Kingdoms of Amalur: The Reckoning has quite a pedigree. A famous artist designed the art for the whole thing(Todd Mcfarlane), a bestselling author wrote it(R.A.Salvatore), a famous game designer is involved(Ken Rolston), and just to top it all off a famous baseball player owns part of the company(Curt Schilling). Which is cool and all, but the more they pushed these facts; the more I thought, “God this is going to be a complete mess.” After playing a buggy demo that was the first demo to ever lock up on me; I was really thinking, well this is it, it’s going to be a disaster. Then I played the full game, I can’t say the game is terrible; but the Kingdoms is definitely not that good.
The game was offered as an open world, action fantasy RPG. Well, one of those genre conventions is just completely wrong. That would be open world; you cannot freely jump, vault, or even traverse a small log in front of you. Without ANY kind of freedom of movement, except choosing which road to walk down; there is no way that this game could be considered open world in any way. For more than 60% of the enemies they are arranged in little groups like in an MMORPG. Otherwise, they are activated when the player sets off some kind of trigger(walks into an area or hits a particular switch). There is a day/night cycle which is only important because there are mechanics associated with some weapons tied to them in a minor way. There are no weather effects of any kind, not even rain. But all this I could completely be fine with and ignore.
The action mechanics in the game are the stars of the show. Everything from magic to melee works incredibly well. Every weapon handles well and has an incredibly fast pace which breaks a lot of conventions; At least for RPGs anyway. The player can make his character dodge enemies at will, do combos, you can even snipe some enemies with your bow to a point. With upgrades spells will hit more guys if they are close together and there were even instances where groups of enemies were hit with only one strike of my long sword. Although at some point in my time with the game, I just felt like I was just pressing X a whole lot. It might have been nice to actually have to do some more complicated combos. But then that would probably have required more complicated enemies. Also, stealth is useless; only being able to go after 40% of enemies renders it so. The actual stealth system is great and has definite chops; be we need to have opportunities to use it. I felt like at some point the character would be better off if they could turn invisible. Because that’s about what it would take to stealth attack most of enemies in the game.
The story in Kingdoms of Amalur is by far one of the weakest parts of the game. Your character is completely silent. That is a very 90s way of doing things, but hey Skyrim did it, so I can forgive that. Your character, while customizable is not exactly a complete blank slate and considering the game is not exactly running in DirectX11 at 60 FPS what difference does it make. Many of quest givers sound exactly the same, even in the main quest. Which really detracts from the feeling of the world. They could have used the same voice actor and just have them change their voice. The whole thing just feels lazy and cheap. There were some interesting side quests that were good and there were some faction quests that were good. The main quest definitely felt like the most fleshed out of any of the material I experienced. While I enjoyed the disparate material, none of it really interested me to the point where I HAD to know what was going to happen. There have been plenty of people saying that Kingdoms of Amalur is very MMO-like and I’ll join the chorus. The game has the power and capacity to change the world the character was in but doesn’t at every turn. Because, if the designers chose not to have a completely open world, the very least they could done is have the actions you do effect the world in some permanent significant way. There were some interesting aspects of the story given through dialogue in the main quest and in a couple of the faction quests. But most of this was described to me. This was a prime example of show don’t tell. That’s Creative Writing 101, what happened here. There were a few cutscenes for big moments in the game but these were very few and far between. In them my character STILL didn’t speak. It was very out of place. Also, considering the size of this world, it would have been nice to see more than around 6-8 enemy types. If I see one more reskinned Brownie, Sprite, or solider. This is very noticeable when your playing have to get right on top of your enemy to realize they are a Tuatha Solider and not a Freeman Assassin. Really? I mean at least the Sprites and Brownies are different colors.
The thing that after 14 hours, I could no longer deal with in Kingdoms of Amlur the Reckoning however; is the freaking menu design! I have not, even in Fable 2, or even freaking Elders Scrolls IV Oblivion found a menu system SO INCREDIBLY annoying. The system has too many tiers, you must manually compare EVERY SINGLE FREAKING item in this game. With a game that is basically about collecting, making, and adjusting loot; the game completely and utterly fails in this arena. I’m a pretty intense RPG guy. I beat Dragon Age Origins on PC and XBOX 360. I beat Dragon Age 2 on XBOX 360. Little things like badly designed quests or reused content doesn’t bother me too much. But make a game about loot collection and then put every obstacle that you possibly can in my way and I will eventually snap. PC RPGs from the early 2000s had better inventory management.
The inventory size limit is too small, I have to constantly be managing my items, because more than half of everything I get I don’t need. I have to fast travel constantly to a town to find a Blacksmith table so I can salvage; this takes me completely out of the world. Weapons and Armor degrade which is fine, but if my stuff is degrading and it only costs a very small amount to fix it. Then why not, when I get a hoard of stuff ALL THE TIME that I neither need or is very valuable. After around level 8-9 there stopped being anything I could or wanted to buy that was any good. I was much happier just crafting my weapons and armor or socketing gems into pieces that were usable from the main quest-line’s loot. Making everything in the character menus a list, might have sounded good in a design meeting; but in practice it is about the worst thing ever.
Even worse than the menus were the absolutely terrible maps. Every time I had a quest with more than one goal, I was constantly hunting on the freaking map. It’s not on the local map, maybe it’s on the world map. It’s not on the main level, maybe it’s above me or below me. There was no consistency except that it was consistently hard to find anything that had more than one goal. The game does not allow you to fast travel to people, only places but it constantly marks the quests as people to just add that extra step so that you have to move the cursor to fast travel to the place instead. There were also a couple of instances in side quests and in the main quest where the quest indicator showed I’d completed the quest when I had not and I would just have to go through the quest and hope it worked in the end. The main quest one did, the side quest one never did.
Kingdoms of Amalur the Reckoning is at most a 20-30 hour game in a MUCH BIGGER SHELL. There is no reason for anyone to play anything except the main quests and the faction quest-lines. Any cool stuff you could possibly get from anything else is immediately completely useless once you get a drop from either of the above quest-lines or even go to the nearest store. The Rogue class is all most completely useless and ended up only being good for bow proficiency and applying a magical poison effect to all my weapons. Seems like the designers, from the loot table; wanted the player to have a lot of warrior or Might abilities.
Let’s see, a single player linear RPG where the main character is a Warrior who has two party members, one who is a Rogue and one that is a Wizard in a game that is around 20 hours long. It’s a formula SO OLD and SO rote that the designers and writers probably would never have dreamt of using it. Too bad they didn’t change the game accordingly. The game has had around three years of development and they really should have taken more time with it. Because the game, in this state feels unfinished. I did experience two game freezing bugs that crashed the game and made me save in 4 different slots all most constantly for the rest of my time with the game when transitioning from one area to another; as this was where the crashes occurred. There is nothing so absolutely terrible or broken in Amalur specifically. It’s the culmination of all the slightly poorly designed and badly implemented things that add up to just not wanting to play the game anymore. If your actually forcing yourself to give time to a game; it’s time to stop playing.
If you really need to play this Kingdoms of Amalur: the Reckoning, play through the entire main quest and faction quests. Ignore everything else… You will be much happier and done a lot sooner. But then, I only made it to 14 and a half hours, I couldn’t take this poorly designed game anymore; so you’ll have to let me know how it ends. On second thought, I don’t really care. 4/10…
No comments:
Post a Comment