Combat is basically a button mashing affair, where you can generally beat everyone around you just by swinging away like a mad man. Your character is funneled down one long path, forced to fight waves of imbecilic enemies and be beaten over the head with the solutions to any puzzles before them.

No matter how varied the environments are, though, the levels boil down to the same thing. The characters aren't particularly interesting, and there isn't enough dialogue between them or background given to the world to make it more than an excuse to put you in a bunch of different environments. Unfortunately the story is weak and clichéd, with all the predictable twists and turns I'd expect out of a cheesy action film. Looks aside, the major appeal of The First Templar is its story and combat. Graphics aren't everything, but these are so behind that they detract from what is already a mediocre experience. This looks like a game from several years ago, and no matter how good a performance the voice actors might be trying to give, they're always hampered by the mechanical nature of the character's movements. The character animations and lackluster graphics don't help The First Templar, either. Games like Dead Space have shown that UI can be both elegant and serve a purpose, while The First Templar's is just phoned in. The screen is simply too crowded – especially in split-screen cooperative play – and it takes away from any of the ambience or occasional beauty the environments have. The menus and user interface are bad with generic fonts and an intrusive heads up display. Moments into The First Templar you know you're playing a budget game.

It's nothing I haven't seen done better many times before. At its core, The First Templar is a hack-and-slash adventure, wherein you'll be pushed through a series of environments, bludgeon tons of enemies and solve mind-numbingly easy puzzles. His journey takes him all over the Middle East, with stops in historical cities like Acre. This is the story of a Templar named Celian, a knight who is on a quest to recover the Holy Grail.

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