Lords of Midnight has been a long time coming. This generally bodes ill for a game, indicating that the designers either A) didn't know what the hell they wanted to do with the thing, and thus were constantly changing their minds throughout the course of its development, or B) were a little overambitious, and entire new technologies had to be invented to achieve the effect they wanted. There have been exceptions, but most games that linger this long probably ought to have been taken out behind the chemical sheds and shot when development time hit the "150% of original projection" mark.
Lords of Midnight isn't that bad, but it's not as good as I hoped it would be. The biggest problem I have with it is rather ironic: the graphics don't live up to the excellent background material. The game uses a book metaphor for its interface, which is rather cool. Each of the characters in the game has his or her own "page," with icons linking it to the map page, the fellowship page (which shows characters which are grouped together) and so on. From this page, you can also jump into controlling the character directly (walking around in a first-person view of the 3D fractal landscape, a la Comanche) or issue a quest for the character to complete.
Here's the problem: most of these pages are stills, yet they're in VGA. This would be acceptable if the game did not rely heavily on text, but it does. The typeface used to display information is huge, but still difficult to read. There's absolutely no reason these pages shouldn't be SVGA. This is especially disappointing because the artists involved in the game seem to be quite talented. The VGA rendering of the excellent cover art, painted by noted fantasy artist Denis Beauvais, is particularly atrocious.
You start off with a handful of characters in an alliance to rescue Luxor the Moonprince from the clutches of the evil Boroth Wolfheart. Along the way, through recruitment and conquest, you must expand your alliance to the point where you are able to assault the Wolfheart's Citadel.
Though this background is interesting, there are some fundamental logic flaws. Two of the characters on your team begin in the citadel of Maranor, and periodically will free additional characters to swell your ranks. All well and good, but the escapees are always equipped with a dragon, presumably to speed their escape. How this is accomplished within an impregnable fortress, I can't quite understand.
It is also difficult to control your character directly - time flies by when you do so, with literally hours passing as you travel (indoors) from one room to another. For the most part, this is a waste of time. It's a far better choice to simply instruct characters what you want them to do, and let time run along until something interesting happens that needs your attention.
Once you get past these shortcomings, the game is actually kind of fun. You must recruit neutral characters to build up a huge army so you can assault Wolfheart's citadel (with its garrison of 10,000!). Choosing the right character to do the recruiting is part of the challenge, as it will impact whether or not an NPC chooses to join you. Along the way, there are lesser villains to smash and artifacts to recover, which will make your heroes amazingly powerful - useful in a battle where you'll face odds like that.
Throughout the game, however, there's a sense of detachment. I can't just treat these characters as faceless numbers, as I can with a traditional strategy game - they have names and (sort of) personalities. By the same token, I never quite get as attached to them as I do to characters in a good fantasy novel. I can't talk to them (except to ask a couple of really inane questions in a really bad semblance of Edwardian English - "I prithee, wilt thou join me?" and all that), which is unfortunate. A lot of emphasis was placed on being able to jump into any character you control and drive them around in "real" time, which, frankly, isn't that much fun. The 3D engine is okay, but it doesn't hold a candle to, say, the Ultima Underworld games. You're also mostly wandering over feature-poor landscapes from castle to castle, which doesn't hold that much appeal to me in real life - so why would I want to do it in a computer game?
Ultimately, I wish Lords of Midnight was more fun. It's definitely got potential, but I feel that the 3D thing really kills it. Had the engine been super-amazingly-good, it probably would have been worth playing this way, but it's not. It's like the designers said "let's do this cool game where you control a bunch of different characters, and it's got to have a great story, and an amazing fantasy setting, and, oh, yeah, it's got to have a first-person engine so you can jump into any character and see from their perspective. Kids love that first-person thing." Doh! In my not-so-humble opinion, they should have just stuck to using still screens, and invested their development efforts in making their characters more interesting to talk to.
