Good production value for the time and more varied locations than many similar hack and slash dungeon crawlers but doesn't do much to stand out setting wise or mechanically or offer much in terms of character customization and variety.

Lands of Lore was developed by the team that made the first two Eye of the Beholder games and the 93 release is both an improvement to their previous games and a massive step up from SI's Eye of the Beholder 3, even before the 94 CD version of Lands of Lore added additional voice acting. The game has its own setting to explore as opposed to being D&D based, good animations and cutscenes for the time, good music, and had a wider variety of environments and more interaction with other characters and NPC companions than the Eye of the Beholder games had.

There is no character creation, instead you choose from four premade characters with different focuses among the game's three paths and some with unique race to the setting. You can level up fighter with melee attacks, rouge with ranged, and mage by casting spells. Four party members can be met as you play with two being temporary and two staying with you through the game. The race of a character might prohibit them from using certain types of items or allow for additional items to be equipped and depending on the character an item might effect their offensive and defensive stat differently. There are a small number of spells to learn in the game with them basically all being offensive except for a heal spell and when you learn a spell it is available for all three of your characters to cast.

There is an excellent auto map for the time that not only shows you the layout of areas as you travel through them but, despite lacking the option to make your own notes, creates markings for just about anything you would want to know about like switches and buttons on walls that helps with the problems of having to pixel hunt while lost in a maze like environment found in other similar games.

Rogue levels end up being less useful than fighter or mage as you aren't gaining magic points or increasing your damage with your weapons as you level rouge and the higher lockpicking skills aren't needed after the mid levels. You can choose to cast each aquired spell at different levels with higher tiered options becoming stronger or adding additional effects (and animations), while the higher tiered selection is useful many of what were more costly and later aquired spells that should have been more powerful didn't seem to do as much while typically taking significantly more MP to cast than even higher tiered uses of earlier spells. There are spells that work better against certain enemy types but in this type of game it's pretty easy to and often makes sense to cast the spell that does 60 damage three times as opposed to the one that does 100 damage ones and used up all your MP. You can find shops where you can buy and sell equipment but these didn't have much purpose and you likely have to carry around a lot of extra equipment for some time if you want to sell them in the town you visit. There are a lot of enemy types that aren't difficult to fight but do things like make you drop your weapons, drain mana, or destroy equipment. While the locations are varied none of them are that interesting nor are any kind of puzzles nor does anything really stand out about the setting. Despite interacting with more characters your lines are set and you have no roleplay elements excepts for the odd choice of letting you just choose to murder a few random people you can run into instead of talking to them for what would be better rewards when you see them again later.

There's a variety of named weapons but oddly many of them seem to frequently be worse than regular weapons and few have any unique effects. As is a problem still and that was even worse at the time, there is a lack of information or incorrect information given to you. Some weapons have special effects that you won't know what they are doing unless you look it up somewhere and even some of those effects seem to just not work, while gear effects your character's might and protection stats there seems to be an additional hidden value given to certain weapons that also increases damage. When you are choosing which of the main characters to play the canonical hero is Kieran who is statistically worse than the other characters but says he is fast and better at dodging attacks, what he actually does is recover faster from each attack so you can make your attacks faster.

There is a lengthy Cheers reference where I think the Cliff character ends up with more speaking lines than most of the game's other characters.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1750769199176413595