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Knights of the Temple 2 Mini Review
Derek dela Fuente
25/11/2005
TVG returns to the Dark Ages in this Knights of the Temple follow-up...
Having played the original game which was enjoyable but never fully engrossing I was eager to see what new ingredients and clever design work has been adopted for the sequel. It was all too easy to describe Knights of the Temple as a hack and slash game but it did offer a lot more ingredients than purely charging around and killing although you were never fully immersed within the storyline, and felt that your actions were just running through a plotline/script and you were merely a tool being used to run through a set of sequences.
The sequel expands on the ideas from the first game and tries to open up the story whilst also giving you the feel of a more vibrant world and certainly a lot of freedom.
The premise of the game is fairly straight forward. As a master Templar, you must search the lands for three important artefacts: the eye, the weapon and the key to stop the menace of the underworld. Although some dramatic dialogue and cinematics try to get you in the mood at the start once again you feel you will be pushed along a conveyor belt of tasks and skirmishes and there will be no real cohesion or real emotional feel and empathy with the game. Many of the great games seem to conjure up intensity within a few minutes and you are so eager to begin that you will skip the manual and all the preliminaries and just want to be a part of the experience. Sadly this is not the case with KOTT2, although to be fair it is an action game and does not profess to offer more than an extravaganza of events.
To commence you have 3 level of difficulty and it is very much straight into the action if you by-pass the basics of how to use your weapons and manipulate items. It must be said that the camera views and speed the game runs at is very competent and with the use of mouse and keyboard a plethora of movements and some cool complexities of fighting can be achieved with consummate ease.
You are fairly well equipped with sword, armour and blessed with a neat array of fighting moves for confrontations with other well armed and equally resplendent fighters. It is not all about grappling; itās about movements, finding solutions and interaction.
Another of the major negatives from the first game was its restrictive feel and it seemed that you were forever running around caves below the ground, puzzling out where the next exit or door was and every location looked almost the same. A more vibrant look, along with some excellent attention to detail both in the outside world and again below ground, give the game a more rounded feel. It also feels that a lot more thought has gone into to the fighting, for the first experience resulted in once you had learnt a few moves and parries, you could outwit, and defeat the baddies. This is not the case this time around, they are smarter, better equipped and things are not so obvious.
In effect Knights is a neat blend of ideas leaning towards more of an adventure, come action experience where you must think and remember and even try to plan ahead! You need to be more detailed with interaction, ruffle people, gain points, money, find items, in fact new puzzlers are thrown up constantly.
As lightly mentioned, this is more than a brutal fighting experience and when fighting one on one it requires some forethought as to whether you wish to play as an attacking player or one with defence at the top of the list. After a few skirmishes you will soon be able to gauge things accurately and the fighting experience is a pleasing one.
Although KOTT is predictable in many ways, it is the challenges, the nice mixtures, the fighting and game interaction that really require you to build up a good level of skill and in some parts itās quite thought provoking. KOTT2 is not innovative in either its presentation or theme and many might well say this is ordinary but in terms of a very long gameplay event it offers plenty of hours of fun!
