I've just finished playing through the demo on Xbox and I wanted to share with you my impressions of the demo. So read on and find out whether this is a reckoning that is going to reverberate with awesome delight through your spine or if it will go meekly into the cold darkness of the night.
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| "I really..really have to pee" |
Let me preface my impressions by saying that I was initially not very interested at all in Reckoning. From the first footage I saw of the game it seemed like a rather generic fantasy RPG with some slightly interesting combat. But I gradually came around to Reckoning to the point that it ended up being one of the games I was most excited to play in 2012.
So when I was finally ready to fire up the demo and have a chance to poke around in the kingdoms of Amalur I was genuinely excited.Perhaps it is this level of excitement that resulted in the following disappointment.
*UPDATE* I just had the chance to play the PC version of the demo and I have to say that it was a much improved experience from the Xbox version. In particularly the combat feels smoother and faster and I found myself more easily being able to dodge enemy strikes.
I am still not impressed by the demo but at least the PC version made me feel much better about Reckoning.
Yep, the TL;DR version of my impressions can pretty much be summed up with "Meh, is that really it?".
For those looking for something a bit more in depth allow me to elaborate.
Firstly there is the presentation.
Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is not an ugly game and there is a certain charm to the cartoon-like aesthetics of the game. However the graphic quality overall just looks like a game from a couple of years ago. In particular I'm not very keen about the facial details and texture details in general.
It kind of feels like World of Warcraft, as in the size of the game necessitated a down scaled presentation in order for everything to run at acceptable speed, but at the same time the game doesn't really seem expansive enough to justify such a sacrifice (though maybe it will later on, obviously the demo only let's you go so far).
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| From the right angles Reckoning looks quite pretty, but things don't stand up too well to closer scrutiny |
The next thing you'll notice is probably the user interface, which leaves a lot to be desired.
The inventory screen is a mess of lists that you need to scroll through to find what you're looking for and it makes it very hard to get an overview of what stuff you have in your bags and makes equipping gear a very cumbersome process.
The dialogue UI is also a bit strange. When you talk to people it will usually start off as a wheel, as seen in any recent BioWare game, but then the dialogue choices will suddenly change into a list after a while for no apparent reason and sometimes even go back to the wheel choice again. Why?!
Speaking of dialogue, I think the voice acting is passable but I've certainly heard better. What bothers me more is how your own character never speaks. You click your dialogue choice and then the person you're talking to immediately responds.
I know some people prefer not hearing their character speak as it can be somewhat immersion breaking, but this is already a 3rd person game where you're constantly looking at your character from an external viewpoint so I don't think giving him or her a voice would distance you any more from the character.
It is especially annoying since you're not choosing exactly what you're saying but just the general subject, again like the dialogue system from BioWare games. But since your own character doesn't speak you kind of have to guess what sort of question he asked in order to understand the response that you're getting.
The real meat of Reckoning is of course to be found in the games very open combat system.
It reminds me more than a little of what was in Fable 2 with its tight mix of melee, ranged and magic combat. The big selling point of Reckoning is how you aren't locked into a specific class but can mix and match combat styles as you go along.
You'll be able to switch effortlessly between sneaking up on people and stabbing them manically in their jugular or blasting enemies apart from a distance with crackling balls of lightning.
In practice the system works pretty well. You are able to sneak up on a group of enemies and take one out immediately with a sneak attack before you switch to a sword and take out his closest friend, then roll out of range of the nearest incoming enemy and blast him with magic before finally grabbing your bow off your back and making a human pincushion out of the last enemy.
During the introductory dungeon of the demo you'll have a chance to try your hand at the three main combat avenues of Recknong; Finesse (rogues with stabby daggers), Might (warriors with stabby swords) and Sorcery (mages with not so stabby staves) so you get a taste of the variety right off the bat.
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| Just like on the internet the Troll is a fearsome opponent |
But here is my one big complaint with the combat system; animations.
The combat animations in Reckoning do a fairly good job of conveying a sense of power and weight but unfortunately it seems that the developers were so happy with their animation efforts that they decided that the player should be locked into them.
Once you start a swing or a spell casting action then you are locked into seeing it through, no matter if you can already tell that the angry troll in front of you is going to crush you with his huge club well before you get a chance to finish your move.
This makes combat quite frustrating as you'll be trying to duck out of the way of incoming attacks only to find that you have to wait a crucial couple of seconds before you can get your dodge off.
The frustration of this is made worse from the fact that the camera is quite close to your character and you'll often be attacked by multiple enemies at once. So it can be quite difficult to get a sense of where all your opponents are until they get very close to you and are just about to hit you. But at that point in time you'll probably be in the middle of swinging your weapon or casting a spell so you'll just have to man up and take the beating.
As to the rest of the gameplay it's hard to say how much of the game is going to be driven by the main storyline and how much will be from sidequests. Certainly you'll find a ton of quest givers as soon as you enter the first town you come across, so I'm thinking that there's a large chance that playing through Reckoning will be much like Skyrim, where the main questline ends up being almost an afterthought, but that's too early to say.
Summing up I guess that my overall impressions are not that Reckoning is going to be a bad game, but it does not look like it will deliver on what I thought that it was going to be. I had hoped for a real big step forward in terms of the action RPG genre, but this seems to be more of a sideways shuffle on the spot and maybe even a half step back in some ways.
I'm still interested in playing the full game when it is out in February but I'm afraid it's dropped off my "most wanted" list for now.
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