the intro movie or any other cutscenes even thought I downloaded the patch. not sure whats up with that), but that is about it.

If they plan on making another, they better go back to what worked for Realms 2 & 3 and incorporate it in Realms 4, otherwise this franchise is dead if it isn't already.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I was looking forward to this game. I absolutely loved Lords of the Realm 2. I can pick it up and even play it today and enjoy it greatly. Part 3 however is awful. All of the fun parts of 2 are gone. The battles are boring, and the graphics are really dated. The game is full of bugs and is just not fun to play. Playing the game once feels repetative. This game has no replay value at all.

I didn't buy this game through Amazon - Maybe if I had looked here first I would have seen all the terrible reviews and saved myself $20.00. The graphics are the only improvement over Lords II, and as has been stated by others, they're still below par.

Here I was, oh-boy all excited to play the next Lords Of The Realm game, and boy-oh-god what a dissapointment. Really, Sierra, how can you justify releasing a game in the Lords franchise that mocks everything that was good about its predecessor?

I want my money back. I want my money, and the 2 hours I spent trying to get into the game. I suppose if I complain enough I might get the money back, but that two hours is gone. Forever.

I absolutely loved Lords of the Realm II. I was sooo excited for Lords of the Realm III. It was a MAJOR disappointment. Don't waste your money on this game. It's not even remotely as good as Lords II.