he last couple of months have seen a whole slew of new RTS titles hit the market. Some good, some bad, but none with the gargantuan EverQuest franchise attached. Expectations for this title were pretty high, and for the most part LoE doesn’t live up to them.
The gameplay is classic RTS, and thus a bit simpler than the current favorites. Resources in particular are dumbed-down – there’s only one, and you can harvest it much faster than you can spend it. This makes for a different flow of play from similar titles, and cheapens strategy in the process.
Though there are three very different factions, the depth of units, upgrades, and spells isn’t anywhere near what can be found elsewhere. Also, the skills are pretty weak – when I cast a spell with a 60-second cool-down, I expect it to lay down the law. In LoE, it’ll maybe kill one unit. Also, even Lords (the LoE equivalent of a Hero in WarCraft III) only have four skills total, the second two of which you won’t see in most games since it takes so long to get to the required level. The combat just never reaches the level possible in the big-time RTS titles.
With multiplayer significantly less user-friendly than in other titles and a lame single-player mode, LoE falls well short of the genre’s top dogs. The fact of the matter is that this is the first RTS title from Rapid Eye, and they simply don’t have the experience in smooth gameplay, balanced factions, and online support that Blizzard and Ensemble can bring to the table.