Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom
Preview
Series takes a turn to action-RPG
by ffanxii4ever
previewed on X360
Breaking the fold
The Kingdom Under Fire series was a fairly successful series of real-time strategy games that were first seen on the PC, and then for the original Xbox where it grew in popularity. It successfully merged the strategy and action genres, allowing you to order entire groups of soldiers into position, while you simultaneously attack the enemy leader with your own, and engaging him one-on-one in the hopes of demoralizing his troops and making them useless. Circle of Doom deviates from the KUF series in that it removes the strategy aspects and instead makes it entirely a dungeon crawler.
The Cast
With the emphasis moved away from strategy and to the action-RPG field, the characters that you can play as become even more important. All of the characters that you can play as were introduced previously into the mythos of the KUF universe, but their back stories will be told for newcomers and for those who had yet to meet some of the characters. There are six different playable characters, each of them unique. There is Duane, the aging aristocrat who wields maces, morningstars, and guns; Kendal, the white knight who is fighting the mutation; Regnier, a man freed from immortality and granted with immense strength; Leinhart, the half-vampire who wants to mutate, even though he cannot; Celine, the Elven archer who is trying to save her beloved’s soul; and Curian, the wandering savior of Bersia, who is searching for a way to cure his mutation.
Other than the traditional unveiling of the story through cut-scenes and other traditional media, you also unlock tidbits of the story through a dream world. When you find Idols scattered throughout the levels, you have the option of entering this dream world where you can wander around and talk to people, who can give bits of information as well as provide you with a chance to learn new abilities.
Since it’s an RPG...
You are going to be levelling up, and picking up loot, the hallmarks of Action-RPGs since Diablo (Sorry, it goes back a lot further than that – try Rogue. -Ed). The levelling up in the game is handled very simplistically, where an amount of points is given to you, and you choose to put them into additional HP, additional SP (all of your actions use some amount of SP), or luck (which dictates the quality of the items that drop as loot). You learn new abilities in the previously mentioned dream world, where you must complete a little quest to get the ability that typically consists of killing so many of one type of enemy, so many of another, and then you earn the ability.
You collect loot in the traditional manner, by picking up the remnants of your victorious battles, and then equipping the most powerful, and most likely the best looking as well. While each character can only equip certain weapons, you are allowed to equip a primary weapon and a secondary, expanding the options that are available to you.
