I picked up KoA: Reckoning on release day and have spent about 20 hours playing it. While that sounds pretty positive as that's quite a bit of playtime for only 2 days, but I have mixed feelings so far. You see the combat and the questing is pretty fun, but the world is too big for a character without a horse... which means you'll have to quick travel more than you'd want to. The world while kind of pretty and mystical looking it's kind of bland which mean all this walking / running you'll be doing isn't interesting unless you are in combat. As for the questing I think it's starting to get a little bit old... when are RPGs like this going to try something more interesting than "just go to quest marker and kill or collect stuff"? Skyrim burned itself out with generic quests like that too, I thought I was for quest markers and people who didn't like them where crazy and liked getting lost, but developers are just using them like a crutch now so they don't have to write up an elaborate journal so you can keep track of your quests.

It's a good thing the combat is interesting, while it is a bit on the easy side (apparently even on the hard difficulty as well), the way you can link attacks together is really fun and I love how they designed each "cIass" to be viable. I am playing as a Battlemage and I can do just as much damage with my magic staff as I can with my long sword and the "destinies" card system adds just the proper buffs to any combination of Might (Warrior), Finesse (Rouge) and Sorcery (Mage) you can think of. You wield two weapons (primary and secondary) and a shield. You can use your shield to block attacks to reduce damage but if you block just before an attacks hits you do some counter damage and set-up your opponent for a counter attack. You also have a typical action game dodge roll but here is the catch: in KoA you cannot use the dodge to cancel a combo animation so if you get too aggressive and button mashy you can't use your dodge move; it forces you to wait for an opening before you attempt a full on assault. I haven't tried magic because I kind of wanted to play an Ice Battlemage with ice magic, ice sword and ice staff, but the ice spell doesn't unlock until you put 20 points into the sorcery skill tree so I haven't quite got there yet.

Kingdoms of Amalur is one those questing games that can get addicting until you realize you are doing the same 6 or so quest types over and over. I am going to keep pressing on as I want to try some of the faction quest and haven't made it to far to the east on the map yet. I'll probably have more on this game when or if I get around to doing a finished article. Final Fantasy 13 and NLID #51 probably won't be until Saturday or so as KoA has taken up all of my time which is why I figured I had better write up my impressions. I talk to you soon. Loading Complete!