Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

"Ambitious" action RPG that stresses the action elements of combat married with a supposedly deep RPG framework. The demo is hitting today on its three platforms. I saw a preview for this on Gametrailers but it has otherwise flown under the radar. EA seems to think it has potential since they started their cross-promo with what will likely be their biggest game of the year, Mass Effect 3.

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/pr...doms-of/721676

Preview's close to 4 months old now but it'll probably be close to the final product. Gonna get the demo on PC today and see how it runs. I've been wanting a good action RPG that actually is a real action game with heavy RPG trimmings, not an RPG that sometimes looks like your actions can trump the math.

It seems kind of like Fable done right, I hope it's good. We don't need another Asura's Wrath :(

Curt Schilling dumped all of his baseball money into a game studio to make this

If I dumped all my money into a game studio I'd be lucky to get a working version of tic tac toe. :(

James

I hope it's good, I've been wanting a sort of "Fable done right" since 2004.

I've had this preordered on Amazon for a while now. Fingers crossed.

I had to turn off "Post processing" as the game has issues with Radeon cards but the game looks pleasing enough. Controls perfectly with the 360 pad but I wish you can zoom out the camera. I think its too close but thats my opinion. I like that there is a "junk" option for old or crappy stuff. I'll wait for thorough reviews but I like it so far.

edit: I downloaded it through Origin but its up for prepurchase on steam if you prefer that. Has stupid Team Fortress hat crap if you buy it there.

I played the demo too. I agree about the camera being a little too close for my tastes, but it's not awful.

I like how it plays with the mouse and keyboard, the controls are really sharp and responsive like you'd expect a decent action game to be. The targeting system is a little strange, there's no lock on but the game generally does a good job of hitting your intended target if you shift the mouse or your movements. Lots of previews and promo material promise a marriage of God of War and an RPG, and that's pretty much exactly what you get. You gain experience, level up, allocate skill points in secondary skills, build a talent tree, equip gear in multiple slots, loot shit off enemies and chests, equip "destinies" that give bonuses to your intended class role, and you gather reagents and craft things.

The thing I really like is that as far as the UI goes it actually seems like it's intuitive to the PC. There's a hotbar at the bottom and a radial inventory. Graphics options are light though.

There's a few minor technical hiccups that are kind of jarring. The transition from gameplay to conversations or in-engine cinematics is jerky and weird looking. The animations for talking and emoting are pretty awful and a few models animate weirdly in general. There's some texture pop-in and a little bit of a short draw distance. As far as the game itself is concerned, I doubt the gear will ever get too exotic and the weapon types will probably be few, but the combos you can perform as well as the amount of control you have over how powerful you'll be at various forms of combat make it more than just "an action game with the illusions of stat progress."

I like it. I hope they fix a few of the niggling technical issues, but barring that it's exactly what it promises, which is something Fable couldn't be!

I first saw this when E3 rolled around and made a note to keep an eye out for it, grabbing the 360 demo now, which you can get right herrrr.
http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Pr...5-d8024541093e

Fingers crossed for this, even if the video doesn't seem to do justice to the original screenshots I saw. Please don't suck!

I'm not entirely thrilled. Perhaps it's the result of spending so much time with the amazing Skyrim, but I don't think this is particularly fantastic. The combat doesn't feel as responsive as an action game should. The pause/delay when you connect is just a little too long. Stealth is utterly worthless as every enemy in the area is alerted as soon as you perform a stealth kill. Magic is decent fun but mana recharges too slowly. The areas are nowhere near as wide-open as I would like, reminding me more of [i]Fable/i]'s spiderweb of constrained paths than Bethesda's massive worlds. There's a ton of pop-in and far too little control over the graphical options. Shadows also seem to be cast really oddly - heads of boggarts in particular seem to cast gigantic shadows. I'm not happy with the UI. It feels like there's a slight delay whenever I click a conversation or menu item, and having to mouse over my desired race and then do a loop around to the continue button at the bottom in the beginning was all kinds of stupid. The couple of quests I did amounted to nothing more than "talk to this person and then acquire this item."

All in all, I'm not impressed, and I'm not going to be running out to pre-order it. Maybe I'll grab it in a year when it drops to $10, but there's no way I'll be paying full (or even half) price for this game, especially since there's a ton of Skyrim left to explore and a couple of other great RPGs in my backlog.