Kingdoms Of Amalur: Reckoning.
Kingdoms Of Amalur: Reckoning picks at the bones of successful fantasy franchises to carve some sort of bastard amalgam, with the flourish filled combat of Fable, an interface daubed in the colours of Dragon Age and an atmosphere akin to Warcraft including some curiously similar gnomes wheeling along your un-customised corpse at the beginning of the demo. While slightly clunky and drenched in back story from the outset, Amalur’s simplistic structure means it’s easy to pick up and run with. The key draw of the title remains the involvement of legendary comic book illustrator and action figure designer Todd McFarlane in the overall look and feel of the world. His inky fingerprints are certainly all over KOA from the first squinty, menacing helmet you see roll across the floor as multitudes of fae creatures are slain. In early interviews McFarlane emphasised a view that the system of the fantasy RPG is one that works but is also easy to get wrong, and suggested that you should simply build on what works. With this perspective it’s not surprising EA’s game is so familiar, given the solid foundations the company has built in the field with the help of the Bioware studio. The influences of genre tropes can be seen everywhere; the sneak kill mode comes draped in the clothes of The Elder Scrolls, from its short flair kill animations right down to the eye icon that judges your current stealth level, to the Fable like combos and flourish kills. Amalur takes the route of talent trees and skill customisations for character progression rather than the messy little balancing act of a stats dump every level with perks coming in the form of destiny cards tweaking your points in either the might, finesse or sorcery trees. One seemingly original tweak to the system is the added fate meter which gives you the chance to unravel the fate of your enemies, that in practice gives you a nicely violent finishing move.
In the end my main problem with Amalur is it’s far too comfortable in the mass of bones piled together from its genre mates. A game that purported to take the best of what has been done before ends up being rather unimpressive and lacking a certain something. Even the collaboration with Todd Macfarlane feels dull and ineffective lacking the sinister and gorey edge that originally carved his following. Amalur could have been a game changer but instead is just another sheep in wolves clothing. This all being said in the time since its release critics are applauding it as better than Skyrim and at first that puzzled me. Skyrim stands as one of the most epic RPG’s in scale, quality and immersiveness of the world, but for simplicity, fluidity and fun I can see where Amalur may trump it.
