GAME-A-WEEK - KINGDOMS OF AMALUR: RECKONING

When it was announced that Big Huge Games and 38 Studios were pairing together bestselling fantasy author R.A. Salvatore and toy designer and Spawn comics creator Todd McFarlane to make an epic fantasy RPG, the buzz was huge.  But a turbulent dev cycle, a massive change in scope from a MMO to a single player experience, and the hugely publicized collapse of Studo 38 after the game's release have put a pall over the game's reputation.  But once you push those factors away, how does Kingdoms Of Amalur: Reckoning stand on its own merits?


What were my expectations going in? 
Mixed.  I used to absolutely love Salvatore, but nowadays most of his books seem like Drizz't Do'Urden fanservice. Todd McFarlane hasn't really been relevant since the 1990s.  But still, both men had greatness in their past, and could work well together.  I'd read some rumblings on the internet that the combat was pretty simplistic, but the game itself was huge and epic, so I have been dying to get my hands on it.  However, there were enough negative reviews that I was unwilling to pay full price. 

Welcome to Azeroth.  Er, I mean, Amalur.

So how was it?
If I could encapsulate this entire game into a single word, distill it down into one emotion, it would be "meh".  It's not a BAD game, by any stretch, it just feels incredibly uninspired. The game feels like the dev teams had an enormous amount of passion and creativity in the beginning, and they just ran out of steam.  Finally someone said "Fuck it, let's just put WoW and Fable in a blender and call it a day." 

The graphics in the game are your first blatantly obvious reminder that this game was originally made to be an MMORPG.  It's a very pretty ugly game.  It looks like a game designed to run on weaker systems, but with the settings turned up high.  It does not look like a 7th Generation (PS3/360) game.  It looks like a PS2 game that someone slapped a quick HD skin on.  This keeps a good framerate, but kind of looks like crap on a technical level.  The artists definitely make do with what they had, though.  Utilizing the same sort of garish neon-pastel color palette that World Of Warcraft employs, they managed to squeeze some pretty beautiful scenery out of the lackluster graphics engine.  Then you get a closeup of a creature or an NPC, and you see how flat and bland they are, and it ruins the illusion. 

It's like they weren't even trying to hide it.

There are so many assets in the game that, while not blatantly stolen, are "borrowed" or "inspired" by other games.  They're not even an homage or reference, they're just copied.  When sneaking, the stealth icon that hovers over people's heads looks identical to the "eye" icon  of The Elder Scrolls, and their lockpicking minigame is almost the exact same mechanic.  Common enemies, Boggarts, wear what look like Deku Shields from The Legend Of Zelda on their faces.  The chat/response wheel from Bioware games has been unsubtly borrowed for conversations with NPCs.  It's little stuff like that which really makes this game feel, well, lazy.  I guess on the other hand, if they're going to steal, at least they're stealing from great games. 

Furthering the MMORPG design, every single goddamn attack is a burst of brightly colored trails, bloom, and particle effects, so simply swinging your sword at a bandit looks like a goddamn fireworks display exploding on your screen.  It's neat at first, but after a while it just gets really old.  When every single battle is a bombastic burst of bright colors (and alliteration apparently), the display becomes commonplace and doesn't impress anymore.

OOH SHINY!

The gameplay feels like you're soloing an MMO that's been adapted against its will to fit a controller.  Specifically, it feels a lot like the Fable series.  You can call this a good thing or a bad thing, I call it fairly bland.  You have a button for primary attack, a button for secondary (read: Ranged), a button for dodge, and triggers step in for a hotbar for items/magic.  Still, while I call it bland, at least it's serviceable.  I never really ran into any control problems or unresponsiveness.  My only complaint in the gameplay was the notable absence of a lock-on targeting system, which would have greatly improved the combat. 

The game has a fairly standard skill tree and crafting system.  I like that you don't have to choose a specific class; you start off blank, and can pour your points into Might, Finesse, or Sorcery however you like. Unlike many games, this one does not punish you for spreading your points across the three; doing so in fact unlocks other Destinies that combine them.  Following one path never prevents you from pursuing another.  If you don't like it, there are ways to respec.  You choose how you proceed, you don't let the game do it for you.  This was a pretty nice touch.

 Leveling up allows you to set your own destiny

I will say that Salvatore's story is the biggest saving grace of the game, not so much bucking the trope of "A great evil threatens the land and only you can stop it", so much as making you work for it.  You play the Fateless One, who died in a great battle between the Summer and Winter Courts of the Fae.  Resurrected by a gnomish engineer working on a machine to revive the dead, you awaken stripped from the bonds of fate (and thus able to make your own, as you so choose).  I will fully admit that I am a huge sucker for most things borrowing heavily from Celtic Faerie lore, and this game does so quite well.  Most of the enemies you face are McFarlane's interpretations of creatures of Celtic legend turned into an epic fantasy world.

Unfortunately the story gets bogged down by a horde of trash fetch quests that make no effort to mask that they are trash fetch quests.  Much like every MMO ever made, every town has a gaggle of "!" icons on the minimap representing every Tom, Dick, and Harry that wants you to go find X or kill Y.  Even the main quest is pretty much nothing more than a string of "Go to this town and speak to Bob", who is in the next area.  When you speak to Bob, Bob tells you to go speak with Frank, who is in the next area, and so on and so forth.  Each area has a handful of the piddly side quests that provide just enough experience to bump you up to the necessary experience level to handle the monsters of the next zone.

At least he didn't call him Bro.

In keeping with the "uninspired" theme, the sound design was mediocre.  Not an atrocity, but not good either.  Voice acting in the game is not awful.  Some voice actors are better than others, some have some really corny accents.  Nothing really dragged down my experience, but nothing inspired me either.  I did notice more than a few sound glitches though; a monster would visibly roar, and the sound of said roar would kick in after it had already closed its mouth.  I don't just mean in combat, either.  I'd say one out of four cutscenes had poorly synched audio.  Judging how the rest of the game ran, I'm 99% sure this was the game, and not my system.

The score is forgettable, and keeps with the trend of borrowing.  There are echoes of better games in the music of this game, masked under blander overlays.  It winds up being serviceable, but ultimately not anything I'm going to go rushing out to find the OST for.  A lot of times the game tries to try for dynamic music that changes with what's going on onscreen, but this often fails by not triggering fight music right away, and then continuing it well after a battle is over and I've wandered on.  It's kind of sloppy.

For all that I'm bitching, I'm actually not going to say Kingdoms Of Amalur: Reckoning is a bad game.  It's just not a great game either, and it left me feeling fairly disappointed.  Maybe I just had high expectations, maybe it was the pedigree of the men involved.  I wasn't expecting the pinnacle of Western RPGs, but I was kind of hoping to be blown away by a deep, epic fantasy game.  Instead I got an offline MMO experience.  It wasn't even a bad MMO experience, but if I wanted to play an MMO I'd resurrect my old World Of Warcraft account, or go play Guild Wars 2 or something. 

I haven't beaten the game yet, and the story is enough to make me want to keep going at least a little while longer.  If you can find this one on sale for cheap, and you're really jonesing for something that will keep you occupied?  You could actually do a lot worse than Kingdoms Of Amalur: Reckoning.  But if you're looking to have your socks rocked off, there are a lot of better games out there.

Play time:  9 hrs
Finished:  No
Recommended:  Kinda.
Available For:  PC, Xbox 360, PS3


Sidenote - I bought this game ridiculously cheap ($7.99) on Gamefly, which forced me to install Gamefly's client to install it.  Then, to play it, I had to install Origin's client.  I have to admit, this made me very unhappy.  The more I look through Origin, the more I realize how much it sucks.  Hell, they don't even have a dedicated screenshot key; I had to use Fraps to get these.  Fuck Origin.  It was almost not worth the savings.