Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Reviews

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Written by WorstUsernameEver on February 7th, 2012

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Combat is both fun and challenging, with a focus on efficient blocks and dodges that creates a more tactical edge than most button-mashing RPGs offer. Enemies are aggressive and players will need to be on the defensive just as much as the offensive. While it's a noble effort to inject a little depth into the game, it can become incredibly annoying. For instance, player attacks can be interrupted at any time, even if they're halfway through a lengthy spell animation. Meanwhile, many enemies can pull off attacks uninterrupted and will power through even the most deadly of abilities.

Perhaps the worst -- and most common -- grievance is had when fighting multiple enemies with fast attacks. It's not uncommon to get hit by an opponent and knocked right into the attack of another one. Some enemies even have their attacks timed to create almost seamless chains, with one blow ending just as another begins. For melee characters, this can mean blocking to an almost farcical degree, with there being almost no gap in an opposing assault. Just wait for an encounter with spiders, with those in melee range taking turns to attack while those positioned further away effortlessly lob projectiles. The coordination of the hostile forces can sometimes border on bullying.

One other gripe with the combat is that special abilities, even when leveled up, feel remarkably weak. Even those skills designed to deal with crowds have rather small attack radiuses, and when they hit, they seem to do little damage. They're also really good at missing their targets, while enemy skills home in and hit with 100% efficiency, even readjusting their trajectory mid-flight should you dodge! It would also help to not be restricted to four mappable skills at the maximum. One soon learns that it's a waste of points to unlock more than four active abilities, as they simply won't be able to use them all -- not without constantly navigating through menus to swap them out.

As impressive as combat and moment-to-moment gameplay in Reckoning can be, it suffers in terms of some of its macro elements as well as on some technical levels. Crafting isn't as broken or overpowered as in Skyrim, but it also feels almost like a necessity. Reckoning features item duration, but if you didn't level up blacksmithing, then repairing your gear can easily bankrupt you. If you instead put skill points into other crafting skills, but not blacksmithing or money-finding skills (like Lockpicking or Detect Hidden), then you may eventually find yourself at the point where you can't afford to fix gear, forcing you to sit there and watch a cool unique set break as you hope to get good enough drops to make up for it. Meanwhile, the Lockpicking and Dispel skills feel shoehorned in, and while combat feels like a definite focus for the developers, these minigames (and perhaps the prison mechanic) were simply tossed in as an obligation.

Occasionally, Reckoning plays it too safe. As good as the combat is, it cannot make fights against giant rats any more interesting. Crime follows the Fable route of, "if you disappear and come back later, all is forgiven." Reckoning teases with consequences, but either doesn't follow through or does so in wacky ways. One quest had me wipe out an entire town; 40 hours later, there has been no reference to or fallout from the fact that Canneroc is now a ghost town. Or that I chose a quest ending that made one faction put out a fatwa against me; every time I encounter NPCs of that faction, they attack me on sight. That's fine, but when I'm in a normal town, and just those guys attack me, it looks plain goofy how I can slaughter these soldiers, but no one bats an eye.

Also, I'm no longer a fan of Todd McFarlane's design aesthetic, so the Niskaru enemy that looks like a refugee from early Violator concepts for Spawn and the banshaen with its oddly out-of-place ample bosom strike me as downright immature. The art direction, whether you like it or not, doesn't mask how the last region unfolds as a slog through a relentlessly linear dungeon. Reckoning's boss fights, neat as they look, can almost always be boiled down to, "use Reckoning mode and concentrate on the boss while ignoring the minor enemies."

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning does all the boring, difficult parts of RPG game design very well, and marries them to exceptionally slick combat and a towering stack of stuff to do. This well-oiled machine keeps you motoring through all the sludgy fantasy cliché and through a sluggish first act. Then - just as the world opens out and the story picks up traction - that motor really starts to sing. That's when a solid, workmanlike game becomes one that's virtually impossible to put down.

It's an unglamorous kind of success story, admittedly. And perhaps it's worrying for 38 Studios that the bland fantasy world it's hanging its future on is the least enticing aspect of its debut game. But it's not all elbow grease - Kingdoms of Amalur adds a splash of colour and a lick of polish to the open-world RPG, and they couldn't be more welcome.

Interwoven with quests and combat is a whole other layer of peripheral systems, ranging from Stealth to Alchemy, Blacksmithing, Sagecrafting and more. In other words, if you're not too busy completing quests and slaying trolls, why not make some better weapons, and be sure to craft some gems to enhance them? You say your blacksmithing and gem crafting aren't up to snuff? No problem, just brew up a couple of potions to temporarily enhance those skills.

None of this is to say there aren't a handful of minor concerns with Reckoning, but they are just that -- minor. Quests can become repetitive, though nearly all of them are optional. Some skills seem unnecessary, especially lock picking. Any lock can be picked, even at the lowest skill level, as long as you have enough picks. I should also mention that a friendly character managed to trap me in the corner of a dungeon, forcing me to reload a previous save. You'd think any non-player character would get out of the way when pushed, but no. Perhaps it will be fixed in a later patch but, for now, keep your distance from friendlies in close quarters.

Again, though, these are tiny quibbles in an otherwise sterling production. Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning presents a world that is immaculately crafted and beautiful, yet still simple and accessible. Every corner reveals a person in need, a treasure to collect, a secret to uncover, a battle to wage. I don't know how much more time I'll spend in Amalur (dozens? hundreds?), but I plan on savoring every minute.

Reckoning's plot exists to mostly explain why your character who is dead at the outset, then resurrected can defy fate in a world where everyone else is imprisoned by it. It's a cool concept that provides some helpful context for why your character is powerful enough to fix things for virtually every citizen, but the developers fail to make it seem as though your actions are having much of a visible impact on the world. The Faelands are distressingly static, rarely changing to reflect the good or evil you have done. That may work in an MMO, but it feels out of place in a single-player adventure.

The hundreds of quests are full of minor twists and turns, but they never quite go anywhere interesting. Both the main storyline and most of the lengthy faction quests end without any significant surprises to the degree that even now, a mere week after finishing the game, I can only vaguely recall any of the characters or plotlines I encountered. Nothing about the world of Amalur feels original enough to get me excited for the potential future products in this universe. Big Huge Games and 38 Studios have unique takes on traditional elves, fairies, and gnomes, but they've failed to create a compelling hook in the lore that differentiates it from everything else in the fantasy genre.

With the numerous (well over 100) quests available in Reckoning, not giving them a unique flavor through storytelling techniques lets them stand as mere ciphers for getting a player in a dungeon and leveling up through combat. Repetitive behavior is at the core of any game, but with dexterous use of story and setting, a good game can offer the player a promise of something new and remarkable around the corner, the illusory sense of the unique that compels him to continue. Developers such as Bioware, Bethesda and Lionhead have championed this art; it's unfortunate that Reckoning only highlights their accomplishment.

The world of Amalur fares somewhat better. The vibrant color palette is a welcome respite from the browns and greys of many near-apocalyptic fantasy settings. Beginning in a forest, the game traverses plains, mesas and swampland before succumbing to the bland desolation of its final hours. The art direction is reminiscent of the high-fantasy, fairy-tale world of Fable, with its insistence on refusing right-angles, but it lacks any clear vision or coherence. At times, the various environments feel as formalized as a desert or ice world in a platformer, feeling requisite rather than organically sprung from the logic that underpins the conception of Amalur. It is fun to look at but lacks the awe and mystery that leads a player to check every odd corner or investigate a cave without direction from a quest. The abundant use of the bloom effect provides an ethereal quality but ultimately prevents the player from integrating into the world, like the matte effect of 80's action movies where the player is in front of the environment, not a part of it.

To be fair, 38 Studios do disguise their limited action spectrum with comprehensive lore. You may only be killing spiders in a cave, but you can be damned sure the locals have something to say about the cave, the spiders, the last guy who wEnt to the cave, the sister of the last guy who went to the cave... it's like talking to Wikipedia (Fantasy Nonsense Edition).

And that's before broaching the geopolitics of Amalur's warring factions. Forget hack-and-slash, this is chat-and-slash - and it'll divide action-hungry barbarians and myth-loving nerds accordingly.

It's endearingly old-fashioned, too. With its elves, gnomes and character names that resemble unwinnable Scrabble hands, Amalur's fiction rejects the brittle Norse influence currently in vogue thanks to Game of Thrones and Skyrim.

That said, don't expect a laugh riot. Reckoning is dismally earnest, not helped by a hammy cast of Brit sound-alikes (Almost Pete Postlethwaite! Sort Of Terence Stamp! Not Even Close To Malcolm McDowell!). Fantasy author R A Salvatore allegedly plotted 10,000 years of Amalur history - didn't one funny thing happen in 10,000 years?

Reckoning's combat uses a hybrid of styles, combining the simple, arcade fluidity of Dungeon Siege with the Quicktime events of God of War.

It works brilliantly, allowing you to swap weapons in mid battle and reel off moves in a way many beat-em-ups would be proud of, albeit without the need to ever memorise more than two button presses.

It may lack the precision of, say Witcher 2's combat, but it makes for a style that can be picked up in seconds, customised to your own particular style of play and crowned with impressive arcade-style finishes.

In its initial moments, the story gripped me you wake up buried in a pile of corpses, left for dead. Buzzing flies, poisonous stench lines, and your character's facial expression and body language truly captured the horror I could actually smell the stench of rot. It was a powerful scene.

Unfortunately, that was the high point of the story, in my experience. The plot just didn't engage me. The basic premise is that your character, who is recently resurrected, is not bound by fate, and more so, alters other people's fate through his actions. The big secret behind all this is dangled before you like a carrot on a stick from quest to quest, and the story hinges on you actually being interested in this one secret. Sadly, I wasn't. As far as plot hooks go, this one is a step up from the tired trope, (You awake with amnesia.)

I'm not confined to fate. I get it. I got it two quests ago. Why are we still hammering away at this, five quests later?

A quick glance at the world map might not look impressive, but it'll take quite some time for the devoted to see and do everything it has to offer.

Admittedly this echoes the dissatisfaction of Kingdoms Of Amalur: Reckoning's world it would have been much more enjoyable to explore something you might actually want to learn about, after all but there's no doubting the timesink Reckoning can become. The longer you spend in the Kingdoms Of Amalur the more enamoured you'll become with it, and this really is its saving grace.

Combat is by far and away the best feature of Reckoning. One of few action RPGs with satisfying combat.

Because no, Kingdoms Of Amalur: Reckoning is not perfect in fact, in many places it's damn right low-rent yet somehow it manages to be just as satisfying to play as Dragon Age 2.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is one of those games that really does take you by surprise, and it's a great, if sometimes a little basic and repetitive game that plays more like an old classic than a new breed of RPG, but is all the better for it. And, thanks to the huge world and ridiculous amount of quests to go at, it's a game that could last months and months.

To sum up, although I'd still favour Skyrim if you can only get one of the two, Reckoning is a highly recommended title. It's a very promising start to what will hopefully be a new series of RPG tales.

Despite its many positive qualities, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is not perfect. Though it is free of the rampant glitches that plague many open world RPGs, Reckoning does suffer from some audio issues, including repeating or clipped speech and delayed sound effects (especially when players dive into water). Strangely, not all of a player's equipment is displayed on his/her character shields, for instance, magically appear every time they are used. The in-game camera can't always keep up in the heat of battle, and Reckoning's two big boss encounters are anticlimactic.

That said, Reckoning gets the important things right. Engaging combat and lovely visuals, engrossing fiction, and an enormous quest all come together to deliver the most accessible open world role-playing game yet. The freedom players have to exist in the world of Amalur to explore it as they see fit is hugely compelling, and there are plenty of reasons to keep playing long after the primary quest is complete. Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is not a masterpiece, but it is extraordinarily good, and highly reccommended.

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