Just when I thought I was out…
Another RPG appears, set to drag me back in to countless lost hours and skipped meals. Ok. Who am I kidding? I never got “out” of Skyrim in the first place…and I never skip a meal. Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is poised to be the coup de grace on my productivity.
My time with KoA: Reckoning has left me with this conclusion: this game combines the action-y feel of the Fable series with the complexity and more “hardcore” RPG elements of the Elder Scrolls and Dragon Age games.
The demo starts out with what I assume will be the start of the full game as well: you find yourself in a Tutorial Dungeon. You are taught the mechanics of the game and are given melee, ranged, and magic attacks/weapons to use to give you the standard “think about which one you want to use” process we’ve all grown accustomed to. I have to say that at first blush, I wasn’t feeling great about the game. The dungeon was poorly lit and mostly brown (so…like a dungeon, I suppose) and the graphics, while certainly not “bad” by any means, were good, not great. You also start smashing a lot of crates and barrels.“Oh no, I see where this is going” I groaned to no one.
You make it through the dungeon, which throws your first real challenge at you in the form of a troll, and then you go to the surface. The game quickly ramps up the awesome.
You get to level up and the game slowly tips its hand. Beginner, intermediate, and master spells/abilities, you say? Skill trees and class specializations? Upgradable armor and weapons? Crafting?! Alchemy?!?! Yes, please.
This is where I think KoA’s strength will lie. It is a game that looks and plays like one of your more “streamlined and simplified” RPGs like a Fable, yet has the depth that people who like rolling d20s and obsessing over character stats crave.
The combat plays out in a very action game-like fashion. One button is used for melee, another for ranged, and another for roll/evade. Magic usage is controlled by a hot menu brought up by holding down right trigger and then pressing one of the face buttons. Again, simple at first glance, yet depth and nuance rear their head via the skill tree. As you progress in level, you can spend points to unlock new moves and abilities, thus turning what used to be just spamming a button to get an animated combo, into deftly chaining powerful, class-specific moves together.
Big Huge Games has put a lot of time into their universe and it shows. This is another reason I believe this game deserves your attention. Back story and lore is there for those who want to delve deeper. Books, notes, and monuments that cue audio clips fill in the gaps of what is already an interesting fantasy world. The art style serves to augment one’s desire to explore this world. In what can best be described as “Blizzard-esque,” the art direction of the game makes for some truly beautiful environments to explore.
However, the demo did leave me with a few concerns. The camera certainly isn’t “broken,” but it isn’t the best. There are frame rate issues at times. Character facial animations are sometimes disturbing in that I swear I’ve talked to two people who had lazy eyes. Luckily, none of this really impacted my enjoyment in any significant way. Hopefully we can chalk these issues up to “unfinished/demo code” that won’t be indicative of the final retail build.
The demo gives you 45 minutes to stomp around the world and kill things. Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is a game that is highly influenced by other great RPGs. What I like most about it though is that it is in a fantasy setting that is, at times, violent, but it isn’t a bleak, “realistic” setting like Skyrim, the Dragon Age games, the Witcher games, and the masochism fests that are Demons/Dark Souls. It succeeds at being a deep RPG experience that doesn’t cover everything in a layer of grime and dirty plague blankets; a good change of pace. I highly recommend checking this game out to anyone looking for a deep, fun RPG.
