KUF and Dark Messiah Impressions
Crashing into the UK this February come two new Action heavy RPG titles both of which recently had demos released on live. After taking both for a spin I have a few first impressions of both games so here is how Blue-Side’s Kingdom Under Fire: Circle Of Doom and Ubisoft’s Dark Messiah Of Might And Magic: Elements seem at this point in time.
Pointlessly long titles aside, lets first take a look at Blue-Side’s effort. The Korean developer has abandoned the RTS/RPG hybrid of its Xbox editions of the franchise and has instead plumped for an all out action-RPG, reminiscent of the Diablo games, but much, much better looking. The demo of the game allows us to step into the boots of two of the games playable cast (obviously there are more in the full version) and proceed to hack through legions of creatures in a beautiful forest area, and a not so beautiful forest area. Combat pretty much entails whacking away with your blades, occasionally sending yourself hurling into the undergrowth by mistake, and afterwards picking up all the crap the enemies drop and moving on to the next bunch. While it isn’t amazingly executed its enjoyable enough for a fan of a bit of hack and slash and it was fairly satisfying to level up and play through the demos two stages.
Circle Of Doom also has some seriously weird stuff going on too. At the end of each of the stages, my character reached a clearing where they could shop and customize items with a God/Goddess of a variety of types (I saw Love, Greed and Death), at this point your character can also sleep and proceed to have some seriously trippy dreams that I can only suppose are meant to semblance something of a plot. I picked emo-kid Leinhart to play who (baring in mind I have NO prior knowledge to the series) seemed to be a vampire of sorts. His cut-scenes seemed to involve being groped by some elf woman in a ridiculously revealing outfit who suddenly turned into an old man and.. well… things got a bit complicated after that and the second and third dream sequence left me wondering if the designers were on crack. Hopefully it’ll all make sense when I buy the game, but for now the storyline verdict is “huh”?
All in all Circle of Doom proved to be entertaining if a little basic and weird from demo alone I give it a 6/10. Not bad, not good, just average. Oh and for the love of God people stop it with the tiny text in games, even in HD I couldn’t see the bloody writing in this demo without a high powered telescope.
Next up is Dark Messiah which featured in my most anticipated RPG’s of the year, and also unfortunately appears to be under the delusion that every-ones TV set has the surface area of the moon. Infuriatingly tiny text aside I must say I love Dark Messiah, I’ve played the demo about seven times all the way through, and its ridiculously fun and violent combat carries it superbly. Lets face it story wise it’s probably going to suck more than being unfortunate enough to get in the way of a backfiring enema but combat wise its refreshingly new, different and challenging to be well worth a shot.
The demo sees our hero (whos class you choose but little else), going through the tutorial as his master instructs him. It’s rather creepy as your master isn’t with you and seems to be communicating to you in a “voices in your head” kind of way, encouraging you to kick people off cliffs or onto spikes etc.. . Fortunately it’s a game and not real and the protagonist doesn’t actually go and need to seek psychiatric help. ANYWAY, the demo basically has you kicking, impaling, bludgeoning and crushing your way through a temple and in the end fighting a giant spider. Its fairly textbook level design and exploring gameplay but the excellent combat more than compensates so it’s a nice cuddly decent 8/10 for the Dark Messiah demo!
On another note and slightly of topic, why the hell is nearly everything I want to purchase come out in February? These two titles both land that month as does Lost Odyssey and Devil may Cry 4! Heck even Too Human is slated for a release in February.. but I suppose at least that’ll be postponed.. to.. oh I don’t know.. 2010?
