In one of Capcom's earlier side scrollers, you'll need to stop the Red Dragon from wrecking havoc in the land of Malus"Slay the Dragon or you're FIRED!" - original capcom tagline.
Overview
You and up to two other players, join in the adventure to save your land from a firery doom. KOD is one of Capcom's earlier, less known side scrollers and after playing it you may understand why.
Graphics 5/10
Is this a Capcom game? The visuals in KOD while not terrible, are not the quality that Capcom has showed us in other games. The overall appearance has a washed out, color bleeding, bland appearance. Many of the animations are two frame, which remind me of some Vegas billboard advertisement. Not all is bad though, the game does show some decent graphical effects on a few of the bosses and some magical effects.
Gameplay/Controls 6/10
The gameplay here is pretty basic, even the heroes names are basic (Elf,Wizard,Fighter,Cleric,Drawf.) To acompany this you'll use one of three basic attacks (attack,jumping attack,magic) to fight through a long 16 stage game. As you progress through the game you can gain experience and become stronger. However the enimies you face along the way become pregressively stronger as well, so the difficulty does not chance much. Which reminds me, KOD has a good degree of difficulty to it, so be prepared to feed the machine some quarters.
Sound/Music 7/10
Medevil, upbeat, and probably the best feature of the game. Surprisingly the tunes in KOD go well with the fantasy enviornment. The strange thing is that the music sounds very similar to the music used in Knights of the Round, maybe its the same, maybe the same guy worked on it. Regardless the music is well done and satisfying. The same however, can't be said about the sound effects, which like other aspects of the game, feel cheap and poorly put together. One example is the monster noise which is heard at the title screen, then is reused over and over...
Replay Value 6/10
Only one ending here, and nothing spectacular, just a picture and 2 or three sentences. If you played with one character through-out the game it may be interesting to try out the other characters, but thats about it.
Overall 6/10
Out of four cps1 sidescrollers released in 1991, KOD falls behind in almost every category when compared to the others, or even older capcom games such as Final Fight, Strider, etc. You'll be better of spending your money on another game.
- By Enternal
