Blizzard is translating its Warcraft series of real-time strategy games to the online role-playing genre in its forthcoming World of Warcraft, so it's only fair that Sony Online Entertainment did the reverse with EverQuest. The new Lords of EverQuest is a real-time strategy game based on the EverQuest massively multiplayer online universe. It's clearly derived from other, previous real-time strategy games, especially Blizzard's most recent, but a bland story in the single-player mode and a host of gameplay issues make Lords of EverQuest feel like a cheap knockoff instead of a worthwhile entry into an established genre.

Your lord can deal justice without much help at all.

Lords of EverQuest is set 10,000 years before the current timeline in EverQuest. Three factions vie for power and control of Norrath's lands: the Shadowrealm, the Dawn Brotherhood, and the Elddar Alliance. These factions are composed of the similarly aligned races found in EverQuest. For example, the Shadowrealm consists of races such as trolls, iksar, and dark elves, while the Dawn Brotherhood has humans, dwarves, and kerrans. If you're not familiar with these races from EverQuest, they'll seem like straightforward high-fantasy archetypes to you.

You don't have to know anything about EverQuest to play the game, but only EverQuest players will appreciate the units. Even with this in mind, the unit design in Lords of EverQuest is disappointing. It seems as though the developers tried to find some way to throw in every single race and class from the role-playing game without any clear purpose. For example, the Dawn Brotherhood's cavalry are always kerrans, and its clerics are always dwarves. Any character can ride horses in the online RPG, and many other races can also be clerics, so it would have been much more interesting if clerics were sometimes dwarves and sometimes humans, for example. This may sound like nitpicking, but it's just one of many instances of Lords of EverQuest failing to use its source material to deviate from the standard RTS formula, even though the opportunity was there.

The three factions don't vary, either. What makes other real-time strategy games interesting is that they're able to balance three or four completely different factions that play significantly differently from one another. You'll find none of this variety in Lords of EverQuest beyond the different graphics used to depict the sides. All of the factions have comparable units and play styles--each side has a healer, for example. It's to be expected that each faction in a real-time strategy game will have some means of healing its forces, but in Lords of EverQuest, each side's healer is essentially the same exact unit. The three factions build their bases in the same manner, and they mine resources in the same manner. As if to continue the monotony, there's only one resource to mine: platinum.

As the name may imply, Lords of EverQuest focuses on units called "lords," which are analogous to hero units found in other strategy games. When you start a campaign or multiplayer game, you choose a faction and then you pick a lord--each faction has five to choose from, for a grand total of 15 lords in the game. The lords radiate an aura that has a positive effect on nearby friendly units and a negative effect on nearby enemy units. Lords also start out with one ability, but three new abilities will progressively become available as the lords gain experience levels. Unfortunately, there is little variety here, too. For instance, each faction has a lord that can have a "pet" and a lord that has a "slow enemy attack speed" aura. Your lord will eventually become so powerful that he or she can pretty much do everything alone. Lady T'lak from the Shadowrealm can take on a group of enemies without breaking a sweat by instantly killing the most powerful enemy and then using an attack speed upgrade to quickly take out the remainders.

Everyone just stands back and lets the healers do their work.

With such a powerful lord, you'd imagine that other units would be worthless. That would be a correct assumption, for the most part. A large group of healers can make you nearly invincible, and ranged units can take down pesky air units, but everything else can just get in the way. That's too bad, because every unit also gains levels and becomes more powerful. Unit levels would play a bigger part in the game if the transfer system were better implemented. In the campaigns, you can transfer units to the next mission, but you always have a limited number of transfer points, so you can take only a few units with you. Additionally, once a unit hits level six, you can knight it. You can have up to two knights, which gain an additional power and an aura as well as a free transfer to the next mission. You can choose which unit would best complement your army with its aura, although being knighted doesn't seem to raise its intelligence.

The artificial intelligence in Lords of EverQuest is rather pathetic. Moving units from point A to point B works fine, but once they get to point B, things go downhill. Large groups of units tend to get trapped by each other and won't move out of the way. The blocked unit may stop, or it may decide to circle around the entire map and wind up in the enemy base. Things get even worse when that wayward unit happens to be your lord. Expect to hear "Your lord has been slain" more often than you should, due to this erratic behavior. This wouldn't be too much of a problem if you could easily resurrect a fallen lord or knight. Instead, you have to recruit a special unit that transfers its life essence into the fallen unit. The lord is the most powerful unit and the backbone of your army, so if your lord dies in enemy territory, you're out of luck. Hint: Quicksave is F9. Use it often.