Getting Off On the Wrong Foot: Reckoning's Dire Opening
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The opening is a clever way to explain the unique core mechanic freeform levelling but it's also strongly reminiscent of Planescape: Torment, widely considered one of the best RPGs of an era stuffed to the bulging, straining gills with excellent RPGs. At lower levels the excellent combat, with its reliance on timing and positioning, is pretty standard third-person action fare perhaps a little more fluid than God of War, less combo-centric than Bayonetta. The lockpicking is like that in Skyrim. The menus could come straight out of any classic RPG, which is a polite way of saying they're quite unoriginal, fiddly, and boring. The cartoony look of the graphics is very like Fable.
It's this last comparison which really eats away at Reckoning's chances of turning heads. The visuals really do smack of Lionhead's series, and not just in a general sense. The gamepad UI for switching into aggressive mode which is almost never used otherwise looks so much like Fable III's that Peter Molyneux should call a lawyer. The first time my character went swimming I actually whistled in horror, the animation is so similar. Seconds later, I was prompted to dive for a hidden treasure another Fable nod. All this would probably go over many people's heads if the plot didn't kick off in a colourful forest region and generic fantasy town which looks so strikingly like one of Fable II's environments that it makes me wince.
Reckoning actually has a wide variety of locations, many of which are both beautiful and unusual. The starting forest is not one of these. It only takes a little bit of playing to clear this section, especially if you ignore the questlines and take advantage of the open world, and some of the surrounding, beginner-friendly locations are great, like a dark, spider-infested wood bordering on a nasty, maze-like marsh populated by enormous ettins.
Both of these examples are a joy to explore, and they can't hold a candle to the areas you unlock outside the Faelands, which give twisty corridors the boot in favour of wide-open plains dotted with interesting features. Either would have made an excellent place to kick off the game. Instead, Reckoning drops you in the most boring, claustrophobic and homogenous environment in the game, an experience likely to make you want to cut out the middleman and put Fable in the disc tray at least you get a dog.
