Persevere, explore and allow the game to unfold however, and you'll find that the irritating gameplay failings repeat themselves indefinitely like a string of paper cut-out men, or some sort of wonderfully asinine kaleidoscope. Trying to play this game with a keyboard is like trying to perform open heart surgery with a baguette and spoons for hands, blindfolded. That said, Cauldron has missed the medieval mark completely, instead concerning itself with awful, I mean really awful controls -keyboards are just not welcome here.

Medieval, it would seem, is coming back into fashion - full platemail two-piece suits are now considered retro chic and crappy movies like Zl Knight's Tale and Black Knight smear themselves over our silver screens. It's tiresome, unchallenging and artistically bankrupt, and there's no reason in the world to patronise it when you've got the likes of Star Wars Jedi Academy, Soul Reaver 2 or even Dungeon Siege on the market. And what's worse, you can't move and block at the same time, something I've always found unforgivable.īut I wouldn't care if this was the best goddamn hack n' slash game in the world, as this genre is defunct. The best thing about it is the motion capture, which is high-quality stuff and makes for some fluid medieval exchanges, but otherwise the combat is the dreary button-mashing that plagues this whole crippled genre. The selection of combos is poor, the Al basic and the environments repetitive. The last really good example we had was Severance back in 2001, and even that was only saved by its nice shadowy bits.Īs it happens, Knights Of The Temple isn't even a particularly great hack n' slash game.

It should have taken itself out into the snow to perish years ago, making room in the igloo for another genre to flourish. So how is it that we've somehow managed to let an entire genre slip through the net unnoticed? The hack n' slash genre is past it, geriatric, anachronistic. New PCs are obsolete before they're even thought of, generations of graphics come and go like so many Beckham hairdos and tomorrow's technologies usually arrive around lunchtime last Tuesday. Obsolescence is a concept that we PC users should be all too familiar with.

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