There is an art to making good hack-and-slash role-playing games.

It's not just cosmetics that make one addictive and another instantly tiring. It has to do with responsive controls and gameplay that is challenging in a way that stimulates rather than frustrates.

In short, simply asking you to hammer the attack buttons is not enough. We have, after all, evolved brains that are capable of doing more than just hammer on a button when given the correct visual stimulus.

Unfortunately, 'Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom' does not ask much of the human brain. Indeed, had it not been for the mature themes (rated 16+ for violence and demonic content), one would have thought it was aimed at very young children.

As something of a poor man's 'Devil May Cry' or 'Onimusha', 'Kingdom of Fire' sees you battling the standard hordes of thugs and Japanese-style supernatural monstrosities.

With some decent cut scenes, solid voice-overs, and atmospheric enough visuals, it certainly seems to tick most of the boxes in terms of presentation.

Once you start playing though, the experience quickly unravels — the AI is remarkably poor, the fighting overly simple, the controls unresponsive and, to put it bluntly, 'Circle of Doom' gets boring very quickly.

The game does feature some interesting RPG elements in the way you have to build up your character's attributes and master new skills and weapons, but whereas the idea is good, the implementation is poor. Whatever weapon you have, it remains a rather simple and tedious button basher.

Things are further spoilt by some extremely uninteresting level designs. Whereas the environments may look pretty, they are in reality extremely linear and play a significant part in making the game the depressing slog that it is. A bit more variation would not have gone amiss.

The multiplayer experience is a bit better, allowing you to take on the bad guys cooperatively. But, the slight improvement is probably only due to the fact that the misery is being shared. At its core, the game mechanics remains broken.

The only good thing to be said about 'Circle of Doom', is that it generally makes good use of the 360's graphical potential. But then again, if you wanted to see pretty pictures, you'd probably be better off watching a movie instead.

Whatever glitz it may have on the surface, under the hood 'Circle of Doom' is not only outdated, but supremely boring.