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2 Minute Review: Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

LIKES

• Map system with on-screen mini-map: The map system in Reckoning was fantastic and easy to understand. Hover over a town and you’ll see information such as what shops, trainers, and other things of note are within that town. During your adventure, your current mission will be visible in the mini-map as a gold ring, but other missions will be shown as a greyed-out ring, allowing you to complete another mission if you happen to stumble onto it or if it’s in the same vicinity as your original mission.
• Combat: You can easily hack ‘n’ slash your way through your enemies, but Reckoning gives players the ability to perform a ton of moves through the game’s ability trees.
• Skills & Abilities: Reckoning allows you to customize your character completely how you want. You can be dedicated to one type of character, or mix it up with a bunch of abilities across three ability trees.
• Art style: The art in the game reminds me a lot of World of Warcraft’s art, but the graphics are much more crisp and fluid.
• Loading times: When I play an RPG, I expect the loading times to be long enough for me to check my emails and social media sites. Not so with Reckoning as you’ll go to the loading screen and back into action in about 5-10 seconds.
• Add to Junk: Fell in love with Skyrim but feel like you spent way too much time going through your inventory to sell what you picked up along the way? Reckoning has a dedicated Junk inventory area where you can place loot you want to sell later. This makes selling more of a breeze and less like an actual job.

DISLIKES

• Out of sync sound: There were a good amount of times where the sound effects or dialog would not sync up to what was going on in the game. It happens way too often and took me out of the experience one too many times.
• The cameraman is a drunk: Reckoning overall does a good job with its camera, but during combat, the camera can go a little too crazy which leads to not knowing where exactly your character is among the enemies. This becomes more of a problem when there are 10 or so enemies coming at you in different directions.
• Volume fluctuates too much: I play my games usually at night, which means I need to keep the noise level down or face the wrath of my landlord. I spent way too much time adjusting the volume in Reckoning when the game went from wandering around the world to one-on-one discussions with people of interest.

Given how large of a game Reckoning is and how much I’ve been enjoying it, I could easily recommend this game if you’re a fan of action-RPGs like Fable. There’s a large amount of character customization in this game, tons of abilities to master, and the overall art and graphics of the game is absolutely gorgeous.