Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

Do you ever get a feeling that a game is trying to get in your way, making things unnecessarily cumbersome or punishing you for wanting to play a certain way? It happens all the time and we’ve just become accustomed to it. I often find myself panic stricken playing games that leverage systems of loot and skill trees.

I very quickly tire of sorting through loot and will carelessly sell collected gear I haven’t checked to make room for more gear I’m unlikely to pay attention to, I don’t have any patience for cumbersome and unintuitive menus and long lists of collected trash make me feel uncomfortable. Skill trees on the other hand fill me with dread, what if I choose the wrong thing? I’m torn between wanting to see these potentially awesome new skills and missing out on others, when a game allows it I stockpile skill points and try to plan out a build, it takes the edge off any sense of achievement. Couple that with having to assign stat points to complement chosen skills and I’ll soon break under the pressure and quit.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, or Reckoning as I will henceforth refer to it, doesn’t have cumbersome menus or a daunting skill system. Menus are slick and easy to navigate, checking your inventory against your equipment is effortless and marking your junk for a quick sale at a vendor is a simple button press that leaves your equipment list uncluttered. Skill trees are present but stress free, it’s clear early on that you can respec and it almost seems to be encouraged. Even your chosen ‘Fate Card’ can be swapped at will. Fate cards represent the stat boosts you earn from learning skills distilled down to a set of templates you can switch between as long as your have the relevant number of skill points in the required disciplines. Simple, elegant and relevant to the story.

Reckoning shines in that it does very little to get in your way at all, it’s almost as if it wants to be played. Your character walks rapidly and sprints even faster. Quest text and erroneous chatter can be skipped. Levelling is well paced and new equipment is found regularly enough to keep you engaged in its management but not so often that you need to spend your life in the, very functional, menus.

Reckoning does however have some issues, most notably with the inconsistent quality of the quests. The core quest lines are satisfying in both content and length and there is a huge number of side quests to be picked up, all delivered by odd looking villagers with suitably quirky voices and mannerisms. These side quests are where the inconsistency creeps in, while most are well conceived many seem contrived, like they have been included as padding to lengthen play time. It’s a real shame as if there is one thing Reckoning is not short of it’s content, there is easily enough top quality content to fulfill and exceed player expectations. Once you have escaped the dingy starting dungeon the game reveals the bright and lush world you are given to adventure in, it’s a shame the demo was set at the start of the game as it does the world a disservice. It’s worth mentioning that when battles get a little hectic, and they often do, you’ll see a noticeable frame rate drop, especially when using elemental throwing weapons against multiple enemies. This is tempered by the fact that these drops never seem to affect your control of combat and that using said elemental throwing weapons is immensely satisfying. When viewed beside the likes of Skyrim and Final Fantasy XIII-2 the cartoon visuals, reminiscent of Fable, might seem a little dated but there is personality and charm here in spades, and as Samuel L Jackson once said “Personality goes a long way”.

Ease of use aside, the real star of Reckoning is the combat. You’ll very quickly find yourself equipped with two weapons and a bunch of spells with which to cause mayhem. Each weapon has a single face button assigned to it with combos and special attacks being executed by pausing, charging and bashing that button. There is no delay in switching from one weapon to the next and spells can be quickly accessed using the right trigger and an assigned face button. If you’re not one for learning combos you’ll do just fine bashing away and throwing the odd spell into the mix but you’d be missing out on the satisfaction of mastering the deeper underlying systems of combat on offer. In yet another example of just letting the player play you can instantly use health and mana potions with a quick press of the D-Pad. You will get the instant effect of the potion even if you happen to be mid combo, being hit or charging an attack. Combat is also where the titular Reckoning comes into play, as you slaughter your way through the world you will be filling your fate meter, once full you can enter a state of Reckoning, slowing time, boosting damage and giving you access to a finishing move where some button bashing will gain you some precious bonus experience points.

Big Huge Games have shown they know how to keep action prevalent while keeping the roleplaying satisfying and have produced a game that is very enjoyable to play, I came into Reckoning expecting to find a level of frustration that was not present and it left me wanting more and more.


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