Title: Knights of the Temple: Infernal Crusade
Genre: Action
Big Word: Medievil
Strap: Move along, nothing to see here.

There are some people who just oughtn’t bother making games. Knights of the Temple isn’t especially appalling. It isn’t going to be remembered by any Worst Games of All Time features. It isn’t going to be remembered. It’s just a woefully badly made third person action, with no reason for existing.

There’s no reason to have thought the meagre story needs to be told. A Knight Templar (oh please, just no) is on a quest to find a missing girl (really, please don’t) who has the power of manifesting God’s miracles (just stop). An evil bishop appears to have captured her, and you must… hit things with a sword until you find her.

There’s no reason to have thought the genre needed this addition. Another bluster in the wake of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, this is a sub-console hack-n-slash on a par with the recent Gladiator: Sword of Vengeance. It requires you to hammer the two attack buttons, pretty much ignoring the unnecessary ‘block’ key, until all the foes on the screen are gone. There’s no more to it than this, although it would love you to think there were. Again, like Gladiator, it occasionally announces that you’ve access to a new combo move. Incredibly, these so-called combos are nothing more than an encouragement to hammer at the two attack buttons randomly. One is, and we swear this is true, "Q, Q, Q, Q". That’s not a combo – that’s falling asleep on your keyboard.

There’s no reason to have pretended to include puzzles. Occasionally the bloody death of a foe leaves an object for you to walk over. When you later walk near a flashing object, the game will ask you to confirm combining them, the choice made for you.

And there’s no reason to have released something so poorly constructed. Controls are relative to the position of the camera – a camera that swings in endless sweeping arcs throughout. If you run into a room holding down forward, and the camera rotates 180 degrees, you’ll run right back out again. It’s quite funny. It’s not something that should ever happen in a game, but it does cause laughter. As such, it’s barely controllable, clearly weakly designed for an analogue joypad, but unable to map one to its own key-bindings.

There’s a semblance of fun to be had in fighting three foes at once, but it’s all an illusion. You’re just hammering the two attack keys, and nothing more. There’s no threat of danger – we never came close to dying in the first three hours of play. In fact, just hitting one button and looking away from the screen can see you safely through most it has to offer.