The First Templar Previews
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GameZone:
Combat is fairly standard stuff. Haemimont wants to make the game as historically correct as possible, so fighting is mostly sword swings. However, each of the characters have skill trees to upgrade stats, abilities, and special attacks. Special attacks are tied to the zeal meter. Since there is always at least two characters fighting together, players can switch back and forth to utilize each characters special skill sets. The action feels fairly basic, and isn't terribly fresh or new.
Thankfully, the drop-in, drop-out co-op looks promising, allowing players to roll with the French templar or one of two pals: a fellow knight and a sexy noble woman who has been declared a heretic. It's a simple system that promises to work well due to its fundamental design.
CVG:
Your journey is going to take you round the greatest cities of Medieval Europe - as well as oriental environments, suggesting that the Grail's well hidden - and inevitably there'll be plenty of levelling up and tweaking skill trees as you progress.
Some enemies will have specific abilities you can take on when you've vanquished them, and there's also the by now traditional rage-meter style feature (here called Zeal), where a series of successful melée actions will build up special attack options.
And then Front Towards Gamer dives into both The First Templar and The Lord of the Rings: War in the North:
The First Templar is a third person action role playing game, set in the middle ages. You play as a templar, and you kill things. It's co-op, so a buddy can jump in and play with you if you like. I found the game to be charming, even though it might not be the most polished game around. On PC it looked great, but the Xbox version looked like crap (but I think about most Xbox games, so it might actually look good to you). I know Shanghai Six played it and found it to be disgustingly generic, which is true. The story seemed to be bland in the two levels that I played through, and the voice acting was a little weak. It might have it's flaws, but I had fun playing it. I love the setting of the medieval world, and playing as a knight is very cool. It might not be the best game to come out this year, but I think it'll fun enough to pick it up and play for a weekend. The First Templar is set to release on April 26.
