I looked forward to having an RPG to play on the PS3 - who wouldn’t? They’re usually great value for money, usually coming packed with some really nice cut scenes and making me become obsessive about getting that next uber weapon etc. I’m still waiting unfortunately as Dark Kingdom didn’t want to play ‘next-gen ball’ with me.

A bunch of elite knights return home after facing foreign conflicts at the King’s whims only to find their kingdom a changed place. Dark magic has corrupted the land and the King has gone a bit power mad, planning to use the knights against their own people. The knights, not liking the sound of that, devise a way to assassinate the King. After the attempt fails, the knights barely escape with their lives only to try to survive in a Kingdom they can no longer call their own.

You start the game with a choice of 3 classes: the Warrior, who’s your general melee smash ‘n’ crash type but also has magic, The Mage who casts spells and has some melee attacks, and The Scout who’s the agile melee class. You wont be able to change between them throughout the game so choose whichever takes your fancy the most, although to be honest the differences between classes aren’t huge.

As you progress though the game in typically RPG fashion your character will level up, upon which you’ll get an amount of predefined stat boosts and additionally two extra points to add as you see fit. This allows for a certain degree of customisation depending on your playing style and preferences. A nice addition is not only a certain amount of interchangeable armour throughout the game, but also a level of power-ups for your weapon, which again allow you to boost areas that your class is specialising in.

The problem with next-gen titles is not only the price (an average of £50 for this one), but also our expectations are much higher too. Due to a rush to get some launch titles out for the PS3 most of those titles feel as if they have been ported from a pre-existing console and Dark Kingdom is no exception to this, with the graphics looking really dated even by a PS2’s current standard. The cut scenes are really nicely done though; I will give them credit for that. Rather than go for the pre-rendered movies we’ve grown used to, it’s more graphic novel looking, which is a nice change.

I’m bit of an avid fan of RPG’s in general, be that MMO’s or stand-alone, I’ll give it a good go. While I started off thinking it wouldn’t be bad, the hack ‘n’ slash, rinse and repeat gameplay soon becomes monotonous and dull. Enough for anyone in the targeted age rated audience to put it down fairly quick. I wondered if it was due to not liking my class choice at first, but I tried them all to make a solid point of it. The only thing that you’d think would work out better would be the online version, but with so many games going online these days it’s hard to just add the feature to your game and hope to compete on any decent level.

Probably the one thing that will stand out when playing this game is the stoic voice acting. That Mage, he’s a real conversationalist. And although the music’s pretty good, you probably wont be paying much attention due to wincing at the one-liners.

All in all, it’s probably quite a good game to give to your kid, if it wasn’t for the fact it’s a 15. Oops.