Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning introduces its fantasy action RPG world with your character’s death and resurrection. Reborn through a new magic technology, you are soon identified as the Fateless One, able to rewrite destiny. The rebirth thing is an unusual twist, but the rest is a combination of a standard chosen one narrative and making equally standard character progression options into a textual feature.
As you gather experience and invest it into different traits (might, sorcery and the slightly more complex finesse) you can choose different destinies, represented as cards. Destinies, and associated bonuses, open to you based on your progress in individual traits, but also combinations of them. If you spend your points in all three, you can explicitly become a Jack of All Trades, killing with strength and magic and stealth alike. As far as simple but powerful systems for customising a single character go, it works well.
As part of a game entering into an increasingly crowded genre, those cards also feel like a summary of its wider approach. This is a game which picks up assorted bits from other successful games with a magpie eye. The aura, “Racial Bonuses” and inventory management of The Elder Scrolls. The mission structures, conversations and mix of accents of Dragon Age. More than anything, the mechanics and conception of heroism of Fable. Recognisable elements appear everywhere, right through the same “safety mode” keeping bystanders from harm unless you really want to cause it, and a mythic voiceover which sounds like wannabe Wannamaker.
Being a jack of all trades, of course, comes with a downside built into the phrase. Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is a highly polished game, but for many hours all I could think about were the things it wasn’t living up to. It’s The Elder Scrolls without the true freedom or epic heft. Dragon Age without the engaging characters. Most painfully, Fable without the humour. A few timid jokes about drinking are thin gruel, and I found myself skipping through a lot of uninspired dialogue. Which I almost never do!
At some point, though, I found myself not just compelled to carry on playing it but enjoying the experience. It was thanks to something which set it apart from any of those most obvious comparisons, which is that its combat is the best thing about it. Snappy, well-signalled and lightly strategic, it makes executing quick dodges and attacks feel fluid and natural, and rewards figuring out its subtleties. It felt like quite the action RPG novelty that getting given a mission to take down five big mountain trolls was actually an appealing prospect for its own sake, not just for what it might open up.
The combat is not exactly totally original either, of course. Most notably it plays like a variation on God of War, which perhaps explains the gory finishing moves, otherwise a total ill-fit for the tone of the game. Thoughtfully importing a well-worked set of action mechanics into an action RPG is a good idea, though. Some of the best things about Fable involved importing ideas from The Sims. Combination can create its own niches. It would be nice to imagine Big Huge Games being able to take the lessons and apply them to a new game with a more interesting concept. That didn’t happen.
Even without thinking that ambitiously, there is every chance that if Big Huge games had made a sequel to Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning which built on the things it did best, they could have improved on it a lot. That didn’t happen either, even though not long before it would have been the norm. None of the other three series I compared it to started with a chart-topping game, and that was fine. Two started during previous console generations, though, and the other was made by a major publisher-backed developer that had established their reputation back then. Being a decent number of people’s second favourite RPG (or second favourite football game, or second favourite street racing game) had once been enough to get a series going.
By the time of the HD console generation, making something as polished as Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning was only possible at great expense. It was built on an enormous loan from corporate giant EA and an even bigger one from the US state of Rhode Island. Combined with some less than ideal management, even the game’s substantial success wasn’t enough to break even and save the developer from bankruptcy. The economic direction of the industry narrowed the number of available destinies for major games ever further.
Top of the charts for week ending 11 February 2012:
2 Comments
2 Pingbacks