Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

Kingdom of Amalur is an amazingly fun and addictive game, focused deeply on equiping your character with the best weapons, skills, and buffs to fight your way through the wonderfully visualized world and creatures. The story of the game, meaning the components that come your way via the main quest are excellent. Great cut scenes, great storytelling, and just plain fun to experience. Same goes for the faction quests, which are equally well done. However, if you play the game seeking a greater emphasis on Role Playing vs Action RPG, you will be dissappointed. This game has been referred to as "God of Warcraft" often, but is more like the medieval fantasy offspring of Borderlands & Oblivion (have not played / am not interested in playing Skyrim). You get the instant gratification and addictive gameplay of Borderlands, with it's generic "go here and kill this" quests that are so much fun since the game plays so well. You also get Borderlands skill tree-like advancement, which is simple to progress through and has a big impact on how you play the game. Then you get the crafting, lore, town, and exploration experiences that you would find in games like Oblivion. For me, someone who only has time to play a game in 1-2 hour stints (father of 2), at the most, I could never get into games like Oblivion and Fallout since they took so much time to advance, and I need quick gains to keep me entertained. They are great games, but I always lost interest since the mechanics of advancing in the game (combat) were too stiff and disconnected to make my short window of play time all that much fun; considering I wasn't really able to play the game, engage in the story, complete the quests, and advance my character in the short window of time I was playing the game for. A game like Borderlands was played for the same brief stints, although literally wracked up over 100 hours of my life since it was just so much fun to play. I would have loved that game to have a great story as well, but the instant gratification of the action is what kep me coming back for more. Kingdom of Amalur has both. You play the game because the fighting and action RPG advancements are fun to experience, AND the story and character customization. It gets the most important aspects right, and follows through with an engrossing environment and storyline to keep you hooked into seeing what's next, beyond just advancing your character's abilities. Again, IMO, Kingdoms of Amalur is best depicted as an ideal mix of the rewarding gameplay of Borderlands and the character customization and story of Oblivion. Seriously can't stop playing this game.