lostinadaze

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

Developer/Publisher: 38 Studios

Platforms: PC, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360

Rating: M

Release Date: February 7, 2012

Plot Synopsis: You play the role of a mortal, who has been dead for some time, but have been resurrected by the gnome scientist Fomorous Hughes using the Well of Souls.  Although you have come back, you have no memories of your previous life and not only that, but you find out that you are the “Fateless One” and the first and only person to succeed in his experiment. With the gift of a new life comes many trials and you are immediately attacked by the Tuatha Deohn, who are waging war against the mortal races, a war known as the “crystal War.” Upon your escape, you meet the Fateweaver Argath, who fills you in on the intricacies of the world you have returned to. Argath informs you that every person in the world of Amalur has a predetermined fate and fateweavers are able to foresee the fates of other, but you are different, for you fate holds no bounds. You then set forth on a quest to uncover your past and hopefully put an end to the war that has arisen while you were dead. What does fate hold for you?

Graphics/ Character Design: The graphics are nice, but a little too cartooney and not up to the expectations of today’s gaming standards. The graphics felt a bit WoW (World of Warcraft) like. Take Skyrim or Mass Effect, the graphics for those games are far better than that of KoA (In the realism sense.)  I’m not saying that it’s the worst thing in the world because the continents environment that you roam is actually quite beautiful, but in a cartooney kind of way. The spells were really cool and pretty to look at, but that was only if you have most of your talent points in the mage class tree. The two melee classes had some pretty cool looking combos, but they weren’t jaw dropping. A lot of the rare weapons, or purple named weapons, in the game had minor animations to them; like flames or lightning sparks. The character design is simple and they give you enough options to make your character unique, but once again, it felt like I was making a character in WoW; except there were fewer races to choose from. There was one unique thing that you could give your created character, however, and that was giving your character a permanent blessing; which is a small percentage buff to a couple stats of your choice. In my opinion, after playing all three main classes and even mix and matching, going straight up mage class was the most fun.

Gameplay: The game is fun to play, but can get pretty redundant and lackluster. The quests are fun, but once I progressed farther into the game, I just honestly wanted to finish it. Once you get to the mid 20’s in levels the game just gets too easy, if you have to finish quests that aren’t part of the main storyline, I’d say to just complete the faction quests to get your fate card buffs. When leveling your character, there are other things for you to level up to help your hero other than the talent trees like blacksmithing, lock picking and persuasion. Also, when putting in your talent points, your character will get some improvements to his or her performance depending on where and how many talent points you invested in a certain tree; mages getting things like mana-cost reduction, warriors getting bonus resistances, and rogues higher crit-chance, which are pretty basic upgrades.

Your character comes with an activatable string of fate buff that charges as you use abilities and kill enemies. Once you’ve filled up your fate bar, you can activate it to make you pretty much a god that makes you unkillable and able to make even the bosses seem like just a regular monster. When your time in god-mode is almost over, you can use a finishing move on one of your defeated foes that has some cool kill animations and gives you a chance to get bonus experience. That being said, this fate feature for your character in all honesty makes the game super easy, even on the hardest difficulty.

There are only so many attacks/spells in the game that they will get boring to use. That being said, you will probably switch your roles from Warrior, Rogue, and Mage a lot. Another reason you’d probably switch around a lot is because the items you find from killing monsters and chests are completely random. So, if you are say a Mage, you will most likely find items for a rogue or warrior that will make you want to respec. When playing the game, I believe I respec’d close to 10 times and after awhile it gets expensive, which brings me to another point that it’s quite difficult to make money in the beginning of the game and paying for repairs can put a dent in your pockets and it is very important to repair your gear because they can break. Even the action bar and talent trees felt a tad recycled from other games and could have used a bit of its own unique twist.

The game tried to add in an item-creation feature by salvaging the armors and weapons you pick up from your adventures, but in all honestly, I don’t think I ever used it once. You will find plenty of items in the game and none of the ones you can create even come close to being better than the ones you pick up, but that comes as almost a double-edged sword like I mentioned previously. It’s good in the sense that you will probably always find upgrades for your gear as you level; but the bad news is that you find so many items that you will have a hard time dedicating yourself to one class choice, not to mention it’s nearly impossible to complete a set of gear. The closest I got throughout the entire game was two, maybe three items of the same set, it could be that I was just unlucky, but I don’t know.

Along with finding items in the game, you come across lorestones and prayer shrines. Lorestones can be found in the various areas you come across in your adventures that once all of a certain area are found, give you a small permanent buff to your stats. Prayer shrines are mostly found in towns and cities and give you a small timed buff that also give you bonuses to your stats, I see a pattern here.

They story was entertaining, but like I’ve said it wasn’t amazing and the ending was pretty predictable.

Disappointments: Something about the game that I was most disappointed in was that none of the characters in the game really gave any lasting impressions. I couldn’t name you any of the characters names other than my own if you’d asked me and I spent probably close to 30 hours on the game. I could see when I was playing the game where there could be some intent to get me emotionally attached to the NPC’s, but in all honestly I couldn’t care less about them during the quests and just wanted to move forward once the quests were finished.

Playing the game on even the hardest difficulty was really easy and didn’t give you any benefits for playing it that way, the drop rates and experience gain were the same, I think that they could have done more with the difficulty setting for the game because I didn’t feel challenged at all.  I think that the game had so much potential, but they wasted it by making it boring, repetitive and not giving it any grasp for the players emotions. Hopefully they make the next installment a lot better.

Replay Value: Medium. The only reason I see that would give you any drive to replay this game is to change the decisions you’ve made in this first playthrough to it’s opposite. Other than that, you don’t really need to because most likely throughout the game you will have gone through each of the fighting styles multiple times. I don’t think I’d play this game again.

That being said, I give this game a 6.5/10.

On a side note: I heard that the game was originally supposed to be an MMORPG, but they released a Single-player RPG first and are still planning and working on an MMO version. Game is controller enabled for PC version.