Knights of the Temple II

"A disappointing sequel"

Oh, how I wanted this game. really, after a game like Knights of the Temple it's natural you can't wait to play the sequel. But, the game was designed by another company, no big deal actually, if they didn't make it out to be a crap sequel.

Gameplay: 5/10
Basically, it's button mashing. There's no real skill involved or good timing for your combos like in KotT, in this game it's merely button mashing. They put in some RPG element, you get EXP for every enemy you defeat and with that you can upgrade you abilities, but my abilities never got better or stronger.

The game is quite hard, even at the lowest difficulty level this will bring you trouble, and it's not linear. Well, not very. It's still easy to get the hang of playing this game. A lot has changed in the gameplay, but none of the changes are good IMO.

Story: 4/10

What? I really didn't know what the story was until I was at the Final Boss fight. Apparently, a demon called Azrael tries to open the gates of hell and lead his armies into the world. I was wondering if there would be a particular reason but he didn't even gave a crappy reason like 'I will rule the world', no, he gave absolutely no reason. So basically we just have a bored demon who wants to lead his hell armies into the world to pass the time as a villain. That sounds kinda stupid if you ask me.

Sound: 7.5/10

The music is still very atmospheric, the sound effects are good too. The clashing of swords, the crashing of thunder, it all sounds good. The enemies make creepy sounds, and the environments feel very realistic because of all the sound effects. It made no really big improvement but I must say I was blown away by the atmosphere it created in Sirmium, with the thunder and the doomy music.

Graphics: 7/10

also some improvements in the graphic department, characters look better, cities look better and the backgrounds look better. Only the character movement doesn't look better, it looks too stiff. When swinging a mace for example, your character looks like it's a wooden puppet, moved by strings. At least in Knights of the Temple your character looked much more supple and...human.

Replay Value: 5/10

There were some sidequests in this game. You could talk to citizens and sometimes do jobs for them, so you could play this game again for those quests. But the main 'storyline' (or lack thereof) isn't a reason to play it again at all.

Pros and Cons:

+Graphics and Sound have improved
+Short(you can quickly finish it and be done with it)

-Gameplay is worse
-Crap storyline

So ultimately: it looked good at first, actually, and it was fun at times, but I never understood WHY I was playing it. There was just no important storyline, you had to obtain 3 items to open the Gate. I was at the Final Boss before I even knew the storyline started. And the Final Boss took me around 50 tries to beat, even at the lowest difficulty level.

You'd do yourself a favor to stay away from this game and just stick with Knights of the Temple.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 03/27/06