Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning DemoFollow

First off, that's too much title for one game. It's also a bit uninteresting. If I hadn't gotten a set of armor and a weapon for ME3 for playing the demo, I probably wouldn't have bothered with it. I would have been missing out on some pretty damn fun game play if I that were the case.

Graphically, the art direction borrows heavily from WoW, but with a a better color scheme. Everyone has silly looking massive shoulder pads, and the world has a bit of a cartoony quality to it. Attacks from just about every weapon involve lots of over the top and completely unrealistic movements with plenty of particle effects flying all over the place. No one would actually fight like this, it would result in massive amounts of wasted energy and leave you painfully open to someone quicker than you. But, it does look cool.

Controls are simple and fluid, and depend more on timing to activate different moves than button combinations. You can string together a variety of different attacks to create lots of different custom combos. For instance, you can fire a few arrows into an enemy, switch to your main weapon and juggle them a bit, and throw a lightning blast at them for a finish. It can be as complicated or as button mashy as you like, depending on your style. I'd say combat consists of a combination between Dragon Age II and God of War, with just a bit of some random fighting game elements thrown in.

When you level up, you get to put one point into a skill such as Alchemy, Smithing, Lockpicking, etc, and a three points into combat, which is broken down into several categories with different skill trees. I don't know if there is a level cap, but there is plenty of room to go the jack all trades route if you like.

The little bit of story I saw was painfully uninteresting. The big bad evil guy took over one of the Fae kingdoms and is going to war with the mortals. The Fae don't stay dead, so things are going badly for the mortal folk. Some dwarf looking guys are trying to come up with a way make everyone immortal, and their first and only success is your character, the fateless one. You're called that because something about the process that brought you back to life has allowed you to control your own destiny. That's pretty much it.

Most of the NPCs I ran into were pretty whiny and need your help to wipe their noses. This is definitely one of those games where you'll be skipping through a lot of the dialogue. I only did a few quests before my time ran out, but they tended to be mostly fetch quests. Nothing groundbreaking there.

Honestly, I had more fun with the game than I'm making it sound. Mostly, it's because of the combat. So many RPG have boring lackluster combat, but it was actually pretty fun to beat the crap out of stuff in this game. I'd love to see this battle system in a more interesting world. I'm not sure if I'll end up buying the game new or waiting to getting on the cheap, but I'll definitely be buying it at some point.

Edited, Jan 21st 2012 8:07pm by Turin

I played it on 360, and aside from a couple of graphical glitches, I didn't notice anything wrong.

NVM. Figured it out.

Edited, Jan 22nd 2012 1:33am by Kastigir

I hopped on XBL last night and couldn't find this demo available anywhere.

I rather enjoyed the gameplay, though it had a fair number of bugs in it. Found myself enjoying playing around with crafting things, though limiting item names to 8 or 9 characters kinda sucked.