There are a lot of games that try to create a truly “badass” protagonist. Most of the time what they end up with is an immature, meatheaded, adolescent power fantasy. Geralt, the “hero” of The Witcher series, is an unqualified badass, and he is what makes this game worth playing.

Geralt’s backstory sounds like a laundry list of the genre tropes – he’s a giant-sword-wielding mutant amnesiac, caught between a corrupt regime and questionably motivated rebellion. With that description, a bit more hair gel and a few more belts, you might think he’s Cloud Strife from Final Fantasy 7. The similarities stop there, though. Geralt is a battle-toughened, matured, and ultimately scarred warrior. This game is rated M for Mature – and it lives up to this title. There’s violence, sure, but there’s also a mature tone to the game which few games attempt, and even fewer get right.

Geralt is trapped between two worlds – humans don’t trust him because of his mutated genetics and non-humans think he’s (ironically) too human to be trustworthy. This line that Geralt is walking is complex and typically morally gray, so the choices you make feel like they have weight and impact. Sometimes being a jerk pays off, and sometimes what you think is the right choice doesn’t work out the way you plan it.

I’ll admit – I did not finish the first Witcher game. I played a good 20 hours into it, but I found the combat off-putting. They’ve changed it up a bit in this installment, but don’t go into it expecting the typical “action RPG” experience. Geralt is not a tank, and if you think you can go into combat, mash the attack button, and hope to win… get ready to stare at a lot of loading screens. Evading attacks and being strategic with your strikes and special abilities is the only way to survive even the earliest encounters.

The tutorial gives a short intro to the basic game mechanics, and then explains combat mechanics with a series of fights in the Arena. (Screenshot courtesy of the Witcher Wikia)

The Enhanced Edition adds a tutorial to ease new players into the experience. I failed the tutorial fight, hard. The game was being nice in suggesting I should play on easy – I think it almost wanted to tell me to give up and play something else. It was a demotivating experience to be bested so easily in the early going, but I feel now that I’ve got more of a handle on the system. The tutorial explains at a very high level how to take advantage of many of the game’s systems, but I still felt like I could use a manual or a detailed strategy guide in order to grasp the intricacies of the system. Luckily, much of my knowledge from my aborted run at the first game came in handy.

This strategic focus is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, knowing your enemy pays off. If you plan ahead, you can pick potions and weapon enhancements that give you significant boosts against whatever it is you’re out hunting. On the other hand, this required level of planning and forethought means that you’ve sometimes got to know what is coming before it does, and that failure is always an option. Frequent saves are almost required.

The density of quests per-chapter isn’t as high as some other games (Kingdoms of Amalur, I’m looking at you), and for the most part the questing is fun and often rewarding. The tracking system could use a bit of work, however. When there are quest indicators, they’re hard to see on the minimap, and the level of zoom available in the pause screen map is often insufficient. Sometimes quest markers are shown for objectives within buildings, and it’s not always clear where the door you need to take is located.

Other times, there’s no quest indicator at all. I don’t mind this terribly much in theory, as it just means the game expects me to explore a bit in order to proceed. However, when combined with the pretty much required battle prep, including limited duration weapon upgrades and potions, there’s kind of an urgency to getting on with combat once you’ve prepared for it. Meandering about in the wilderness looking for the monster you set out to kill while a timer is counting down the seconds you have left to defeat it can be stressful.

This is certainly one of the more beautiful Xbox 360 games I've played in recent history!

The Enhanced Edition is the only edition available to Xbox 360 players, and I can confidently say that they did a good job with the port. The controls feel solid, and responsive. There are a few issues with textures that load late – you’ll sometimes see in a cutscene a blurry texture on an object close to the camera for a second, before it’s replaced with a higher resolution copy. Although it’s recommended, I don’t have it installed to my hard drive, so I don’t know how that affects the situation.

The game’s got rough edges, but I can appreciate what it’s trying to do, and it’s largely a fun and engaging experience. It’s not going to knock genre titans like Skyrim or Diablo off their thrones, but it doesn’t really seem to want to. The experience you’re getting here is unique. If you were intrigued by the first game, you’ll find an experience as good or better here.

Lunnye Devitsy is BossBaddie’s first published game.  This game is presented in the ‘silhouette’ style I mentioned earlier.  What I mean by this is that the player character, as well as most of the elements in the foreground are simply black shapes against the background of the game world.  A noticeable deviation from the way this is usually done, however, is that the background of the game world is fully coloured, so the silhouetted character stands out as an ‘outsider’ in the game world.

This particular title is all about exploration.  There is a large world for the player to explore, and 6 different ways to complete the game.  There is no dialogue, and no real instruction.  This non-linear nature of the game does wonders for immersing the player into the game; players are encouraged to explore, create a mental map, and get ‘lost’ in the world.  The lack of dialogue also leaves the game to be interpreted by the player, largely on their own; the story of the game has to be told by the on-screen action.

Wake is another game from these developers, and when compared, these two make a wonderful example of how two games can share many similarities, but be so spectacularly different in terms of player experience.  To give you an idea of what I mean, Wake is also a side-scrolling platformer.  It also involves exploration.  It is also non-linear, and lacks dialogue/instruction.  However, where Lunnye Devitsy is a very relaxing and surreal experience, playing through Wake is incredibly tense and nerve-wracking.

This is a game about escaping from a sinking ship, by making your way to one of three exits at the top.  The atmosphere in wake is extremely intense, with flickering lights and power outages making it difficult to see, flaming sections of the ship blocking progress, locked doors that require keys, etc.  But the most powerful factor in the game’s tension is the constant threat of water rising from the bottom of the ship – if you’re progressing too slowly, your character will drown.  It’s one of the best presented games I’ve ever played, and remains one of my personal favourites.

I guess the point I’m trying to make here is that even though many independent game developers are using similar elements in a lot of their recent games, that they are ‘making the same game over and over again’ couldn’t be further from the truth.

Ninjas, eh? Good thing I wore my Ninja punching gloves today.

Mass Effect 3 is blazing new trails in terms of story. It takes significant risks, and flies in the face of the way some people play games. However, it largely succeeds in telling a story whose scope and impact are far beyond almost anything we’ve seen in gaming to date.

There’s no denying that Mass Effect 3 is well-written. Bioware has a long history of excellent storytelling, and everyone has a favorite character or scene from Bioware’s history. The story in Mass Effect 3 is unique because it dares to show us a situation where our heroes are powerless. In the previous installments, Shepard and the team were able to prevent the mass extinction of the galaxy’s sentient races, but they knew they were living on borrowed time. The races of the galaxy have begun to heed Shepard’s warnings, but their efforts are ultimately too little, too late.

The opening sequence of Mass Effect 3 throws the player right into the heart of the conflict – the Reapers are no longer a legend, no longer a problem for future generations. They are here, on Earth, and they are harvesting and killing humans by the millions. There’s no saving the world at the final second before the ultimate evil is unleashed. There’s no last ditch suicide mission that just might work. Despite the very real threat, the races of the galaxy continue to bicker and let old wounds fester. This is quite likely the end – the only question is how long it takes, and whether any sentient spacefaring races will survive the onslaught.

The introduction attempts to use some “shock value” scenes involving an innocent child to amp up the emotional connection, and it largely works, although it quickly outstays its welcome. I don’t think anyone believes that the later dream sequences involving this child were really necessary.

On the flip side of this, however, are the reappearances of various major and minor characters from previous chapters. Both the previous games featured a large roster of squad- and ship-mates, and most who survived make an appearance. Some are returning squadmates, but most only appear briefly, in times of great need. Watching the ways in which they sacrifice in order to aid Shepard and the Normandy is touching, and having their history carry forward into this game makes these scenes even more powerful.

Carrying over actions from your previous games is an important part of what makes Mass Effect 3 unique, and what makes its story so controversial. Although the choices are far from infinite, it is quite likely that among your friends, no two of you will have the exact same experience in this game. This is a story that each of us is telling individually, and all of our major and minor choices have shaped its conclusion. The staggering amount of choice can be paralyzing, however. Knowing that every decision has a direct and measurable impact on the conclusion of the game can be a burden. If you take into account all of the previous choices that could have been made in Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, the amount of effort you’d need to invest to see all the possible combinations is staggering.

Choice of cover art?! Now you've got to play it twice as many times.

However, in the 5 years since the release of Mass Effect, we’ve each been telling our own stories through these games. Allowing us to take that story, with all its ups and downs, and follow it to its conclusion is an extraordinarily powerful gift. Most games that offer significant choice would be content to say that one of the two endings is canon, and then move forward with a sequel based on that decision. Mass Effect 3 challenges us to take responsibility for our choices, and see them through. In some cases, you won’t be able to save people – not even your friends – from death, simply because you’d have to have chosen to sacrifice others 20 or 40 gaming hours previously. There is no truly “good” ending here. There is simply the end to the story you’ve been telling all along.

Some gamers had concerns over the newly added “action mode” (which short-circuits the dialog choices) and the multiplayer co-op experience, fearing that they would have a negative impact on the storytelling. I can understand that as the third part of a long-running game series that the designers would want to include things that had more mainstream appeal, and attract more first-timers to the experience. I can also safely say that it doesn’t feel like they made any sacrifices in the single player game in order to accommodate these additional modes. They multiplayer in particular manages to feel both completely optional and yet rewarding. If this brings the Mass Effect experience to a wider audience, and allows Bioware to create larger and more expansive experiences in the future, then I am all for it.

“Epic” is a word that has taken on additional meaning in our language, but one of its oldest meanings is to denote the long-form telling of a legendary hero’s journey. If Mass Effect 3 could be summed up in a single word, that word would be: epic.

Last time, I was contemplating whether the monster filled meteorites had anything to do with why this planet’s abandoned…

Anyway, enough of that. Back underground! I run across my bridge, shocked when a creeper lands in front me and dies. Once I reach the glass dome, I tend the farm I started there last time, dig out some of the floor, and make some armor with it. I think I’m substantially more prepared this time.

Eh? Eh?

I get back on the rails and much to my horror, I discover that I accidentally loaded the version without the Enderman mod, so two of them had done their dirty work on my poor railroad. I exit Minecraft and reload the correct one. Fortunately, they only picked up the block under it and not the actual rail, so I am able to repair the track. When I look up again though, my cart is nowhere to be found and I still have the most dangerous stretch ahead. I have never been more thankful for the ability to sprint. :P Sure enough, my cart was waiting for me at the end. I continue on, and this time I find the room in the ‘shroom.

Continuing to the surface, I find a somewhat surprising site:

It looks so serene during the day.

It’s getting night, so I need to find that tunnel and fast lest this life be a repeat of the last. I eventually do find what I think is the right tunnel. I’m substantially more lavish with my torches as I bob through ultra-creepy terrain that makes me wish I had a boat.

With underwater chasms like that, I was expecting sharks at any moment.

I come out inside the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen in Minecraft…

I run and I run and I run but there’s just too many of them, much like Ronan’s run through the forest in part one of our “Race For Wool” “Game On!” So I wall myself into a corner. I eat some food, let my health regenerate, check on the status of my armor (still good), and wonder what next. I haven’t seen any other signs of people, this “forest” just keeps going. I have about 5 spiders and a skeleton outside my 2x2x1 enclosure, so I decide to remove one block and whack at them from there. I run out again and am forced to wall myself back up. I’m stumped.

If you have any games you’d like us to review, be sure to give us a shout.

BioWare recently released the third installment in the Mass Effect series. Mass Effect 3 continues the battle against the prehistoric alien race- Reapers – who are destroying Earth and the Galaxy as we know it. Deeply engaging action, story and an immersive experience make this game one of the most anticipated releases this season. To celebrate, we’re giving away some awesome ME 3 and gaming gear for new and seasoned users of Gaming Stack Exchange who complete a series of missions on the site.

These missions are designed to assist you in resolving questions that arise as you battle back the Reapers and defend the galaxy while also helping build a high quality resource for Mass Effect 3 players across the galaxy.

All users who embark on missions on Gaming Stack Exchange will be featured on the mission board. For details on missions, prizes and rules visit Mission Control!

Before playing the demo, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning wasn’t really even a blip on my radar. It’s a weird post-holiday-season RPG from EA that is dropping two months after the most anticipated RPG game of last year – Skyrim. I really enjoyed Skyrim, but I was intrigued by the prospect of a new fantasy RPG series that dared to emerge so close in the wake of Skyrim. I wasn’t really expecting something totally new and fresh, so I was pleasantly surprised with what I ended up getting.

Kingdoms of Amalur is, in my eyes, an RPG-lite. It’s the well-rounded love child of Skyrim and Darksiders. It’s Exactly-What-It-Says-On-The-Tin, no more, and no less. Amalur, is an RPG targeted for consoles. That means less exploration, and more combat than Skyrim, and beyond that, a faster pace and more loot than the traditional RPG.

Initial Impressions

When I was first exposed to the Kingdoms of Amalur demo, the first thing that struck me was the setting. Tolkien-esque fantasy seems to be the norm, but Amalur dares to divert from this, discarding the notions of Orcs, Elves, and Dwarfs, for the European folklore of fey and faeries.

The main plot of the game casts the player character not as some destined hero of legend, but instead an unpredictable destroyer and instrument of change. The world was perfectly fine — until you came along.

Amalur does not aim to appear realistic, and the world is vibrant and full of color. Coming from Skyrim’s world of grays and whites, it was a welcome change.

Gameplay

The gameplay will seem pretty standard to anyone familiar with the genre – go to an area, get quests in area, complete quests in area, move on. Most locations on the map have an associated quest, and if you’re compelled to complete the majority of the quests you encounter (like me) be prepared for some backtracking (though there is a wonderful quick-travel option).

Amalur does an okay job at avoiding the “10 Bear Asses” trope, and often your quest will be to retrieve an item (or rescue someone), or defeat a boss, rather than simply kill until you’re satiated. Most of the kill quests I’ve encountered are for specific creatures, or groups of creatures, not some arbitrary number, which gives the games quest a feeling very much like that of Skyrim’s radiant quests (though Amalur doesn’t generate them on the fly or re-use past dungeons).

But the game has its fair share of interesting quests, too – there was a logic puzzle quest where I had to find the proper order for a group of stuffy nobles to enter the King’s court, and there was another where I was tasked with finding the parts for, and assembling, “souvenir” weapons to sell to tourists at exorbitant prices. There was even a quest (which fittingly offered no reward) to find the remains of dead silk farmers, and inter them in a local cemetery.

The issue with this, if it can be considered an issue at all, is that there are perhaps more quests than there should be – if you stick around to complete all the quests, you’ll quickly outlevel the area the quests are in, and while most of the dungeons will scale to your level to give you an appropriate challenge, monsters in the overworld will quickly be demoted to “gray” status, where they give little experience, poor loot, and hardly any fate (more on this last bit on a minute).

Combat

Combat in this game feels quite similar to the Witcher 2; it’s usually one against many, and getting hit will interrupt your attacks. While you can block attacks (and even launch a riposte if you time it just right), I found that the block mechanic just a tad too slow for my tastes, and found it much easier to simply dodge away. Combat is one area this game simply blows Skyrim out of the water. Combat in the Elder Scrolls games sucks – it’s the elephant in the room, but it’s true. Combat in Amalur is not. It’s sufficiently challenging, and what’s more, it feels fluid, responsive, and downright cinematic.

Tristan shows off his chakrams against a Jotun Runelord!

This is overshadowed a bit by the titular “Reckoning” mode. Call it what you like — limit break, super meter, going Super Saiyan — it’s borderline overpowered. Even in the leveled dungeon encounters, entering reckoning mode is an “I win” button. Deal more damage, take less damage, slow time and earn bonus experience? The only reason not to use it more often is because it takes quite some time (perhaps 10 minutes of standard play) to refill the meter between uses. It is filled with “Fate”, something usually earned by killing enemies. But as an overleveled melee character who killed enemies in 2 hits, this meant it took forever to fill up, since grey enemies don’t reward fate, and you don’t get any for simply fighting things unless you manage to complete the three-hit combo.

The biggest flaw in the combat system (other than the blocking) stems from Amalur being aimed at a console audience – PC users (like myself) have no way to adjust the field of view. It’d be a lot easier if I could zoom out a little, but as it is, I spent most of my time in Webwood getting interrupted by spider venom flying in from off screen.

Skills and Abilities

And yet, by all reports, the PC is one of the better platforms for the game. The PC version has a hotbar for spells and abilities, and while it’s a little awkward to have the hotbar change the active ability (instead of using the active ability), it supports twice the number of options console players get.

Abilities in Amalur come in three flavors, the holy trinity of Roguelikes the world over — Warrior, Mage, and Thief.

The three trees are pretty disparate, but there’s simply not much choice – there’s one path if you want to be an archer, one path if you want to be an assassin – type, and there exists only a single primary spell for each of the elemental schools. (But it still holds up favorably to Skyrim) You might want to play your character as a pyromancer, or a summoner, but there’s very little the game allows you to do beyond that.

The flip side of this is the Skill System, which is strictly inferior to Skyrim. Skills are on a separate progression path than Abilities, and are, for the most part, largely non-combat. Skills are where you get your lock-picking, your alchemy, and your persuasion.

The skill tree, in all its glory!

The issues here are that, aside from the crafting skills and detect hidden, the skills feel largely useless. If you’re good at the lockpicking and trap dispelling minigames, there’s no need to invest in improvements to those skills, and other options, like Mercantile, only serve to increase the amount of gold you gain (Amalur already gives more gold than things to spend it on even after only a few hours of play), stealth (which is largely marginalized and less-than-useful in the first place), or persuasion (which lets you extort people for more reward or get out of fights — because clearly we want more useless money and less opportunities to kick ass).

The crafting skills are on the other end of the spectrum, as the items it creates flatly knock the pants off most non-crafted equipment in the game, especially once you invest a few levels into it. The disparity between these two classes of skills is immense, and generally comes off as a weird (and not very interesting) system. Of course, there’s no reason to not simply get both. It’s ridiculously easy to max every skill, so you don’t even have to choose what to focus on.

Conclusions

Amalur occupies the unique niche between brawler and RPG, and while it doesn’t blast either genre out of the park on its own, the two come together to create a satisfying game. It’s got vibrant visuals (a blessing for all gray/brown former Skyrim players), an uncommon setting (more Norse than High Fantasy), and a visceral combat system that lets your character feel powerful no matter how you choose to build them.

Amalur’s not for everyone, but if you enjoy action-heavy RPGs, or are looking for a less intimidating way to introduce yourself to the genre, Amalur’s everything you could ask for, and more.

When we last left, I was starving and being chased by several spiders during the night with no chance of finding nearby shelter.

I ran out of food, they caught up to me, and I died. This series of blog posts may be longer than we planned.

Oh well, I badly needed supplies anyway, so I hit “respawn” and wake up back in bed on my spaceship. Unsurprisingly, everything has grown. So I set out and start harvesting. Then it occurs to me, all those buildings were made out of iron blocks. The same stuff I could’ve made armor out of. Too late for that life, but this time I plan to take advantage of that. I plan to be ready. I plan to have iron everything before I even leave my spaceship again. With that determination, I gathered all the resources I could, and set to work forging weapons and armor.

Since I missed so many signs, I decided to reread all the notes when I get to them to see if I can get any more clues from them. And I notice something I missed on the note in the cockpit of my ship. “The scan also indicates anomalous meteorites in the craters on the surface.” There is something on the surface of this planet? I’m curious now.

I head off is search of them. And sure enough, in the one direction I didn’t check earlier, I find this:

Figuring there had to be some goodies in there, I dig straight to the center. What I see is not a pretty sight.

And yes, that's a creeper spawner.

There has to be something awesome in that chest. But what? Diamond gear? I start anticipating, then reality hits. I can’t get to the chest. Or can I? The way I see it, there are two ways to do it: tunnel under and hope I dig up at the right spot, or completely dig away the surface of the meteorite. I remembered that direct sunlight will stop spawners, so I figure all I have to do as get sunlight onto those spawners (without the spiders climbing out and killing me), head far enough away so that the creepers despawn, and waltz right in. I get to work removing the ceiling. After a few minutes of almost-falls into a pit of creepers and spiders, I realize it’s getting late, I’m far from home, and very hungry. Fortunately I came prepared! (this time. :P) I ate some of the bread I brought, and sprinted home without seeing another monster.

The next day I continue working on my plan.  And much to my surprise, it worked perfectly.  The loot contains a little diamond ore, gold ore, redstone ore, lapis lazuli ore, coal ore, and a cooked pork chop.  Spurred on by my success, I repeat the process twice more.  In case you were wondering, meteorite #2 had plain old skeleton and zombie spawners, and meteorite #3 contained spiders and more zombies.  I was much less scared of the latter two because their inhabitants don’t, oh, BLOW UP.

But they do climb up to get you.

Although it said exploring the surface was optional, I’m wondering more and more if these things aren’t part of the reason this place is so abandoned.  I mean, if rocks from space carring monsters landed on your planet, wouldn’t you panic and run away?

Before playing the demo, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning wasn’t really even a blip on my radar. It’s a weird post-holiday-season release from EA that is dropping a month before the real anticipated EA release of the first half of the year – Mass Effect 3. I’m really looking forward to ME3, but I was intrigued by the prospect of a new fantasy RPG series from a major publisher. I was really looking forward to something new and fresh, but I wasn’t really expecting what I ended up getting.

Have you ever bitten into a raw potato? If you ever have, perhaps you can understand what I mean when I say this game is dense, and at the same time painfully bland.

First Impressions

The opening of the game really does very little to draw you in. There’s a war on, and things are going poorly for our side. Shortly thereafter, our hero is brought back from death by an experimental magical device that has left him or her with no memories. After a short character creation and tutorial sequence, our hero is told that they are a special hero who might finally end the war from the intro movie. These are well-worn tropes, and I’ve been here, done that 100 times before in the fantasy RPG setting. Immediately I thought of the introduction to Planescape: Torment, which is a classic of the RPG genre, and a tall order to live up to.

The game then lets you loose on a large world map, and gives you a general direction to set out in. The setting is pretty generic fantasy, with art direction and character design heavily reminiscent of World of Warcraft. Quickly you come to the first town, a generic fantasy hamlet wherein a half dozen people want your assistance. Here the game proper begins.

Gameplay

You could pretty much describe the whole game experience with this cycle:

• Enter new, roughly square, area of fantasy geography (Plains/Forest/Mountains/Desert/etc.)
• Arrive at a new settlement
• Find a half dozen quests
• Go forth and kill quantity X monsters, loot Y bear pelts, locate missing artifact
• Return to town and collect reward (probably insignificant compared to the loot you recovered)
• Head East or South, as the case may be to find the next area

As you may have noticed, quests are the backbone of this game, and boy, are there a ton of them. The problem is that they are terribly generic and don’t tend to vary much from place to place. There’s always 5 of something to collect, some dungeon to explore (occasionally with a useless but unkillable NPC companion), or some artifact to recover. While at first this process is fun, after a while, the repetition starts to grate.

Combat

Integral to the questing is the combat system. It’s been lauded elsewhere, but I found it to be a little lacking, especially coming off of Batman’s sublime acrobatics. The base mechanics are relatively interesting, and there’s a wide variety of weaponry. I find myself heavily favoring the Chakrams, which are a magical throwing weapon that resembles a pair of flaming frisbees. They do heavy damage, at very long range, rarely miss, and can hit multiple enemies at once. I almost never find situations where they aren’t appropriate.

Tristan shows off his chakrams against a Jotun Runelord!

In addition to my weaponry, I’ve got a bunch of secondary abilities that consume Mana, and these are quite powerful. However, on my Xbox 360, I have control issues. To switch from weapon attacks to abilities/magic, you hold the right trigger. The face buttons then switch to their alternate functions. However, most of the time, the first time I press the button after holding the trigger, I do my primary attack instead of using my ability. This isn’t so bad when I end up throwing my Chakrams instead of doing a knockback attack, but it can become problematic when I roll out of position instead of firing a carefully timed lightning ball. This sucks a lot of the strategy out of the combat, and basically just boils it down to mashing the buttons and hoping that the right attack fires.

The dodge move and blocking are also problematic. The dodge move is quite short range and has a second or so cooldown, which means if an enemy is doing an area of effect attack, and my dodge doesn’t take me out of range, I’m likely to get hit by it anyhow. Some enemies also have homing attacks, which I’m supposed to block, but doing a dodge or an attack means I can’t block for a second or so, which results in me getting hit even though I tried to dodge and was holding block.

I’m not sure how this changes if you’re on a PC, but from what I’ve seen there’s a “hotbar” for skills that replaces this dual-mode button setup. I’m not sure if the blocking or dodging are any less responsive on that platform either.

Skills & Abilities

Character progression is controlled by two systems. The first is a set of “skills” which primarily control how difficult and/or rewarding the various crafting and looting minigames are, and the second is a set of “abilities” that give you special combat effects. The abilities are divided into Might, Sorcery, and Finesse, representing the standard RPG warrior, mage, and thief tropes respectively. How you divide your ability points up determines your Mana, Hit Points, and Destiny.

“Destiny” in this case is represented by a series of cards that you can choose from depending on how you’ve allocated your ability points. Each card gives you a bonus that should align with the play style you’ve chosen with your combination of skills and abilities.

The skill tree, in all its glory!

The problem with these systems is that although there’s a good set of skills and abilities here, there are also some quite terrible ones. There are times when I level up when I just can’t decide what I should spend my ability points on, simply because all the choices available are pretty terrible. However, I know I have to spend the points to upgrade my chosen trees in order to get to the next tier of abilities. I realize not every level can bring a large increase in my overall power, but sometimes the difference between one and two points in an ability is a 3-5% damage increase, which really makes those ability points (and therefore my level up) feel like they’re worth very little.

Additionally, the skills you can get and the minigames they are related to are a bit lopsided. Dispelling is important for chests that are protected by magic, but the dispelling minigame is terribly difficult and not particularly rewarding. If you screw up, you often end up cursed. Being cursed can be debilitating, and requires that you exit the dungeon, fast travel to a city, and pay a healer to dispel it. On the other end of the difficulty curve is lockpicking, where I can pretty consistently pick “Very Hard” locks at level 1 with a minimum of broken picks.

On the other end of the skill spectrum, ranking up blacksmithing and sagecrafting skills is a total no-brainer. Sagecrafting turns shards, a common loot item, into gems, which are ridiculously valuable and able to confer unique bonuses to your equipment. With blacksmithing, you can disassemble items into their component parts, and reassemble them again. The only weird thing is that it’s possible to take a weapon apart and put the same parts back together and end up with more enchantments than before. Additionally, with even minimal skill in blacksmithing, you can cut a 17,000 gold repair bill into a 500 gold charge for a stack of repair kits. As they are somewhat lopsided compared to other skills, both of these are absolutely essential to any character.

Interface

37 completed!? This may sound like a lot of quests, but Tristan's still fairly early in the game!

One other major issue I have is the user interface. Tracking my quests on the map is a chore. I often find myself switching back and forth between the quest list and the map to determine what quest objective is closest to my current position. Given that there are crazy numbers of quests in this game, quest management is something I’d want to see more effort put into.

On the console, if you have more than four abilities, (and there are probably a couple of dozen in the ability tree) you’ll have to swap them out from the ability screen if you want to use them. This can get painful, especially when you’ve got a couple of core abilities (such as healing) that you always want on, but then need to swap in special abilities versus different enemies.

The Bottom Line

The end result is that this is a game with a few good core mechanics that suffers from too much time put into cookie cutter quests and environments, and not enough time put into polishing the game itself and fixing its issues. It’s got the kernel of something that could be epic, if they’d just taken the time to properly balance it rather than just shovel more content onto the disc.

If you’re in the mood for some generic fantasy action-RPG gaming, and can overlook a few flaws, you’ll get a lot of play time out of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. However, if you value quality over quantity, you’re better off finding something else to play.

This contest has ended. Congratulations to

• Raven Dreamer for asking the most viewed question: What is the max level in Kingdoms of Amalur?
• Sterno for giving the answer with the highest score.

If you want to see the details of the contest, read below.

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In honor of the release of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, we’re holding a contest.

To enter, ask or answer questions related to Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning as you play the game. Anything tagged kingdoms-amalur-reckoning is eligible for this contest.

Prizes:

  

 

• The contest is open to both new and current gaming.stackexchange.com users.
• Everyone is eligible to participate regardless of geographic location. If you live in an area of the world where it is too difficult for us to ship you your prize, we’ll figure something else out on a case by case basis.
• The only metrics we’re using to determine winners views and votes. So ask as many good questions and give as many good answers as you can, and share them using whatever means you see fit. Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Google Plus, whatever works for you.