I've been looking forward to Reckoning for quite some time. Everything I had heard about it pre-release seemed to get me more and more excited for it to come out. Currently, I've put it roughly 30 hours of game time into it and I thought I would share my thoughts of what I've experienced thus far.
Gameplay
First off, one of Reckonings selling points is that the game plays like God of War. The combat is much too simplistic to be compared to God of War. Non the less I find the combat to be pretty awesome.
You can combine your abilities and the more you do so, the more "Fate" you receive. Fate builds up with each attack combo you make. Once this bar is filled up, you can activate "Reckoning Mode" and basically rip the shit out of everything. I found myself using this on bosses constantly and killing them within less than a minute. This made the boss battles less entertaining and barely a challenge. Without "Reckoning Mode" during boss fights, on the other hand, they seemed to be much more difficult.. but not too difficult. One huge issue I have with the combat is that it does not seems to be as responsive as I would like it to be. You need to block right away, otherwise, it just seems to ignore my button press. This gets me pretty annoyed when I'm facing specific enemies.
Another issue I have is in the skill tree point placement. You get 3 skill points every time you level, but you need to place a specific amount in a tree in order to access some abilities. I found myself wasting points in places just so I could use the abilities I wanted to. To a degree this makes sense, but I feel as if they could have designed the the skill tree's in a better way.
The Destiny System also has influence on the combat to a degree. Based on where you place your skill points, different destinies unlock for you. This sounds really cool, but in reality all it does is give you an increase in specific things. Things like 10% range damage increase or 15% damage converted to mana. I was hoping that there was more to this system than just a stat bonus, but it's still pretty cool I guess.
Story
Another huge Selling point of Reckoning is that they have the famous fantasy novelist R.A Salvatore writing for it. I've heard of some of his work, but never been much of a read to enjoy it. I hear there are some pretty good ones though. Anyway, I'm about 3/4 of the way through the main questline and have completed 1 of the 6 faction quests. I've been fallowing the advice of others who are playing through the game and not touching the sidequests for the most part which is really good advice. There are so many sidequests it's crazy. I think that's awesome though because I will always have a quest of some sort that I haven't done thus giving me an incentive to comeback to the game after I beat the main quest and faction quests. These also makes it feel like an MMO. You walk into a settlement and there are a bunch of quests for you to go on if you so choose to. So if you play MMOs, you should feel right at home.
Environment
I really enjoy the art style of the game. It's really colorful and there are various environments to explore. There are some really neat looking places, but nothing too jaw dropping. One thing I did notice when exploring some of the dungeons in the game is that some are pretty similar to others in terms of layout which wrecks the immersion a bit. There seems to be a pretty decent selection of enemies, but you do encounter them over and over again in different locations which is pretty disappointing. The world is open and free for you to explore, but I really never saw a incentive to unless a quests directed me to do so.
Other thoughts
The voice acting got really annoying after hearing merchants and other characters repeat the same thing over and over again every time I passed.
The Crafting System is pretty cool. You can make potions, weapons, armor, gems... etc. There isn't anything that really stands out from other games though. I love the ability to gem gear to give each piece your own personal touch. I just got the ability to create Epic gems and by god are the epic. I crafted one that increases every ability in my finesse tree by 1. That's pretty awesome.
Also, OMG LOOT. I'm a fan of any game that has a shit ton of loot and Reckoning delivers. That's a huge reason that keeps me playing. I have been receiving a steady flow of upgrades which is really nice. If your a loot whore like I am, I couldn't recommend this game more.
Overall, I think Reckoning is really fun and a great new introduction to a new franchise that seems to have great potential for numerous games. It might not be as polished as I would of liked. But it makes up for it with the the vast amount of content it has to offer.
One more thing.. the EA servers are a pain in the ass.. 50% of the time it seems like it doesn't want to connect. If it's like Dragon Age and I can't access my DLC unless I can connect to their servers, I'll be one sad panda... :(
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