A decent game, dragged down by some bad design choices
Role-playing games are going to have a hard time of it in 2012. They will be competing for gamer’s attention with probably the two biggest RPG releases of the last 5 years, Star wars: The Old Republic and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. There is hope for Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning however, if it can carve out its own identity against these two titans of the genre and present something different and interesting for those players already bored with what 2011 had to offer them.
At a glance Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning would seem to present itself as a mash-up of The Elder Scrolls games with third person combat ala God of war, and even though it hits the target you couldn’t call it a perfect fit. Many of its elements are lifted from MMO’s tropes, a less than stellar attribute for a single-player game.
The main story starts with you waking up after having died in unknown circumstance, and you are the first person to be resurrected using the ‘well of souls’. As someone who has been resurrected you are known as someone who is fateless, and in a world ruled by fate this is something exceptional, as the events that you take part in are no longer predetermined. This world governed by fate and destiny is the creation of New York Times bestselling author R.A. Salvatore. He manages to gives the world a very well thought out feel to it, however this does not extend to the overall feel of the story for the game.
The broad strokes of the story are well constructed and are a nice deviation from the Tolkien style of fantasy, however, the interactions that you have with this world, the storyline and the characters, are bland and lifeless. These issues that Reckoning has stem mostly from its third person perspective. During not infrequent conversations with other characters on your adventures you will be asked to contribute something using the Bioware style of conversation wheel, however, even though you will pick something to say your character in game will never actually say a single word, even though the camera will spend half of the time for that conversation fixed on bored expressionless face. Even if someone is telling you they just murdered your dog, you don’t get a dog I’m just talking metaphorically, this isn’t fable, your character will still have the same bland expression of absolute boredom as before.
Where the story suffers from the third person perspective the combat revels in it. The action is fluid and responsive with a difficulty that is challenging without feeling cheap. Death usually results from a wrong move on the player’s part rather than a cheap hit or a badly spec’d character. Which leads me on to Reckoning’s best attributes, its character building. When you level up you will receive some points to put into Might, Finesse, or Sorcery, and magic part is that you can mix and match as much as you want. The other genius is that it is cheap and easy to go back and reset your characters points at any point in the game be you level 5 or 35, so one minute you can be a warhammer wielding tower of steel, the next you can be a teleporting wizard who rains down meteors and shoots lightning. As you can imagine, it’s a lot of fun. It’s just a shame that the way you get to that combat is more than a little dull.
The way that you get quests in Reckoning bares a striking resemblance to an MMO style of game design. Walk into a town, see gold exclamation marks above villagers’ heads, talk to all villagers, complete quests in most efficient manner, collect reward from glowing question marks, rinse and repeat. On many occasions I found myself running around not knowing what quest I was on or what the point of it was, which is okay for an MMO, because the interactions you are seeking are those with other players, but in a single player game it is lazy and coupled with the problems with the story telling already mentioned there is no other word for it than rotten game design.
The monster designs and general look of the game is in a similar vain to World of Warcraft further instilling the feel of an MMO style, but it adds a huge amount of satisfaction to the combat, especial when you’re taking down creatures the size of a house. Sadly the same cannot be said for the character models and in particular the faces of the people you interact with thought the game. This exacerbates the problems already inherent in the games story telling as looking at your characters bewildered face isn’t even appealing visually.
In two or three years’ time the opinions of those who experienced Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning will be that it was a good game that came out too close to the release of Skyrim and Star Wars the Old Republic, however that would not be getting to the heart of the issue. Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning should be remembered for being a decent game that was dragged down by a hand full of bad design choices.
