Everquest is the standard that all MMOGs are held to, for good or ill. It has spawned endless expansion packs, official conventions, and hordes of rabid fans. It was only a matter of time before the brand would expand into other types of games. Lords of Everquest allows you to explore the back story of the world of Everquest in a real-time strategy environment. There's a lot of familiar elements here, building most obviously off of Warcraft 3. While technically adept in most areas, the game lacks depth and charm and ends up coming across as desperately uninteresting.

There's not a lot in Lords of Everquest that dedicated RTS fans won't have come across before. You gather resources, build structures in a certain order that will allow you to create the best units, and send your hordes to fight your enemies. The only resource in the game is platinum, which must be gathered from mines that have a set amount of platinum available before they become exhausted. Frequently the amount of platinum in a mine is depressingly low, meaning you have to carefully manage what you buy and find new mines quickly as possible. Most buildings are capable of making a unit type, and if you have certain other buildings, to upgrade those units. There are some defensive building types as well, but since most single-player missions come across as more of an adventure RPG as you stride across the land to escort people they are usually a waste of resources.

If you've played Warcraft 3, nothing about the units will surprise you. Each team has a Lord, which is a special character that gains new abilities as they level up. In Lords of Everquest Lords are also given an Aura, which is an area around them where your units are given a little boost and enemy units are given a little penalty. Your regular units also gain levels, which can allow you to Knight them, giving them an even bigger boost. There's a downside to this, though. At the end of each map you pick what units go with you to the next map. You only get a handful of points to spend on your units, and as they level their price goes up quite a bit. Since a high-level Lord is a killing machine, it can be a better strategy to pick your level 1 units to act as a distraction while your Lord wades through battle obliterating everything in his or her path. This serves to take a lot of the "strategy" out of your real-time strategy experience.

The blandness of the experience doesn't end there. Games like Starcraft and Warcraft have gained such tremendous popularity in part because each team is balanced against each other in a rock-paper-scissors style. What one team is weak to another will be strong against, and you can get a surprising level of complexity from such a simple rule set. Lords of Everquest entirely lacks this element. Each of the three Realms feels like it has all the same units, just with the abilities renamed and the units themselves re-skinned. While there are plenty of options of online play, your choice of what to play is more of a decision based on aesthetics than on strategy, again gutting the cerebral side of play.

While the gameplay feels phoned in and bland, Lords of Everquest does deliver it in a pretty package. The character design is a little strange but it does match up with the exaggerated style of Everquest. The animations for combat and for raising buildings are well done and often imaginative. The world itself is bright and pretty to look at, with maps taking place in a wide variety of areas, such as a snowy forest or a desert canyon. The music is easy on the ears and fits the theme and mood of the game well. The only real visual problem is the large, blocky interface cutting off the lower left corner of the map, which can be a significant problem for those playing on lower resolutions. There's also a lot of star-talent behind the voice acting in the game, which makes the incredibly frustrating decision to have the same unit repeat the same line nearly every time you give a command to a group all the more baffling.

In the end, we hope that Warcraft will fare better as a MMORPG than Everquest had taking on the RTS genre. While Lords of Everquest is pretty and technically functional, there's little to appeal to RTS fans. If you are desperately seeking something new to take your attention away from existing RTS games, Lords of Everquest may serve as a distraction, but a temporary one with little life-span.