Previews// TGS: Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom

More examples of this balance between ‘simple’ and ‘advanced’ come in the magic system and weapons control. Skill Points are used to conduct magic and other special attacks. You have a blue bar at the bottom of the screen that depletes a certain amount whenever you use a Skill. This refills back slowly over time, but it stops you from mashing the same Skill attacks to defeat tons of enemies – a level of strategy is still present from its RTS roots it seems.

Two weapons can be carried at a time, along with one or two Skills. The weapons can have their stats raised by way of certain actions such as Greed or Bloodstocking. Performing these actions many times will raise particular stats in that field, so if you went around massacring hordes of enemies you may find that the special attack stats will rise a little on that weapon. You can also mix items and even weapons to create new ones, or you can customise existing ones. The best part is you can share these customised weapons with others via Xbox Live, either by trade or selling for cash.

The online multiplayer is something Blueside was keen to stress, particularly due to the fact that it plans on releasing a ‘Games for Windows’-compatible PC version, which will enable Xbox 360 and PC gamers to hook up together. The entire game is based seamless single-player and multi-player action, so you can invite friends to your current game without exiting or anything silly like that.

Character customisation, along with the ability to create or join clans is something we were keen to find out about – unfortunately Blueside’s people told me that they don’t have any such feature… sort of. They told me that they have a new feature for the online networking aspect of things that will help players find one another and meet up with similar kinds of skilled characters, but were tight-lipped on exactly what that feature was or what it entails.

The game itself, when we played it at Microsoft’s TGS booth, was pretty solid – I had a lot of fun running around and smacking all sorts of different creatures with a massive sword and shield, then switching the shield to a boomerang-type slicer and using that with the sword. Then switching both weapons for shields and bouncing enemies about a bit.

The whole thing does feel like we’ve been here before in countless other games, but the unique features I saw seemed to take the edge off of that. Hopefully this will be even more apparent in the retail release when we all get a chance to play it for longer than ten minutes and all the advanced features are evident. And, according to Blueside, with over 40 hours to complete, it looks like there’s still much to uncover from this game.

All in all, if you’re looking for a bit more depth out of your strategy adventure RPG these days, you can’t do wrong by keeping an eye on Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom.