Given the tumultuous times of medieval Europe, games taking place during this period are given a ripe ground to work with. Oddly enough though, games that take advantage of this time period aren’t really all that common. Of course, a few of them do stand out quite well on their own, like Stronghold or the old Castles series. Another series that falls into this category is Lords of the Realm. I really can’t say much for the first one as I never played it, but Lords of the Realm 2 was quite enjoyable. So, naturally, I was stoked to hear about Lords of the Realm 3 and its imminent release.
Unfortunately, Lords of the Realm 3 disappointed right off the bat. Gameplay is horrendously simple. The game consists of controlling estates in an overview map (much like the second game), and you have to capture the main castle to take over the area. Now, this is where the game totally branches away from the second one. To raise your army you have to do one thing and one thing only – place a guy into a subset of the estate called a parcel. Each knight in your court has a pre-existing set of men in his command and that is that. You can always improve your ratings in honor, chivalry, and Christianity to improve those units. You never have to really worry about their upkeep. Food is produced by putting a serf into a parcel; they just automatically grow it and add it to a stockpile. In the second Lords of the Realm, you had to worry about crop rotations and whether to raise cattle or grain. Seasons don’t even matter anymore; just throw a serf into a plot and watch him do his thing.
The churches make more sense, as they are now simply built and left alone. Medieval churches never took orders from the ruling class, but rather the ruling classes took orders from the church, so building a church on your land and letting it reap the benefits isn’t really an issue. To make money, you place a bursar in the parcel and a city is built. This city then generates a set amount of money per time period. That is it. There are no taxes to worry about, no benefits or detriments to work with in taxation, and no population maintenance to keep tax revenues high. You just have to build a city. To make matters worse, the money you make really doesn’t go toward much. You can buy back captured knights, which is a nice addition, buy mercenaries, or upgrade your castle.
Now, upgrading the castle brings up a new point. Lords of the Realm 3 no longer has a resource system to worry about. In the second game, you had to make sure you had stone and iron to go about doing your thing. Now, if you want a bigger castle, just save up for it and buy it. It would seem that there is a local Stone Depot down the street that has warehouses full of stone ready for your use. This destroys the strategy that could have been included while playing in different areas of Europe. The first game I played was in Ireland, and I had 4 gigantic stone castles (which used enough stone to make a couple of skyscrapers). This may not sound odd to most, but Ireland doesn’t exactly have natural quarry resources, so seeing huge stone castles there is strange. You also never have to worry about keeping weapons in good shape. In the second game, you had to make sure you had blacksmiths to make weapons and armor for your armies. This time, apparently everyone is required to bring their own. The knights working for you in this game are quite generous. They bring their own manpower, equipment, and never even ask for a shilling of compensation in return. There is also no conscription since the knights bring their own units, so even knowing the population of your land holdings is unnecessary. Also, units heal themselves and recruit more units on their own, so even making sure a unit is in top condition requires little more than letting them sit in a castle.
Lords of the Realm 3 is run in real time all the time, so you have to move your armies around the map to fight, and strategize to head off enemies before they get to their destination to cause problems. When you do meet up with an enemy army or castle, you then can go into a real time battle. This is the good part, but unfortunately there is a downside as while in the battle things are going on around you in real time as well, so other fights can be going on at once. You have to pick and choose which fight to get involved with based on army strengths, and you’ll have to set aside one fight in lieu of another.
The actual battle system is highly simplified. You select your units, not individual men, but actual units, to battle. Select one or a group of units and then determine the formation to use, which is pretty much limited to the box and line formations. After selection, you simply point and click and they’ll clash with the enemy. There is a small bit of strategy here: Sic small arms men on pole units and archers, since the pole units dismount horse units with extreme prejudice. Horse units slice through all but pole units with ease. The standard field battle is rather dull; you just toss the armies into the center and let them hack out the conclusion.
The only real fun comes in castle sieges, particularly the attacking end. First you have to make sure you have a knight in the army that has siege weaponry with him, particularly catapults, battering rams, and/or siege towers. This is where the strategy comes into play. You can use the tower to easily breach the walls and have swordsmen stationed nearby to ensure quick death to the units climbing up the ladders. The catapults make short work of towers and walls and the battering ram is the worst knock you’ll ever hear on your door (other than an insurance salesman). Castle sieges take loads of strategy in clearing openings and attacking in the right locations.
The AI in the game is poor. In regular field battles, this really isn’t an issue as all you do is march at the enemy and swing your sword. The problem comes in the form of the sieges. While the most entertaining part of the game, the AI is particularly irritating. They tend to bunch all their men on one side of the castle, leaving the other ends open. This allows you to easily breach the wall with even basic ladders and flank the enemies with ease. They’ll also just sit there while you tear out the wall from under them with a catapult. The AI is even more pitiful when you are the defender. They’ll charge their mounted units right to the front of the wall in easy picking range of archers and crossbow men. The catapults and battering rams will circle around getting pelted by fire arrows. Even the siege tower is useless, as it will set itself up in one location while the enemy units climb up the wall with ladders and get torn to shreds.
In terms of sound, Lords of the Realm 3 is just so-so. The music is decent, but nothing is quite memorable. The voice acting is tolerable and sparse. The entire out of combat portion of the game is lacking any interesting sound. The combat portion is the only real sound effort. When you get larger armies going at it, then you have a nice din going on with shouts, death cries, and the clash of metal on metal. It is a very nicely done effort in a sea of mediocrity.
Game performance is decent. The only real issue is the first time loading up the game. The system insists on optimizing 119 different map files for your computer as well as many other files, and this is a good 10-15 minutes of down time the first time loading. Subsequent loads optimize in around 15 seconds. From there, the game is silky smooth. For reference, I am running a GeForce FX 5600 with 256 megs of video card memory and 512 megs of RAM on a 1.8 GHz Pentium 4 processor. Bouncing in and out of combat is very rapid and delays maybe 2 seconds at most in the transition. Combat units move rapidly along with no slowdown.
Graphically, the Lords of the Realm 3 suffers from the same issue of no effort on the outside and all the time put forth in the combat portion. The overworld is simply a map made up of texture overlays, along with couple of 3D units consisting of low poly counts, which represent armies and major buildings. The armies in the combat system are quite well rendered. The texture work is very impressive and the castles are nice and imposing in some cases; there are fire and smoke effects as well that are nicely done.
Ultimately, Lords of the Realm 3 was a big letdown. It is still a rather decent game, but nowhere near as deep as its predecessor. On the upside, the $20 price tag is a very good price point for the casual gamer looking for some castle siege action. You don’t even have to mess with the junky overworld mess and simply open up the numerous battle scenarios available.
