Reckoning

I was very much looking forward to Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, in fact it was one the titles I was most interested in post holiday season. Being a long time gamer I have a very soft spot for new IPs, anything to break up the sequelits that is inevitable in my favorite pastime. This game has all sorts of potential, from Todd McFarlane to R.A. Salvatore, and a team of accomplished developers, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that this is 38 studio’s first release.

It is hard for me to say bad things about this game because there is very little that I find “wrong” about it. The combat is fast paced, action oriented (a lot like a Darksiders) but flawed in my opinion. It is easy to get too deep into a combo, and be stuck in an animation when you need to dodge. This becomes increasingly annoying because the only way the game seems to create difficulty is by throwing more bad guys, and more combinations of bad guys at you. Each monster type seems to have a Punchout style approach to them, you learn their attacks and once you do you are easily able to completely mitigate them, until of course, the screen is full of different kinds of monsters, and animations and spell effects, to the point where you can’t even really see the queues anymore. This is assuming of course you can get them all on-screen so you can see the ranged attacks coming. The camera is really frustrating in these instances because more often than not, you don’t get to see these attacks coming at all. The only real way to deal with it is to load up on potions and use them liberally. But again, it’s not broken, it could easily be said that this was their intention, and if that’s the case they’ve nailed it. The combat is quite fun when I feel like I’m not being taken advantage of by the systems in place. One last note about the combat; I’m playing a full sorcerer on PS3, in the console version you cast spells by holding down R1 (rb), and using the face buttons, when you get to the final tier of the talents, you have more than 4 spells that are useful and you have no way to use them all in combat despite the fact that they are all still useful. Pretty frustrating when I’m spec’d for full shields, and healing leaving only 2 offense abilities to use during combat. It would have been better if it was less cumbersome to remap the abilities so that they can be used out of combat easier, but they aren’t. It’s a quality of life thing but it really does get pretty frustrating when healing up and re-shielding myself out of combat takes a couple of minutes after every encounter.

I don’t have many good things to say about the story so far, most of it has been throw away, a collection of short stories that last 2-3 quests. I’m supposed to be a hero, a “fateless” one, who can change the world. but I am stuck doing trivial tasks or fetch quests not unlike you would in an MMO. Of course the argument is that they are building an MMO, of course they are going to use systems that could be reused in their upcoming project. But if you think about it that way, what you’re playing here is a single player beta next gen action MMORPG. It’s funny because I’ve said that I can’t wait for the next gen MMOs to come out because they are going to look something like reckoning. As it turns out, I don’t think I want that anymore. The questing can be described as make busy work, they have you running all over the place, instead of defined quest hubs where you get quests to do in the area, the quests often span multiple areas which involved a lot of running around. Yes they allow you to fast travel to places you have already been. That caveat it what slows it down.

To say this game is not worth the money is a lie, there is so much content here that if you have a tight gaming budget and you need something that will give you hours upon hours of content this is an excellent value. Sadly in the twenty hours of this game that I’ve played so far there has been 1 moment that I found truly exceptional, and it was the one part of the game that had a very guided narrative, a long combat sequence, and a fun (but not all that challenging) boss fight. It is a shame that it took so long to get to this point because if there were more moments like this one I would likely be more eager to continue playing this game. As stands now, I’m finding that my MMO fatigue that is preventing me from playing SWTOR, is also preventing me from playing Reckoning, and bring into question my whole desire for the next gen action MMORPG.

It is very unlikely that I will finish this game, but I felt that I needed to explain why. It’s not because the game is bad, it certainly isn’t, but the MMO style questing and leveling system is something that I’ve grown tired of in my many years as an MMO player, and if you haven’t, I imagine you can have a fantastic time with this game.