The enemy character designs are also a bit on the crazy side. I suppose credit should be given to Blue Side for taking the plot beyond the usual Dungeons and Dragons-type stuff, but a little coherency would help. In Duane’s dream world, he appears as his narcissistic younger self and tries to win the affections of the aforementioned woman by engaging in a sissified slapfight with another well-dressed gentleman. To learn more, you have to warp to an alternate dimension in which your chosen character talks with characters in some sort of dream world. There’s a beautiful woman dressed up in Victorian-era costume like a character from a Jane Austen novel, and Duane begins to try to dance with her. For instance, if you pick the old, fat, balding Duane (whose description makes him sound more like a Wal-Mart greeter than a fantasy character), you start out in a field. Before players mash their ‘A’ buttons into oblivion by fighting countless hordes of bad guys, they are treated to a short, nearly non-sensical cinematic. The second bizarre thing about Circle of Doom is the story, if you can call it that. Unfortunately, hacking up groups of 20 enemies at a time gets old, especially since bad guys never get tougher, except for the occasional boss battle. There is very little skill or strategy involved in the combat, but then again there’s something strangely mesmerizing about it for a while. You can simply hit the same button over and over on an enemy creature to attack.
Hack, slash, pick up loot, repeat…gone is any element of strategy. Even so, when you strip the fancy graphics away, Circle of Doom could have been released in 1995. With Circle of Doom, however, the developers at Blueside decided to go for the good ol’ action-roleplaying route, a genre which has seen some new developments recently due to games like Mass Effect. The first two games were a hybrid mix of strategy and action RPG using large scale battles involving hundreds of units at a time.
That word (I picture it boldly exclaimed in 62-point Times New Roman font), basically sums up my feelings because there are so many head-scratchingly puzzling things about this Xbox 360 game that it’s hard to know where to start.įirst off, it’s curious that the developers would stray from the formula of the original games so much. If I were assigned to review Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom using only a single word in the English language, the word I would choose is “huh?”.
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