It’s one of the last games before Electronic Arts closed the assimilated gameforge Westwood Studios. It’s not a pretty good one, too. But it isn’t Westwoods fault at all, rather more the fault of the strong rules forced upon Westwood by Electronic Arts. EA didn’t saw a future for the franchise. How surprising? But the project already entered a state near completition. As an independent studio, you don’t have to care much about dead lines. But now with EA holding a gun to their neck, Westwood had to. And so, the designers rushed the games developement progress to match the dead line.
Lands of Lore 3 sure got all the sweet 3Dfx effects of its time, but lacks of creativity in level design. It suffered from wallpaper forests with one or two trees in between. Some locations look well done and balanced, while others look rushed. The rushed ones are the locations that got finished as development time ran out. One dungeon for example, used the same rockwall texture only. Even the height of that cave was too high for the players model. Not everything in Lands of Lore 3 was bad, though. CGI movies look simply amazing and didn’t had to hide from those of other games. Especially the opening movie after the player steps into the rift warping him into the Command and Conquer universe got that special aditude. The postapocalyptic desert and the haunted house scenario are the two highlights of the game.
Lands of Lore 3 is a weak made but entertaining first-person RPG that can hook you up if you let it. If you take a closer look, then you can get a feel in which direction the franchise could have gone if Electronic Arts didn’t smashed it.
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