Therefore I was cautiously excited when I finally got a copy of the PS3 version of KoA. Would I be immersed in a fantastic fantasy world of adventure and excitement, or would my fears of a game that was rougher around the edges than an axe crafted by a drunk Dwarf prove to be all too valid?
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| I think you're going to need a bigger sword, dude |
Well, I'm only six hours into the game by now, but the smell of dwarven booze is wafting at me strong and rank.
Let me preface this impression by explaining that I pretty quickly concluded that I am probably not the target player for KoA. There is a lot of exploring to be done in KoA and lots of quests to do that are completely unrelated to the main narrative, which makes the game slightly reminiscent of Skyrim.
I am very much a story driven gamer and while I do enjoy a fully realized gaming world to frolic around in, I generally need a strong narrative motivation to spend hours clearing dungeons and collecting flowers. So if a big world with tons and tons of side quests to dump countless hours into is really your thing, then maybe you will love KoA, despite the numerous dagger stab wounds that I am about to deliver into its head and neck area.
First off my biggest problem with KoA has to be that it simply feels half baked in a lot of places.
The game feels like it was shipped about 6-9 months before the developers had time to smooth everything out and really polish up their digital baby. The UI looks a bit coarse and the inventory management in particular feels clumsy and unwieldy with long lists to scroll through to find what you're looking for.
Then there is the way that you can only ever see one quest on your world map (though on the local map you'll see markers popping up if you get close to your non-active quest). Oh, and speaking of quests, you better be prepared to ignore a lot of quest givers or scroll through a huge ass list of quests, since you can't abandon a quest after it is accepted and the amount of side quests means that you probably won't finish them all, unless you're really OCD about completing every quest in your log (in which case this game could quite possibly drive you insane(r)).
On the PS3 version there are also significant frame rate issues, with the game sometimes slowing down to a crawl for several seconds during a hectic fight.
And it's not even like KoA is an amazing looking game. The overall art direction is somewhat interesting, reminding me more than a little of the cartoonish graphics of World of Warcraft, but if you start looking too much at the character models you'll soon find that they're not exactly fantastic looking.
Speaking of the presentation you'll also enjoy numerous flaky camera shots during the conversations, where the camera will find itself going behind a bookcase or vase, giving the impression that you're watching the conversation take place from the perspective of a voyeuristic Gnome.
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| Is all that armor really necessary for a stroll through the village? |
The conversations themselves also feel very drab and uninteresting.
The voice work is decent enough but between glitches like the weird camera bug, characters sometimes bugging out and just staring vacantly into space instead of looking at your character (maybe they're just being passive aggressive?) and the fact that your own character is not voiced, the overall experience from the conversations ends up being very underwhelming.
I found myself mostly just reading the text and clicking through the voice overs.
If I should try to find any major component of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning that really feels like it works well, then it would have to be the combat system, which feels like a much more beefy and enjoyable version of what we've seen in the Fable games.
It manages to allow you to effortlessly combine melee combat with magic spells and ranged weapons, meaning you will be poking your sword into the soft flesh of a bandit's stomach one moment, twirling around to fire off a bolt of lightning into the face of his horrified best friend the next, and then maybe finishing off by planting an arrow in the face of their leader.
It's a pretty smooth system, even if the wonky camera once again comes into play and occasionally disturbs the flow of the action.
The main narrative has an interesting concept, but after six hours of gaming I can't say that it has really grabbed me, or that the delivery of the story has really pulled me into the game.
The side quests are pretty much all easily forgettable distractions, while the "faction" quest lines (the guilds of KoA basically) provide a slightly higher entertainment value.
I will most likely keep on playing KoA, but I'm going to focus on the main story quests and maybe on a few of the factions. Sadly I just don't feel compelled to explore every nook and cranny of Amalur, and if it wasn't for the cool combat system I'm frankly not even sure that I could be bothered to keep playing the game at all.
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