Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning (2012)

Let me be frank, despite my positive rating, I don’t think this is an objectively good game. The story is dull, the characters are bland, and the combat is ultimately tedious. However this scratches a particular kind of RPG itch very well. If you genuinely enjoy seeing a quest log filled to the belly-brim with little quests that will give you tiny bits of experience and maybe a cool sword, then this game will satisfy you and then some. I did a large number of sidequests but almost certainly missed tons and yet felt completely content when I got to the end. Will I play it again? Probably not. But it was a nice way to spend a few lazy Sundays.

Oh, what a tale I have to tell you. It involves intrigue, suspense, excitement, and the rise of a relative unknown to the spotlight, then the meteoric crash back down to Earth. It’s a wild ride, and one you need to hear about. What? No! I’m not talking about Kingdoms of Amalur Reckoning. I’m talking about their developer, 38 Studios. It’s an absolutely insane story that, for better or worse, will overshadow this game forever. It’s a shame really, because I have heard many good things about KOR:R, and it would be terrible for a good game to go unnoticed because of external factors.

For those unaware, here’s a brief recount of what exactly happened with 38 Studios. The studio was founded by formal Major League Baseball player (and potential Hall-of-Famer) Curt Schilling. He of the bloody sock, who played in World Series’ for three different teams, winning 3 titles along the way. Before the end of his career he launched a video game company called Green Monster Games. Unbelievably, he claims the company was not named after Fenway Park’s famous left-field- wall. It was eventually re-named 38 Studios. The studio launched one game and was deep in development of an MMO, but poor financial management and other factors led to the eventual bankruptcy of the company with very little to show for itself. Now there are lawsuits pending by the state of Rhode Island, which invested a great deal of money in the development of the company. Oh by the way, that one game they released? It was Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning.


All this for the low, low price of $75 million, bankruptcy, and horrible lawsuits.

Not to lay it on too thick, but Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning was made by a developer called Big Huge Games, which 38 Studios acquired from THQ, so even this game can’t technically be fully credited to Schilling and Company. Despite all the external circumstance, this game was pretty well received. The most common praise and criticism I heard were the same argument, it’s basically single player World of Warcraft. Well you know what? I played WoW for years, and did so mostly solo, so this sounded perfect for me. After playing it four about 14 hours and reaching the end of the main story I really wish I could tell you I liked it. I really wish I could, but I can’t.

I’ve thought long and hard about why I didn’t really like this game, but at the end it can basically be boiled down to the fact that it wasn’t fun to play. I had to intersperse the playing of KOR:R with other games because I couldn’t handle playing it for extended periods of time. I kept finding myself wanting breaks. One of the big selling points of the game is the huge amount of side quests available, and I tried really heard to engage with them, but that just brought the entire experience to an excruciatingly slow pace. I begrudgingly decided to just mainline the story and ignore most of the side stuff, and I still found it tedious, tiresome, and slow.


The part of the combat that is supposed to feel the coolest is a button-mashing quicktime event.

I started out as a stealth class. I usually like that style of play and thought it suited me the best. In fact I was quite surprised it was even an option, since it didn’t really look like a stealth-style game. As it turns out, it totally isn’t. I wasn’t able to creep up any closer than about 30 feet from anything without it immediately noticing me and alerting every enemy in the area. Maybe it got better later, but I wasn’t about to wait around to find out. Instead I respecced a mage class, and that went…….okay. It’s neat that even the mage class has some melee capabilities, and I really do think the spell and weapon effects looked really good, but it just….I don’t even know how to describe it. Boring. That’s the first word that comes to mind. Any challenge the game presents isn’t really challenging so much as it’s frustrating. It just wasn’t fun or engaging, and neither was the story for that matter.

I’m usually a sucker for a good story in games. I love deep universes and I soak up as much lore as I can when it’s well thought out and presented. One thing that I absolutely NEVER do is skip dialogue and cut-scenes. In this case, I just couldn’t help it. Damn near every word that came out of the mouth of every character was not interesting to me in the slightest, and that’s the main questline. I routinely skimmed through dialogue as long as I was getting the general idea of what was going on. Basically, you start the game off dead and are immediately brought back to life. When you come back to life you are now the only person in the whole world whose fate is not pre-determined. This means you have the power to influence the fates of everyone you come into contact with. This may be commonplace in our world, but in this world it blows people’s minds.


I am in control of my own fate, and I CHOOSE not to play this game anymore.

There are redeeming qualities to be sure. Some of the environments looked great, the ability trees are pretty well realized, and certain elements of the combat do make you feel pretty badass. It’s just not worth it though. The auto-saving is inconcsistent, which caused me to save the game after every encounter in the final area for fear of losing all my progress if I died. Certain combinations of enemies are unbelievably frustrating (multiple spell casters are almost impossible to dodge, and their spells easily lock you into a stagger loop until you die).

I’m glad this game has managed to survive all the turmoil surrounding its parent company. I’m also glad there are many people out there who enjoy this game. If you enjoy it, there’s certainly a lot to love, with probably well over 50 hours of gameplay. I just can’t shake the truth, which is that when I finished Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning my immediate reaction was “Oh good, I’m done!”

I was expecting some generic fantasy crap, but this one has quite a few original ideas and the game is surprisingly entertaining!
It plays like an mmo without the stupid online stuff and, you know, other people.
I think I like it much more than Skyrim. Skyrum got old pretty fast. This is a game that you can drop for a few weeks and get back to when you feel like it, then you can just follow the quest markers until you remember what the story was. It's probably too casual for some, but if your gaming time is limited that is perfect.