Busy Work
Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, feels like it began life as an MMO. This is both a good thing and a bad thing - on the good side, there's a ton of content, loot, environments and progression in this game. On the bad side.... it feels utterly soulless and empty.
That's not from a lack of imagination, though. Reckoning boasts a well-written world, large environments and tons of voice-acted dialogue. However, the shallow interactions, completely blank-slate protagonists, the lack of any real change and the barrenness of most of the world hurts any sense of immersion. This game is no Mass Effect or Dragon Age - do not come to it looking for a good story.
STORY
Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning beings, funnily enough, in the world of Amalur (Bet you didn't see that coming, huh?). The various races of Amalur can be broken up into two camps - Immortals, comprising of the Fae, and Mortals, comprising of literally everyone else. Humans, Elves and Gnomes, all your fantasy races are there, although each race has sub-races and are characterized quite well in the literature you find throughout the world.
The main thrust of the story concerns a conflict between a subset of the Fae, known as the Winter Court Fae, and almost everyone else on the planet. Fae are immortal - even in death, their "soul" or "essence" returns to their home and they are born again - they can never be truly killed nor do they know the fear of death. While the Summer Court Fae (the opposite of the Winter Court) use their immortality to basically laze about and get all "hippie-ish", the Winter Court decide that their immortality is really, really useful when it comes to fighting and proceed to declare a war of extermination against all the "Dustlings", which is their term for Mortals.
The various Mortal races have managed to hold off the Winter Court Fae for 10 years, but are losing a battle of attrition against a foe that literally cannot be killed and has no fear. In desperation, they try to create a device which will allow them to resurrect their own dead, thus copying the Winter Fae's immortality. This device manages to only bring back one person to life - your character, who conveniently also loses his/her entire memory. Known as the Fateless One or the Chosen One, you are set upon the world with the goal of changing its fate.
Overall the story if decent. It's well written.... but not well voice-acted. A lot of the story is dumped on you like so much "Mass Effect Codex" entries - you learn about the world through "Dragon-Age" style dialogue prompts that cause characters to go on lengthy spiels about whatever subject you clicked on. It's not exactly engaging.
The story also doesn't pull any real surprises or punches. There are moments of drama, but to be fairly honest most of the characters have no personality - the vast majority are merely walking fonts of exposition and quest givers with no personality to speak of. Even the main side-quest characters are quite hollow, and your own character is an utter blank slate who makes Keanu Reeves look like the world's most emotional man.
In short - great universe, mediocre story, awful delivery.
GRAPHICS
The Graphics of Reckoning would have garnered acclaim... 5 to 6 years ago. It frankly looks like a slightly upscaled WoW. There are actual MMOs with better graphics and animations on the market today, so the lack of graphical fidelity is a little surprising. Facial animations are barely non-existent and body animations, while smooth, are repeated over and over and over again. Enemy art assets are also shamelessly reused, as if they couldn't be bothered designing more enemy types so they just reuse exactly the same enemies, except they give them more hit points at later areas of the game.
The art style isn't bad - and can be inspired in some places. There are sections which almost look good... but even then, you have to actively pan the camera around to get the most out of the vistas - the camera being permanently stuck near the player character (except during combat). There are actually nice vistas in Reckoning, designed and created by a talented artist - but the game almost doesn't want you to notice them, preferring instead that you spend 90% of the game staring at the ground or your character's back.
AUDIO:
Completely Mediocre in every single way. Oh, okay, one or two tracks are pretty nice. But after 15 hours of Reckoning, I actually turned off the audio entirely so I could listen to pod-casts. It's nothing special. And the voice acting is, for the most part, abysmally bland - filled with your standard "slightly-British" fantasy voices.
GAMEPLAY:
The gameplay is perhaps the best part of Amalur - it's fast-paced, it's fairly challenging to start with and you have a wide-range of abilities. Combat is all in real time and you have to be on your toes as you can be surrounded by a whole bunch of enemies, all possessing different attack patterns. You can leap, block, dodge and parry as a melee fighter or teleport and sling spells as a Mage. Your classes are fairly standard: Mage, Rogue or Warrior.
The game is fairly challenging if you play as a Rogue, but painfully easy if you play as a Mage or a Warrior. As a mage, your spells become so powerful, and mana regenerates so quickly, that it becomes a simple matter of teleport, cast spell, teleport, cast spell over and over again. As a warrior, you eventually become so well armoured, with such a high regen rate that enemies can barely touch you. Enemy attack patterns are also very easy to spot and blocking them becomes so simple you could do it in your sleep.
SUMMARY:
I know I've been mostly negative, and that's because I really do feel like I've just played a Singe Player MMO. Quests are plentiful, but most are boring. It's a big world... but most of it is empty. The fiction is well crafted... but it's soulless, almost dry and lifeless. The game is big and will last you a long time and the combat ranges from functional to fun (but becomes samey-samey not that far in), but it feels like Busy Work. Like an MMO, you stop getting any real satisfaction out of Amalur about 15 hours in... but you continue playing it for 100 hours more because it's mindless busy work and bars fill up and quest logs get filled in.
