Genre: Action/RPG
Publisher: Microsoft
Developer: Blueside
Release Date: January 8, 2008

Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom is a strange bird.

It's a hack-'n'-slash. Great, I love sky-high body counts in my video games! It's a role-playing game. Goody, I love a good dungeon crawl and allocating attribute points! It … wants me to grind like an MMO. Wait, what?

Circle of Doom removes the strategy aspect of prior offerings in the Kingdom Under Fire series, and while this should have opened the door for the RPG-hungry Xbox 360 crowd and anyone who dislikes strategy titles, one comes away with the feeling that the franchise would have been better off left alone. It gives you the illusion of choice, but you really have no control at all. Oh sure, when you start off the game, you can select one of five different characters (a sixth character is unlockable), each with different levels of health and speed. However, you can't proceed past the end of the second dungeon without having played as a particular character, Kendal. So you have to select a new character and traverse the same regions through which you've just battled and kill enemies that you've just finished slaying.

What makes the roadblock doubly frustrating is that the game doesn't tell you that you have to start anew; you're just told that you can't proceed beyond that point, so you think you must have missed something, and you backtrack until your thumbs bleed, but you'd come up empty. Nowhere in the game packaging or tutorial does it explain that you actually have a "team" of up to five characters; you chose to "begin a solo game," after all. Without a little searching on the 'Net, you'd go into Circle of Doom thinking that you'll play through the entire game as the character that you selected at the beginning. You would be sorely mistaken.

Now, I've played RPGs where you're told from the get-go that you have a team of heroes, and you can switch between them as the situation and battles warrant. I've also played RPGs where you select the character that is most suited to your play style, and you play through the entire game as him/her. I have never played a game that prevents you from completing it if you don't select the "correct" character — and doesn't let you know about it.

The game world is divided into six different regions, with each region split into smaller segments. Idol locations serve as save points, vendors, occasional quest givers, and a place to stash inventory items for safekeeping. Now, the game has a very loose idea of what "saving" actually means, which you'll find after you exit the game for the first time and turn off your Xbox 360. You may naively think that you'll resume the game at the save point, and you would be very wrong. You get to start at the outset of that region, and you get to traverse the same segments through which you've previously battled and kill enemies that you've previously slain. Don't start up Circle of Doom for a quick fix; be sure you have at least an hour to devote to the game, or you'll start feeling like Sisyphus, rolling that same boulder up the same hill again and again and again.

Idol locations are also a safe place for resting and dreaming, which brings to light an interesting aspect of the game. While you're dreaming, you can talk to characters who will provide guidance and quests; you can also learn skills from them to improve your battle repertoire. To "learn" these skills, you must prepare by waking up from the dream world and … going on fetch quests. You'll be tasked with killing certain numbers of a variety of creatures, and it's only after you've selected the skill that you wish to learn that you're told which enemies must be slaughtered. Some of these creatures are located in prior regions, so you can opt to learn another skill, or — repeat after me, kids! — traverse the same segments through which you've previously battled and kill enemies that you've previously slain.

As you hack away at enemies, they'll drop weapons, potions and various other goodies. This may start to sound like expected action/RPG fare, but don't get too excited because the game can't be bothered to remember which character you're playing as, so weapons are dropped for everyone. You have limited inventory slots while you're wandering around the game world, so if you choose to pick up weapons for other playable characters, it'll count toward your inventory total. If you put two and two together, you'd think that you could just stash other characters' weapons at idol locations, and when you're inevitably forced to play through these regions again as another character, you won't be as weak as a newborn babe. No, you'll have super-sexy, strong weapons to slice through these godforsaken enemies! And again, you would be mistaken, because the once loot-filled stash is now empty. If you must persevere and pick up weapons for other characters, then you can either trade in the goodies for cash, or trade them with others in a co-op game.

Battles will also net attribute points that can be distributed among HP, which is the health bar; SP, which represents stamina; and Luck, which affects the quality and frequency of item drops. You'll start off Circle of Doom with a miniscule amount of health, so the first instinct is to spend attribute points on HP. As you continue, though, increasing your SP becomes exponentially more important because without it, you won't be able to use any weapons. Although SP gradually recovers, the rate at which it does so isn't nearly fast enough to keep up with the requirements of combat, so you have to use white potions to fill up the SP bar. Spending points to increase the SP bar is definitely preferable to using a white potion every few seconds.

You don't get the sense that you're fighting in an epic battle, as you do in Dynasty Warriors or Ninety-Nine Nights, mainly because there aren't hundreds of enemies rushing at you and wanting to slash you to smithereens. Once there is a cluster of over a dozen foes, the game slows down quite noticeably. Everything about this title is slow; even when you're playing as the supposedly light-footed Elven queen, you feel like you're just plodding along. Enemies can spew fire, lightning and poison at you, but you can't even block attacks in Circle of Doom. You never feel like you're in control of your character, especially when you have a full SP bar and you're hitting the attack button like there's no tomorrow, but there is a huge lag in reaction time, with your character standing still while enemies push you around the screen.

You can equip any two usable weapons, and although there are melee and ranged weapons, the latter are usually pretty useless. You can use a ranged weapon while in the regular combat view, but you'd be randomly shooting without an idea of where the bullets or arrows are going. You can hold the left trigger to switch to the aiming view, which, unfortunately, renders your character unable to turn around, so although this view bestows you with a reticle, the aim is loose, and you can't shoot anything behind you without going back to the normal view and repositioning yourself. Of course, now the enemies that you were previously facing are now behind you, so the conundrum never ends.

If you equip two melee weapons, and a situation for a ranged weapon presents itself, you'll have to delve into the menus to assign the bow or gun to one of the two attack buttons. If you have any sense of self-preservation, you won't keep a ranged weapon for any longer than necessary, so once you're done, you'll have to go into the menus again to reassign the weapon slot. This would have been far less cumbersome if the developers had thought of a way for players to cycle through the weapon inventory.

It may have been a rough ride thus far, but there are a few things that Circle of Doom does well: the variety of enemies, excellent audio, and multiplayer. From knightly specters and gigantic Venus flytraps to shamans and invisible lizards, foes are imaginative, menacing and creepy. It's too bad that there weren't more of them at a time, which would have given the game a grander sense of scale. Although the characters don't speak except in cut scenes, the battle sounds are quite convincing, and I haven't heard anything as creepy as the gang of laughing flesh men that maniacally chortled as they wobbled their way toward me … in a graveyard. Item synthesis is also pretty decent, although it's nothing groundbreaking that requires a letter home. You can improve weapons and equipment by adding an item or ability; this task can only be performed at idol locations, and it requires some money and a bit of luck, so the more points that have been allocated to Luck, the better the chances are of the synthesis being successful.

In multiplayer mode, you can host a private or public co-op game and invite up to three other players. The game is much more bearable when you have a diverse party of four to traverse the same segments through which you've previously battled and kill enemies that you've — well, you get the picture. Offline co-op play isn't available, so if you want to play Circle of Doom with your friends, you'll need four copies of the game and play over Xbox Live. We didn't encounter any glitches or lag in multiplayer, but you'd have to enjoy the single-player experience enough to want to run through it again with others.

Although it does a few things well, Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom seems to punish you at every turn for trying to progress. In an attempt to give gamers more bang for their buck, the developers have managed to cut off their noses to spite their faces because instead of a quick and good game, you get a drawn-out game that stops being fun after a few hours. If I wanted to drink the Kool-Aid at the MMO camp, I would have done it a long time ago, rather than wait for one that's masquerading as a hack-and-slash title.

Score: 6.0/10