Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom
Preview
We are hoping for a good story alongside the fabulous selection of weapons and the enemies to slay with them
by Akmad
previewed on PC
How I make 'Akmad the Great' so great
In my opinion an Action RPG game succeeds, or fails, based on its character customization system. The only way I'll remain interested is if I have another skill that I'm hoping to get or the perfect skill mix I'm trying to accumulate. The skill system in Circle of Doom isn't overly complex. At its core you'll be able to distribute your experience points into three different areas: hit points, luck, and skill points (and presumably new skills). Hit points are the usual; more are better, lose them all and you're dead. Your luck determines the quality of loot drops. This is an interesting take on the often useless Luck attribute and gives Circle of Doom a chance of being the first game in which I will actually use the Luck attribute. The Skill points are an integral part of the gameplay as each action requires a certain amount of skill points. And once you run out of them, you have to rest. The skills themselves include your normal fare like being able to specialize is a specific class of weapons, spells, and the like. However, there are also some interesting skills I haven't seen before, including the Masochism skill which can be bound to certain items and will give a boost when you, uh, inflict yourself.
This is my greatsword, there are many like it but this one is mine...
As mentioned before, each character will have access to 5 or 6 weapon types and have more than 50 abilities. This in itself sounds pretty good but it gets really interesting because weapons can be enhanced with the specific abilities of your choosing. Customizing your weapons in this manner should be a lot of fun and will likely end up being an extension of your character customization. The weapons themselves will also have a variety of combination attacks which can deal a huge amount of damage, not to mention looking really cool. Those combinations will come in handy given the large number of creatures that will be coming at you, "thousands" according to the Circle of Doom website. I haven't seen any gameplay footage showing that so I don't really believe it, but even a couple hundred would be impressive. The creatures won't be restricted to just moving along the floor, some will be able to swarm at you from the walls and even the ceiling. No word on if the AI will use such abilities intelligently.
Parting Shots
The gameplay footage show off the great looking environments and the fact that it is being released on the Xbox 360 means it should be very "nextgen-y". It remains to be seen how well it looks and runs on a PC but given the level of detail and the supposed number of on-screen creatures I would expect a pretty beefy PC and video card will be required. The developers still have a few months to finish up the engine but it already looks great. I don't expect that Circle of Doom will be lacking in the graphic department.
Overall Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom looks promising and should be a whole lot of fun to play. It remains to be seen whether the role-playing aspects of the game will give it depth or simply feel tacked on. Lastly, as for any game like this, gameplay control is paramount. If I cannot easily attack the legion of creatures attacking me it doesn't matter how nice it looks. My hope is for an extremely visceral experience akin to Smash TV, but with more depth. Well, any depth, in terms of story and character customization.
