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Meet Copper LeGre', 16 year old half-breed son of King Richard's brother. Copper has gone to meet his father to participate in an upcoming hunt. During the meeting, however, Copper's father and his two brothers are slaughtered through means not made clear. To make matters worse, on awakening Copper discovers that not only has he lost half of his family, but also his soul.

Thus begins Lands of Lore III, the latest installment in Westwood's Lands of Lore series, an RPG series with Dungeon Master/Eye of the Beholder roots that has evolved into 3D over the last two titles. Your first task as Copper LeGre' is to find your soul, a role that shortly expands to include saving the entire world from rifts to other dimensions that are appearing throughout the kingdom.

The role-playing genre is still going through growing pains with regard to 3D. How does Lands of Lore III stack up?

Inventory is slotted, so that carrying capacity is limited to a specific number of items rather than weight. This is a system that is becoming increasingly more popular with RPGs, since it allows management of what you are carrying rather than weight. Lands of Lore III has many, many items to manage, too many thanks to the pharmacopoeia, the alchemy-like system of combining herbs and other items to create magical remedies and enhancements. For those who play the game with a pack rat mentality (usually a necessity in an RPG), the inventory has a tendency to quickly become full of leaves and other items of no immediate use. Finding new items almost always means disposing of that odd rock or leaf whose use is not yet known, a disappointing situation at best. Magic spells use a similar slotted system, however this is more suited to the task because there are more than enough slots for spells.

Combat occurs in real time, and is accompanied by satisfying sounds of swords and sorcery. Copper can wield both a melee weapon and a bow, and uses either depending on his proximity to the target. Fighting was initially a challenge, until a strangely powerful sword (80% or so of maximum strength) was located during the first quarter of the game.

One feature unique to Lands of Lore III is your Familiar. At the start of the game you can pick one of four creatures from the four guilds to accompany you for the rest of the game. This Familiar will assist you in combat and perform various other tasks (identifying objects, retrieving objects, casting spells, etc.) depending on which guild you choose. You can choose from an Iron Golem, a Homunculus, a "Glitterfay" (similar to Tinker Bell), or a raccoon-like creature from the Thieves Guild. While not the same as a party system, it is enjoyable to have a companion on your journeys, and each of the Familiars performs genuinely useful tasks.

There is humor throughout the game, mostly in the form of audible comments made by yourself or your Familiar. These are for the most part well done, but, as is almost always the case with audible cues, they begin to wear thin when you have heard them for the hundredth time. There is also the issue of the context of this humor. The cut scenes and introductory text in Lands of Lore III are serious-minded, and the opening movie might even be classified as chilling. One wonders why Copper, recently witness to the murder of half of his family and the removal of his soul, is walking around making wisecracks to the shopkeepers and his Familiar.

One puzzling aspect of the game is the population of some of the in-game worlds. There are some architecturally impressive areas, such as wide halls with elegant fixtures, that are completely devoid of any type of creature. This emptiness can extend for several rooms until you begin to wonder if something is wrong. By the same token, there are areas that contain a multitude of sword fodder, making the empty areas seem all the more strange.

You could play this game again. But would you want to? Lands of Lore 2 had multiple paths and endings, but Lands of Lore III did not give inspiration to play past the midpoint of the game.

There are two mouse control schemes available, both of which are adequate, and the keyboard can be remapped to your liking. The customized controls are not so customizable that you will be able to duplicate your favorite Quake configuration to the letter, but you won't be stuck with carpal tunnel syndrome due to a bad keyboard layout.

Perhaps more important is the user interface. There is a multi-tabbed journal that holds all information that Copper encounters in the game, from the auto map (adequate, if somewhat ugly) to descriptions of all encountered items and creatures, each of which displays multiple levels of detail according to what you have managed to find out about them. This system is great, except for the way that it interfaces with the inventory. For example, if you are wondering what that new item is that you just picked up, you must first go into the journal, then pick the items tab and locate the specific new item from a visual list that includes every item you have encountered so far. Some mechanism to avoid the intermediate step would have been nice, considering the large amount of items in the game.

Lands of Lore III has a Glide mode for 3dfx users, and Direct3D for other cards. There is support for resolutions over 640x480, however Direct3D can result in the interface items (inventory, text) being distorted to the point of being unreadable, depending on the resolution you pick.

The 3D world graphics are a mixed bag. There are areas in the game that are gorgeous to look at, and really representative of what an RPG is about. On the other hand, some of the world design brings up memories of pseudo-3D games from the Doom era, from the flat cardboard-looking ramparts atop the castle wall to the paper-thin canopy of leaves that covers much of the outlying forest. These eyesores, present in many spots in the game, seem inconsistent with the majority of the world design.

Likewise, NPCs, monsters, and items in the world are a mixture of good and bad. NPCs are rendered using an apparently non-polygonal technique that shows them equally well from any angle. The bad news is that the relative resolution of the NPCs to the world is quite small, and results in blurry, blocky looking figures that you have to look at for a long time while they spiel their audible, sometimes lengthy script lines. Even more curious is the animation of the NPCs, which causes them to flail their arms wildly and make sudden repetitive motions that don't look at all appropriate.

World items such as corpses and items lying on the ground appear to be two-dimensional sprites, most of which rotate with the player so that they are always facing head-on, again bringing up memories of 2D/3D games from five years ago. This is something I definitely did not expect to see in a modern 3D game.

The slotted inventory graphics are all the same size (a rock takes up the same amount of space as a sword), and too small to give you any sense of the objects that you are holding. Using resolutions higher than 640x480 can also distort these items as they are stretched to accommodate the extra space.

Despite this odd mixture of technologies and styles, the overall look of the game is pleasing most of the time, and good enough to get the job done. Lands of Lore III has a wide variety of textures for the differently themed worlds, and makes heavy use of colored lighting and some 3D effects like transparency to give the playing field more depth.

Music is very well done, and is fantasy-themed. Voice acting is believable if you have a good sense of humor. Sound effects are adequate and often surprising.

A huge install is usually something that can be overlooked, but when installation issues impact gameplay they need to be mentioned. Lands of Lore III is a huge game, and spans four CDs. The minimum installation size is 503 megabytes, which is probably at the top end of what you might expect from a game these days, but certainly not unreasonable. The problem comes in the layout of the game across those four CDs.

After completing the tutorial-oriented opening scene, the casual wanderer may find himself subject to no less than two CD changes within the space of a few virtual blocks in the main city, depending on the direction taken. In some cases there is no visual indication that you are approaching a "disc change boundary", and should you decide to cancel the disc change, the game will abruptly exit. These changes take on average a full minute, and can take up to two minutes (timed on a 20x CD-ROM). I found the CD changes to be extremely annoying, especially in the main city, although the game's sub-worlds are thankfully each wholly contained on the same CD.

To be fair, I should mention that the game maintains its own disk cache, and some of these CD changes may have been alleviated if I had increased the default (and minimum) 317 megabyte disk cache. Unfortunately I just don't have 1.3 gigabytes to devote to a single game.

It is difficult to pinpoint exactly why Lands of Lore III is not a better game than it is, and the answer is that there is no single aspect of the game that fails miserably (except perhaps for the frustration involved with CD changing). The graphics are potentially very good, but tarnished by inconsistencies. The gameplay could have been solid but suffers from a lack of coherence between different areas of the game. Overall, Lands of Lore III could have benefited from some more polish before being released. As for the installation - there will come a day when Lands of Lore III's installation method does not seem excessive. That day has not yet arrived.

Having said that, there is an enjoyable game lurking beneath the surface of Lands of Lore III, although some will need patience and lowered expectations to find it. There are several unique worlds to explore, a story to uncover, and a wide variety of creatures and objects to find, all of which are hallmarks of a good RPG.