Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom - Video Game Review (Xbox 360) - The New Order

Naked Crook · **Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom - Video Game Review (Xbox 360)** 03-14-2010

Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom Game Review
By Naked Crook
The New Order Administrator

When I first saw this game on the shelf in Blockbuster I thought to myself "Wow, this game looks like it has a lot of potential, this looks very fun and I think the co-op feature would make a game like this very fun to play". How wrong I was when I thought this. Every single assumption I made about this game was dead wrong. I have never been so wrong in my life. Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom was a terrible game. I was disgusted by the level of repetitiveness in this game. This game is as repetitive as copy and paste. I cannot complain about the storyline too much because there was no storyline, rather, no single storyline, thus, there was no continuity. The level structure in this game can also be described as copy and paste and very linear. The audio and SFX in this game was just terrible, no other words can describe the audio..

To help the readers evaluate how I feel about this game during the course of this review, I will use the star system. We will start at 5 stars. After each paragraph, you will see whether the game loses or gains stars based on how much I praise or trash the game. We will start with 5 stars. How I feel about the game is unrelated to the final score it is given at the end of the review.

* * * * *

I will begin by addressing the issue of the storyline. The main problem was that there was no single storyline. There are six characters in the game and I decided to play as the character Duane. As Duane, the game starts by throwing you into a tutorial about how to play this very straight forward game and it sends you off on your merry way from there with no direction. From what I do know about the other characters is that the sleep/rest mode is like 50% of the story, in Duane's case it's 100% of the story, and its all waiting and doing nothing important. This mode is accessed when you talk to one of the three different looking shopkeepers in the game. I found this pretty funny and you may as well but the three shopkeepers were the Idol of Greed (who looks like Buddha), the Idol of love (A naked woman wrapped in a cloth) and the Idol of Death (who looked like Death). I found this to be quite odd because why would a shop keeper who sells guns, swords, armor, and potions offer an INN service when there are no beds anywhere in this game? I have no idea, It may have been because the guy just decided to flop down on the ground or something like that, I really cannot say and I really cannot care at this point. However, I digress. In sleep mode (for the Character Duane anyways), you try and win over the heart of some Victorian age snob, who for some reason, hates your guts. Long story short, you have to duel with some Frenchman who looks like a drag queen and his witty remarks are nothing short of stupid. Just imagine what a mother joke in the Victorian ages sounded like! Duane really had no storyline but the other characters did and this is where the problem was. This game was to linear and repetitive to be played more than once, thus I do not want to play this awful game to get every single ending. I want to play this game once and send it back to whatever dimension of suck it came from. I would need to write six different paragraphs about six different storylines in order to fully cover the full story mode. However, I will say this: If Duane's storyline is any indication as to the quality of the other five storylines, then I need not write a few more paragraphs about how terrible they are.

* * *

The level structure in this game sucked, period. This game was a copy and paste job. It was awful. It was the same enemies over and over again and the levels were just constant repeats of each other. I do not know what else to say. The levels sucked, they were linear, and they were repetitive. I cannot think of any word mean and nasty enough to describe this garbage. I really hate to write such a short paragraph but there is nothing to say, the words I have used do not even do it justice. Let's just move on shall we.

*

There must have been about three different musical scores in this game. One for running around aimlessly, one for boss fights, and one for enemy encounters. The SFX in this game sucked. They sounded low quality and scratchy and some of the sounds didn't even make sense. For example, Duane had the ability to use guns and when I shot my gun at an enemy made of blood and flesh that was wearing no armor what so ever, the sound that was made was the same sound that was made when I shot a monster made of metal. This game must have had such a low budget because I cannot think of any game that has this level of audio problems.

*

If I could give this game something lower than 1 star, believe me, I would. lets talk about the graphics. The graphics were not bad, I cannot find any problems with the graphics. They seemed pretty nice and despite the repetitive nature of the levels, the ambiance was pretty nice. The ambiance does not excuse the repetitive nature but it makes it slightly more tolerable. Unlike most games on the Xbox 360, there was not a flood of bloom while playing on an HD television set. I liked this aspect of the graphics engine the most because I find the excessive amount of bloom to be very obnoxious and irritating. All in all, the graphics for this game were pretty competent.

*

Despite the competent graphics, its not enough to get this game out of the theoretical negatives of the star system. Lets talk about co-op. I love co-op games. However, this game had a very poor co-op system. I tried it an I wasn't too enthused about it. the co-op did not change the dimensions of the game one bit and in my opinion, this is a failed co-op system.

*

Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom had a lot of potential and I stress a lot. This game just failed to deliver and this game, is no doubt, the worst game in the Kingdom Under Fire series. It is also no doubt the worst game reviewed on Games That Suck as of September 12th 2008. I officially brand this game as A GAME THAT TRULY SUCKS.

Lets break it down into score categories:
Multiplayer 1 / 5
Graphics 4 / 5
Story Mode 1 / 5
Ambiance 4 / 5
Functionality 1 / 5
Music 1 / 5
Overall 12 / 30 --- 40% ---FAIL