Knights of the Temple 2 review

This action adventure, which is developed by Cauldron, puts you in the armour-plated boots of a high-ranked paladin out to fight the forces of evil. It could be called a multi-genre offering since it is in big part a roleplaying game but it also has FPS elements as evidenced by the Unreal-like multiplayer option. The difference is that you fight with swords and crossbows instead of guns.

A Day in the Life of a Paladin

The background is briefly explained with a cutscene; presumably the developer assumes that you know the protagonist from the earlier game. Paul de Raque, a grandmaster of the Templar Order, wears full body armour complete with a full helmet so you don’t get to see what you look like except in the cutscenes.

Incidentally, in the early stages of the excellent God of War for the PS2, one of the ideas was to have the hero in a full helmet or a mask that covered his face. They scrapped that idea because you couldn’t really identify with the protagonist. I tend to agree. Then again, he would probably look out of place in 13th century Europe dressed otherwise being a holy knight and all.

Paul has never found rest since he fought with the forces of hell twenty years ago (KOTT1) and is constantly plagued with visions he can’t explain. At last he finds the answer in some library; he must go forth and retrieve three ancient artefacts. Yep, that’s it, that’s the background story, not exactly a deep intricate plot which grabs a hold of you and makes you interested. To be fair there are some plot twists and turns in the progress of the game.

Land ahoy

When describing the gameplay it’s easier to think of it as a role-playing game. You have your own ship which you can use to sail to any island or city you have on your map. Sometimes NPCs will give you the location of a place for a quest. This means that you can choose the order in which you visit the locations i.e. there is some non-linearity. The quests themselves are almost all of the go fetch variety so they are really not all that interesting, the game probably would have been better off just focusing on the combat.

The places can be cities where you meet questgivers or merchants. Sometimes you have to liberate the city from attacks which is a nice touch. Then there are dark dungeons, forests, pirate islands (yaarrrrr) or swamps so there is a good variety in locations.

It’s clobberin’ time

You fight with swords, shields, hammers and the like and in a true RPG fashion you will find or do a quest for better and even legendary weapons. My personal favourite is a two-handed fire sword which does damage over time in addition to the normal damage. The foes you kill yield experience which you can then use to boost up and learn new fighting or magic skills. Yes, the witch-hunting servant of the light uses magic like heals and combat spells. Go figure.

The other combat mode is when you use a crossbow. You go into first-person mode and take aim. It’s hard to use a crossbow in the thick of the battle because of the sluggish controls. You use it more like a sniper rifle as popularized by other games.

The controls are a bit hard to get used to, they’re not terrible just not intuitive. For example when you do a special move you have to hold one button down and press another and hope you have enough energy to pull the move off because there is no clear indicator. It’s actually easier just to put the experience points into combos.

The look of the moves is pretty okay but doesn’t have the wow factor of other games; these are just your basic swings, slashes, twirls and whatnot. In a nod to Prince of Persia or God of War (or if you want to trace it further back; Mortal Kombat) you sometimes get to do violent finishing moves although it’s not really as gruesome as those aforementioned games.

Here there be monsters

The enemies in the game are mostly monsters of various kinds which would not look out of place in a Clive Barker movie being from hell and all. The bosses are particularly impressive and usually require some tactics instead of just charging headlong since they usually are ten times your size or more.

The mob AI and pathing is just terrible; you can easily pick off a group of enemies with a crossbow one by one and the others won’t move a finger. They also tend to run in all directions and really don’t pose a challenge at all unless they come in large numbers. The bosses are different in that regards, as they are quite fun and can be challenging.

A View to a Kill

The game runs very smooth and loading times are fast. It looks fine, not spectacular, but fine. Just remember that the default resolution is way too low for most computers. The cutscenes are really not the impressive; the only real graphical plus is the interesting look of the monsters.

The biggest technical problem with the game is the camera; it can drive you nuts in dungeons and narrow spaces because it’s controlled by the environment, you can’t look around corners and that’s fine but it makes trying to look around very frustrating because you don’t know why you suddenly can’t move the camera. The camera in combat situations is also frustrating, you can target an enemy and stay locked on him but the camera does not move automatically to him. You’ll also find the camera problematic when using the crossbow.

Multiplayer

KOTT2 has a multiplayer option and you can select if you want to join an internet game or a LAN game. When I checked there were no servers through Gamespy but I made a session. It’s a typical UT setting; you choose a map, run around and kill people. There are potions, boosters, darts and such lying around for you to use.

This is not actually a bad game but it has some technical flaws going against it. If you’re bored of using guns and in the mood for slicing up some nasty-looking monsters without getting scared out of your wits, by all means pick it up.