Don't get me wrong, I do like a good RPG. In fact, Fable is one of my favourite games and I've spent the most part of my life following the Zelda series. Sometimes I like nothing more than playing a game with a good story, getting sucked in and appreciating the talent involved in development. Call me a geek, but I like a game to be like a good movie, only interactive. Similarly, sometimes I'm just in the mood for some good old-fashioned action, violence and gore. Lovely-jubbly.
Alrighty, let's get started with Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom. And with a title that dramatic I was expecting a story deep enough to drown a giraffe in. A giraffe with gills. Either that or a really poor Japanese translation, but I preferred the giraffe thing. First impressions were good, with an instruction manual that thick I was expecting all my bottles of Frijj to explode, and to play a game more complicated than advance astronomy. Well, after playing Blacksite, I was all for something with a decent story and some interesting gameplay mechanics.
Things started going badly very soon when I spotted the interesting fact on the back of the box (I know, most people read the box before even seeing the instruction book, but I wasn't buying it though, was I?), that mentioned something about randomly generated environments. Now, last time I played a game with randomly generated maps was Dark Cloud - one of my first games for the PS2. Which I began to hate with a passion after my favourite weapon was destroyed and my save file was lost. Dark Cloud betrayed me like a lover and I always hated it's silly randomly generated maps.
So with that in mind, I set my sites nice and low for Circle of Doom, hoping that the Japanese love of overly complicated stories in games would cheer me up. That rollercoaster done with, I started the game. When you start a new game, you're asked to choose a character from a list of people who I'd imagine are probably well known in the KUF series, and I thought the best idea to start with would be a a fast character with the best trade off against power I could find. For some bizarre reason you're offered the choice between someone who is "very fast but very weak" and someone who is "very fast but weak". I chose the latter, safe in the knowledge that eventually I'd be able to find some form of super armour and a massive sword to make up for the skinny bloke with a worrying dedication to acrobatics.
The game then starts with a very odd cutscene... immediately followed by a tutorial in some field somewhere. A short and sweet tutorial, teaching you the basics of moving (left thumb) and fighting (right thumb), but leaving me wondering how to talk to all the wonderful and interesting people I'd need to acquire knowledge from in order to succeed, as all the traditional buttons had been placed directly in control of no fewer than two sharp objects each.
Nevermind, we'll cross that bridge when we get to it, to the quest! Ah yeah, about that...
Having played the game for about 4 hours, I didn't actually come across a story of any kind. I came across a lot of bad guys, but the story remained more illusive than a healthy meal at McDonalds. Teases and promises, but only delivering something minuscule and still, at the end of the day, bad for you. That was alright though, because I was quite happy hacking my way through hoards of little lizard men for no apparent reason, confident I'd figure out what was going on once I got out of this bleeding forest.
Speaking of which, the combat worked well against the hoards of things Circle of Doom chose to send my way, with the cooldown bar thing meaning I had to put some thought into which of the numerous attack buttons to press; knowing that pressing the almost-one-hit-kill-button would leave me temporarily defenceless while I developed a symbiotic partnership with a bunch of lizards in a very uncomfortable region. And it also lead me to the conclusion that the best time to use said button was on the rather larger, more angry looking lizard. Presumably angry because I'd just slaughtered his entire offspring under the cue of dramatic music, having not considered they wanted to say hello. Who knows, maybe if I'd just said "hello" rather than reaching for two katanas, I would have made a lot of interesting new friends and not had to spend the next four hours fighting wave after wave of angry people.
Can we just stop a minute and focus on something.
"spend the next four hours fighting wave after wave of angry people".
I wasn't kidding. I played this game for more than four hours and so far hadn't stopped to so much as read a bloody road sign. All that had happened at this point was I'd left a place with a thoroughly disturbing Japanese name, stabbed a giant turtle with a small arsenal of sharp objects, and worked my way through another place with a slightly less disturbing Japanese name.
Disturbingly Japanese places? Stabby boss battles? More linearity than the day is long?
Yes. It took me more than four hours to realise I'd been playing a rip off of Devil May Cry, without any of the style and absolutely no gun-toting. This now left me bewildered by the option in the, well it wasn't a pause menu seeing as how you have to press "back" to get to it, of "quests", seeing as all there would ever be in this game to do was to kill things and collect gold and health potions. By chance (seriously, I was button mashing), I found out that these quests were goals you had to achieve to earn new abilities, and you set them by talking to someone while you "sleep". Which, I guess, also cleared up why a) you could sleep at all, and b) why a promiscuous vampire would be dreaming about a weird old man.
If the list of achievements was anything to go by, then Circle of Doom was planning on defining its name by being a bland and repetitive hack and slash game launched too close to Devil May Cry 4 for another 7 crappy areas, broken up into about 4 areas each, and each area getting progressively darker until the point where you can only guess where your enemies are by mashing the control pad for an hour straight and listening out for the contact from your swords. As if that wasn't enough, the game finally managed to piss me right off by decided for no reason whatsoever, that the boss area for the region I'd just battled through was locked, just to shake things up a bit. With a complete lack of keys, switches and any other interaction with the environment, I decided I'd had enough and decided to finally start playing Mass Effect.
Now you see, Mas Effect is a game I bought initially for two reasons. First, from what I've seen the graphics looked better than any RPG I'd every played before; and second, because there was a screw-up at work, so I got the collectors edition for £20 a week after it came out, rather than forking out the ugly side of £40 for the standard version. Bargain. (For you Americans out there, double those numbers and it'll probably make more sense to you).
I played Mass Effect briefly, taking great care setting everything up just right to play a game following in the footsteps of Knights of the Old Republic (as this was a big game, and I wanted to make the most of this new, improved version), and I was then told after but 20 minutes that my parents were kicking me out and getting a place of their own. Eventually I managed to have another attempt, and was rewarded with two hours of sublime RPG-age, until my brother came home and implied he'd quite like to watch rugby instead. After that two hours, I realised that to play Mass Effect, I was going to need to dedicate quite a lot of time to it, so I wouldn't forget what the hell I was doing, thus saving me from diving into the Massive journal. But seriously, it's a great game, seems really really big and I look forward to playing it properly some more.
Hmm? Oh yeah, Circle of Doom. It is in fact a repetitive circle of... well, doom and I wish I'd spent the last few days doing something with a more clear future, say stabbing myself in the legs a few hundred times. Not so recently I mentioned that Crackdown was really sparse in the story department. By comparison, being a supercop taking down three gangs by any means possible because you're told to classes as a best selling novel alongside Circle of Doom; which couldn't even boast any interesting gameplay features. Or features at all for that matter. Kudos go to my 360, however, for actually managing to generate the levels for me to fight in, where the designers gave up and decided to follow the story team down to the pub.
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