Pros: Great movies between missions. Gorgeous Graphics. Original Multiplayer.
Cons: Needed A3D support. Looks best on 3DFX cards. You might not understand the plot if you didn't read the books. Multiplayer didn't hold my interest long.
I’m not the type of person who likes to play single player games on the computer. I learned a long time ago that it is a lot more fun to play games online than it is to play them by myself. Every now and then a game will come along that will capture my interest long enough to get me really involved with the story line. The Wheel of Time is one of those games.
Maybe it’s just because I read the book series by Robert Jordan, but I found the story line intriguing, almost as if it was one of the books itself. The actual game play itself doesn’t contain much of the story line. The game plays more like an action game. Like Doom only with a fantasy theme, like Heretic or Hexen. The missions you play are explained by a long, high quality 3D animated movie played after each mission ends. These movies are where the story line unfolds. I think the game could have been better with more role-playing elements during play, but the movies were good enough to keep me interested. The action play was fun anyway, but it would have gotten old fast without those great movies giving it meaning.
Now lets talk about graphics. The Wheel of Time is based on the Unreal engine. Normally I am not impressed when a game uses another game’s engine, but they did a really good job with it in Wheel of Time. The atmosphere is incredible. Most of us usually despise games or movies that are based on a book that we read because we make our own interpretation of how things should look. I had my own image of how the world should look, so I was skeptical when I first heard they were making a game about it. Now that I have played it, I have to say, they did an excellent job with making Robert Jordan’s world look real. Everything was just as I had imagined it. Either the artists at Legend Entertainment are really good, or Robert Jordan just did an excellent job of describing everything so that everyone had the same view of it. I have spoken with several people that feel the same way. This game really brings Jordan’s world to life.
The sound of the game was also very good. I felt myself jumping when I heard a monster jump out behind me, or when the thunder rolled across the sky. The sound could have been much better, however. One thing that was lacking was support for A3D 2 for positioned audio effects. Sometimes I would hear a monster jump out, but it always sounded the same, so I had no idea which direction the monster was coming from. This got very annoying, but I put it behind me and kept playing.
I’m sure many of you are reading this thinking, “I never read that book series, does that mean I won’t enjoy this game”? If you never read the book, you probably won’t enjoy the plot as much as I did, and that was a large part of the game. If you just want to run around killing monsters, then the game will be just fine for you. If you are looking for a role-playing game, you won’t enjoy the Wheel of Time. If you aren’t sure whether or not it is worth the risk to buy the game, there is a demo available from www.wheeloftime.com that you can download to get a glimpse of how the game plays and how the graphics look on your computer.
I ran the game on a Celeron 300A with 128 megs of ram and a voodoo3 2000 PCI graphics card. The game ran perfectly fine for me. I’m sure if your computer specs are anywhere around this you shouldn’t have any problem. If your specs are much lower than this, you might still be able to run the game but with low graphical quality. You will also need around 600 megs of free space on your harddrive.
I didn’t have a lot of time to play multiplayer. I played some 8 player deathmatch for a while and it was ok, but it didn’t really seem like the game was made for multiplayer, more like they just added it in later. There is a different multiplayer mode added with the game that is a bit different. It is called Citadel Mode and it is a Wheel of Time version of Team Fortress. Each team has a Citadel and they are allowed to place traps before the game starts. Then each team attacks the others Citadel and tries to steal their “Seals”(Flag) and takes it back to their own Citadel. This was kind of neat, but I enjoy playing Team Fortress Classic of Half-life more. Don’t buy this game if all you plan on doing is multiplayer. You would be missing a lot if you didn’t play the single player missions.
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