Let me preface my poor review with this recommendation - If (and only if) you haven't played it yet, when this game is under $5, buy it and have a good time. But $40, no way. Noooooooo way.
I beat this game about five years ago when the steam controller came out.
By then, the game cost me $2 on steam. There's a reason it came out and immediately faded into the background - it wasLet me preface my poor review with this recommendation - If (and only if) you haven't played it yet, when this game is under $5, buy it and have a good time. But $40, no way. Noooooooo way.
I beat this game about five years ago when the steam controller came out.
By then, the game cost me $2 on steam. There's a reason it came out and immediately faded into the background - it was derivative, boring, and dense in all the wrong ways with only the combat BARELY holding it up. It was derivative even immediately following release. 2012 wasn't exactly an easy year for a bland game to come out, Journey, mass effect 3, far cry 3, the walking dead, borderlands 2, dishonored, diablo 3, FTL. Skyrim and dark souls had come out the year before.
Fast forward to today, and we get... The same game... But wait, I get a loyalty discount of 50%! So I have to pay ten times what I paid for the original for a game that needed a whole lot more than a graphical overhaul (which It honestly didn't need, the art is practically the only part of the game that has aged well)
You can get it to work with a steam controller, and it works pretty well (it's how I beat the game the first time) But the steam controller is discontinued. Damnit (double damnit since mine finally bit the dust after years of loyal service and I want another)
The people calling it "lore rich" are also the type who might think my biochemistry textbook is "lore rich" because they can't understand 90% of the words that are simply overcomplicated ways of saying something we already know and recognize. An elf is an elf. Not a fae or whatnot. It has all the tolkein-esque tropes (not a bad thing) but just scratches off the words you know and writes new ones on in crayon. So you wind up barely understanding the concepts at all, and the game now has to go into absolutely EXCRUCIATING detail explaining the things that you would otherwise already know. So the game is just a plot dump. Constantly. Every single character tells you their boring life story that does nothing to flesh out the feel of the world (which is sparse at best) or develop their characters since random NPC's are utterly meaningless in this game.
The combat is the ONLY part of this game that has aged with a modicum of decency (the art and sound is fine too, but those can't hold up this kind of game on their own, only enhance it. see World of Warcraft for that - old ass art and music but ties the gameplay and world together stunningly) and it too is feeling archaic and dated. The skill system is very nice and I like the theoretical versatility, but all it boils down to is what button you're mashing. The combos are okay, but don't tie together at all, and in a post-dark-souls world, lacks the weight and punch that we'd expect, nor does it have the over the top DMC style that the other camp of action games has. So it feels really, really clunks. Which is a shame, because this could have been a gold star selling point if they took a little time and polished it up to a mirror shine, because the core pieces are present.
And none of the non combat gameplay has been improved. This game suffers HUGELY by being open world. If it was a linear fantasy action game, the smallish studio behind it could have had a potential smash hit. But they were chasing the "open world" trend at the time that just did this game no favors. Load times are inexcusable and unimproved from the original. The art direction gets really bland once you're away from the main set pieces. Monsters are forgettable. Quests are just the veeeery worst kind of "go to X kill Y of Z" I highly recommend you don't touch more than 1 in 10 of the side quests you get. Only do the ones that sound super fun.
Final boss battle is a QTE, but a pretty genuinely awesome spectacle nonetheless. I didn't feel super cheated because of how fun it was to watch, but it could have been a top ten boss battle of all time if they'd have actually let you fight that amazing monstrosity they created.
And lastly, the game has this really unpleasant feeling of claustrophobia because of one critical, instantly-fixable issue that they didn't touch: the camera is angled ever so slightly down. Not enough that it jumps out, but you'll start to feel kind of "closed in" like a PS2 game trying to save Vram. And then you look around and slightly pan up and WOW the game opens up. But it auto-pans down, so you can't just KEEP it at the angle that lets things feel big and airy. Would be so easy to fix and do so much to improve the game.
So, yeah, I had fun with it for $2. I'd have had fun for $5. But it's not worth replaying. Or repaying.… Expand
Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-ReckoningYour Score0 out of 10User Score
