KINDOM UNDER FIRE CIRCLE OF DOOM FULL
KINDOM UNDER FIRE CIRCLE OF DOOM PRO

Not perfect sense: while the online experience enhances the game immeasurably, it's still not quite enough to mask its fundamental inadequacies. Then I ventured online and it all began to make some kind of sense.

KINDOM UNDER FIRE CIRCLE OF DOOM PRO

Pro Tip: join up with someone who's synthed a one-hit-kill weapon for an easy achievement. The Balrog is the most annoying boss in the game.

The problem with Circle of Doom is that mostly the new weapons are pretty rubbish, useful only for fusing to your existing weapon using a half-baked weapon synthesis system, providing barely incremental advances where paradigmatic ones are needed. Each new character level needs to bring with it new items, or weapons, or experiences, to inspire further level grinding each new item needs to be more wondrous than the one before. But that satisfaction can quickly turn into tedium unless a game keeps throwing new things at the player. There is, after all, something satisfying about dispatching wave after relentless wave of baddies. There's nothing inherently wrong with Diablo clones, or with level-grind games in general. Heck, even the flaming-lettered game logo is reminiscent of the Diablo II box. Micromanagment aside, Circle of Doom is, in case you hadn't noticed by now, essentially a third-person Diablo clone, eschewing the RTS elements found in previous Kingdom Under Fire games. But that means that every time you try to equip a new item you'll also have to come to a new balance of SP consumption/recovery. It also costs SP to attack with an item or weapon, and if you run out of SP in the middle of a battle you just have to wait till they charge back up, which means that you also have to equip items that recover your SP. That's because it costs something called SP to equip items and weapons. And as the unceasingly simplistic action becomes more and more tiresome, punctuated only by an insipid array of camera-breaking, attritional boss battles, the micromanagement of your inventory becomes increasingly intrusive.

KINDOM UNDER FIRE CIRCLE OF DOOM FULL

Except that as it goes on, the stunning sylvan idyll gives way to boring clichГ©s like snow and lava levels, populated by one of the most irritating bestiaries in videogame history, full of monsters that are capable of freezing you solid, knocking you over, or bringing their allies back to life. That's pretty much it: the game laid bare inside the first ten minutes. You'll want to switch the blood on or you won't always be able to tell when you're taking damage. The five starting characters all look pretty enough, and offer a well-balanced spectrum between slow and strong and quick and light, and the action is immediate - wandering down what are essentially corridors, meeting a crowd of monsters and then meting out massive violence by hammering your face buttons. Visually it's the sort of impressive that's now standard for next-gen games - the opening woodland level is all bloom lighting and fancy particle effects, and lots of stunning scenic cliff-top views. So for those 12 hours, the score at the bottom of this review ticked inexorably down in inverse proportion to the levels that my character was monotonously clocking up.ДЄs with every review, I started out with doe-eyed optimism, the game's fancy graphics giving me a surge of confidence that remained undimmed by the insanely inappropriate repetitive metal guitar noodlings that make up the soundtrack. The story is rudimentary, fragmented, bizarre, and pointless, the game is an unconcealed level-grind, and that level-grind is monotonous and tedious. That's a mistake because the single-player game is terrible, reaching new heights of energy-sapping tedium and ennui-inducing boredom. I made the mistake of playing its single-player campaign for 12 hours before venturing online. I made a mistake while reviewing Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom.

Kindom under fire circle of doom