Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Demo

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is a peculiar game. At a glance it appears to be a cross breed of several games. I think most single player RPG's are similar, but there are definitely some very noticeable similarities. With a dialogue system similar to the Mass Effect series and a combat system similar to an action game there are a few things I have noticed.

The combat system is wonderful. It's fast-paced, gritty and really rewards skillful combos. I love the idea of committing to skill combos. That the more combos you link together the deeper you get and the harder it is to pull back. So delving into a combo you really have to be committed or you will pay. The game feels very much the same as a lot of RPG's out there. Now this can be taken either way, for me it felt natural. Although I wish there was more things being done different besides combat and a few other smaller things.


The dialogue in the game is good. It's not groundbreaking but it gets the job done. Now since this is the demo I didn't delve too far into the questing system but it appears to be the same run of the mill system. This needs to be killed, I need you to gather this, find out what's going on here etc.

The game is in essence open world, but it really reminds me of Fable. It's not a "run of in any direction" sort of world. It's more of linear paths you will eventually need to go down, but the amount of paths is quite large. It is sort of a linear/open world hybrid. Which works fairly well.

The character customization is sufficient, again nothing extraordinary. There are four races, and genders free to choose among them. There are a nice assortment of faces, hairstyles and the rest to really customize your character. A few things though have me confused though, like the importance of lipstick color on women in such a "chaotic" world. I find myself really questioning the necessity of things like that.

The cinematics are sufficient, but I have noticed a couple of graphical errors in the few I saw, but of course this is only the demo. I just fret that the release is close and I encountered a fair amount of bugs. Now this definitely could be on my end so don't push it aside due to that.

Get a grip buddy!

Although if you do have a Radeon graphics card make sure post-processing effects are disabled. I found out that out the hard way.

I would love to get out of the darkness, in more ways than one.

So in conclusion the demo was satisfying. Once I managed to get past a couple of hitches at the start the time I had with it was fairly entertaining. I just worry that with such a strong combat system other important features got left in the dust...

Ramble complete.