Most of the time, it just makes the gameplay too easy, too basic, or too difficult by design. Something is off, something that you can tell just by reading some of the Messages from the Dark Dimension and proverb-filled Fortune Cookies that are dropped by dead enemies: “You are locked in a sterile white room. The pain is unbearable. The tools are at hand. What is your next move?” Hmm…. probably opening the door and walking away from the pain.
In the end, my experience with Circle of Doom can be summed up pretty succinctly: It's never a good sign when I nearly fall asleep while playing a game...multiple times.
"A playable demo of Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom has found its way up onto Xbox Live today, and I am scared to download it. It's not that I don't have the 1.2GB free space on my hard drive, or that I lack the time to sit down and play it. It's just that they took my beloved action RTS and neutered it into a hack and slash action RPG, and I can't bear to look. It's like being called down to the morgue to identify a loved one, only reversed."
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