Yeah, after putting 364 hours in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, I had achieved all I wanted to achieve in that game. Yet at the same time I was still eager for a similar experience and to "get lost" in a fantastical setting with an avatar that could be molded by the player. So I picked up Dragon Age: Origins and Kingdoms of Amalur to get my epic quest WRPG fix.
Well suffice to say that I've now put in over 60 hours into KoA and I've already purchased The Legend of Dead Kel expansion and am planning on picking up The Teeth of Naros expansion as well. The game has really been a pleasant surprise and really gives me that post-Skyrim content I was looking for all while providing a fresh and unique experience.
Obviously, the game is going to be compared to Skyrim. It released within months of the game (big mistake on their part. They should have realized that TES players would be playing that game for months and months after its release) and shares a lot of the same gameplay elements that Skyrim offers (Big, explorable world. Moldable central protagonist. Diverse battle and overworld mechanics. Etc.). However, the game did enough to really carve out its own niche. First, and most important of all, is its combat mechanics. Can we all just say that Skyrim's combat wasn't its strong point? You just kind of hack and hack (or cast spell after spell) until your foe was vanquished. You had to create games within the game to make it an interesting part of the core experience (like say, making stealth an intrigal part of how you approached and dispatched each foe. Made things much more engaging.) Reckoning, on the other hand, employs a much more fluid and action oriented combat system that relies on player movement and chaining attacks with special attacks to defeat your foe. Skyrim was created with a first person view in mind (but kudos for allowing you to play in the 3rd person), and his hurt the character's ability to focus on precise and quick paced movement and combat, while Reckoning was created with a 3rd person view in mind, allowing it the ability to incorporate combat gameplay from action and action adventure titles.
Another thing that sets it apart is its art style. While Skyrim goes for the more realistic setting, Reckoning takes a much more colorful and stylistic approach. It's not cartoonish, but it uses the best points from that style to create a beautiful and eye catching world. It also offers diverse landscapes, from dense forests to arid desert landscapes, to rotting rainforests... and everything inbetween. I have to say that the northern plains of Erathell were just... beautiful. There were moments where I just stopped so I could take it all in. It really was a continual push for me to continue playing the game. The map style is definitely more linear and flat compared to Skyrim, which offered a giant plot of land with hills and mountains to traverse, but at the same time Reckoning offered a lot of diversity in the world you explored.
So while the main quest was bare bones and straight forward, it at least had the decency to not be a bloated and convoluted mess. My main complaint is that Reckoning, despite all of its quote trees and quests, offers little for the player to impact the world in any meaningful way. Even the faction quests were laughably black and while, either offering the "good" choice or the "evil" choice by the end of their storylines. The only one that offered an interesting twist was the "House of Valor" questline in where I sided with The Maid of Windermere as I sympathized with her entrapment in the endless cycle of forced villany, and where the "heroes" were only heroic because they knew they would prevail beforehand. But other than that the game offered very little that grabbed your attention from a story or character standpoint. Definitely the weakest point of the game.
Still, all in all I have to say that Kingdoms of Amalur offers great content with great combat and a fantastic art style. It's straightforward and unremarkable to a fault, but it still holds its own as a great game. Definiely recommended and I'm really happy I picked it up (Thanks Disolitude!). Speaking of which, the game is on sale on Steam for $5.99 so I can only recommend everyone to give it a try!
