I missed Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning the first time around. That’s not to say I didn’t eventually end up with a copy for the PS3, but I didn’t buy it new and I didn’t play it when it was out on the PS3. Most of that was due to the inclusion of Todd McFarlane’s designs as a selling point, and if you are an utter geek like, um, some of us, you may know about the shady business practices he had in the comics industry, the lawsuits surrounding Neil Gaiman and Miracleman (There’s even a book about it…I have it), and his general distastefulness. Suffice it to say that while I appreciate his early work, I’m not a fan. And having his name prominently attached to a game was an automatic no-sell for me, even with a fantastic writer like R.A. Salvatore attached to the project. Yup, that R.A. Salvatore. Dark Elf Trilogy, death of Chewbacca (no longer canon), basically creates his own universes R.A.Salvatore. Did I mention Ken Rolston of, oh, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion fame? It’s a pretty spectacular crew that put Amalur in terms of talent and I was probably remiss for not playing it at the time. It also bombed horribly and bankrupted the original studio, even with all that star power, so I thought nothing of it.
With the announcement of Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning, the new HD remake from KAIKO Games and THQ Nordic, one of my friends told me I absolutely needed to try Amalur. I had a used PS3 copy lying around so I popped it in. Turns out the DLC that came with it was both active and unredeemed as well, which was simply astonishing! And I played Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. Two weeks later, here I am with Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning and having played both versions (though not nearly as far in the PS3 one), there are definitely things to be said!
First off, the story in Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning (which I will simply call Amalur from here on out for brevity’s sake) is excellent, as one would expect from the pedigree of its creators. It’s an excellent plot with some interesting twists and I definitely don’t want to ruin it for you. None of it is really new ground in a general sense…countless fantasy novels have focused on the Fae and the summer and winter courts, threads of fate, wars between fairies and humans, and pretty much every version of this type of story you can imagine. Probably the best I’ve read in the last decade is The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher, but it’s all quite familiar to anyone who reads fantasy. Regardless, things get moving quickly and the story holds your interest. Or it should…
Unfortunately, Amalur is utterly plagued by horrendous load times, even on the PS4 Pro, which is usually fairly good for such things. The introductory sequence isn’t particularly bad, but once you get out into the open world and start performing side quests, entering stores, and wandering about, things get a bit frustrating. Entering a store in Amalur takes as long to load as leaving one, even though you’re only loading up a fraction of the textures. There’s no reason it should take this long and yet every time I went to buy or sell something or went into a pub to see what was happening, I was sitting on the couch checking my phone, having a snack, and simply waiting. There’s simply no load optimization at all, and it’s utterly frustrating. Amalur is chock full of side-quests and some of them are quite interesting, but after the first 5 hours or so, I was actively avoiding performing anything but the main quest because I didn’t want to wait any longer than I had to. That’s problematic at best and game crippling at worst, especially considering it has a direct impact on the narrative and the flow of the game. Sitting around and waiting just isn’t fun.
Combat is substantially improved in Amalur from the original however. The original game had a wonky high-speed camera and was just not as responsive as it could have been. Amalur takes the source material and doesn’t change it, but it definitely tweaks it. Combat feels more natural, bow aiming is easier, and the camera, while still not the greatest, is noticeably easier to control. This all leads to an excellent combat system that starts off fairly simplistic and becomes slowly deeper as you level up. Attacking hordes of enemies is definitely a high point in the game, especially once you arm yourself properly. Being able to use a wide variety of weapons is fun and the various combat styles allow for a wide variety of play including stealth, magic, and frontal assault, all equally effective with the ability to assign level points to different disciplines. It’s very reminiscent of the progressions in Skyrim, and you can always visit a Fateweaver and reset your choices if you aren’t happy with them, so gameplay style can vary widely.
As you build up specialties, you add all kinds of extra attacks benefits and bonuses and lunging at enemies and easily combo-ing them without complex button presses is extremely gratifying. Sometimes it’s nice to have a game that doesn’t try to be Devil May Cry and where timing isn’t incredibly important every single instant. On top of that there’s Reckoning mode. Build up enough fate energy and you can erase your enemies from the tapestry of fate, essentially cutting them off from their destinies. That’s a fancy way of saying it’s a single shot berserk mode that allows you to obliterate an enemy with a spectacular finishing move. And the Reckoning finishes are definitely awesome. Slow motion pans to a gruesome impalement or slashing jump ending in a quick time event that allows you to double the XP you’d normally receive if you’re fast enough. They’re cool as hell and they come up every so often during combat. Not frequently enough to get completely stale, but not rare enough that you forget they’re there either. Oddly, when you have the Reckoning meter full, the game keeps reminding you how to use it. Regardless, it’s a cool addition, and like everything else in Amalur, it’s designed for ease of use rather than complexity and that makes it simply fun.
What you’re really here for though is the visuals. Amalur is a remaster of a game from 2012, and looking spectacular is kind of what playing a remake of an almost decade old game is all about. Some of the recent flood of remasters have been amazing. Ninja Gaiden II (which we reviewed here) for example absolutely knocks it out of the park on the Xbox One X. Amalur is not Ninja Gaiden II however. The first thing you’ll notice about Amalur’s visuals is that the texture palette seems someone limited. Sure there’s more detail than the PS3 version, but not as much as you’d expect. It’s not being released as a AAA title and only rings in at $40, but characters are surprisingly undetailed. It’s hard to tell if that’s a failing of the development team that remastered the game or an attempt to preserve the slightly cartoonish look that Amalur tends to. This was never an ultra-realistic title and perhaps adding too many textures looked weird. It’s impossible to say.
Regardless, this leaves Amalur looking half like it’s been upgraded to HD and half like a cel-shaded game. It’s bearable, but it’s not anywhere near as spectacular as I’d been expecting. There are a lot of little issues with the visuals too, such as the HUD not being set to the actual corners of the screen, making it feel like it’s intruding on the gameplay window and the camera AI often getting stuck around corners, something we mostly left behind in the last generation of gaming. There are numerous other weird glitchy things in Amalur too. Invisible walls, tree roots you can’t walk over, areas that are strangely off limits with circuitous routes to access (terrible level design on some of these), inconsistent rules for water (sometimes you can swim, sometimes not). All in all it’s a hodgepodge of the very stuff that we have generally gotten away from in gaming, and as a remaster, it’s more than a bit disappointing to see that every blemish was ported wholesale along with the good in this one.
Add to all that the original developers’ absolute obsession with particulate lighting effects and you’ve got a messy, weird screen. Seriously, everything in Amalur glows! It’s honestly ridiculous. If Amalur was in the real world it would be lit up like the Vegas strip! Every attack, every plant, every surface seems to radiate some sort of sheen. In some places it makes it hard to even look at the screen, and it’s genuinely weird to see that many things glowing and constantly radiating particles. On top of all the glowing stuff, Amalur also comes with every piece of DLC ever offered for the game, all in a special delivery chest in the first town. This means you can massively overpower your character right from the get-go and end up blowing through the early stages of the game easily, as well as racking up an absolutely ludicrous amount of gold early on by selling a lot of it. Oh, and of course, most of it glows, pulsing hideously as you run around. Plus you get to wear the Commander Sheppard armor from the Mass Effect merchandising crossover with Amalur, and that alone is simply awesome! That’s honestly all I would ever wear for the whole game if I could. Not knowing that the chest was DLC content had me very confused as I thought there was a game breaking glitch providing unique armor and weapons infinitely at first (there’s so much it fills your inventory). It’s still a nice free inclusion that is absolutely worth mentioning!
Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning is a great game. It is fun, well-written, and has excellent flow, and there’s a 30+ hour main game here with a lot more (probably double that easily) if you don’t skip as many side-quests as humanly possible like I did. But it’s also a PS3 game and it’s got the quirks and design flaws to prove it. Combat is wholly satisfying, the progressions are excellent, and the whole core design of the game is solid. It’s the finishes and load times that really cripple things here and at in this day and age at the end of the PS4 lifecycle, there’s no reason that these things should not be way better optimized and the graphics should not be cleaner and better redesigned, especially since it’s supposed to run in 4K as well. At half the price of a major retail release, there’s some leeway here, but after experiencing the lack of overall polish in this remaster, there’s very little slack left. If you were on the fence about Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning, the overall experience is fun but flawed and it doesn’t quite keep up with other open-world RPGs, especially stuff like Dragon Age or the Elder Scrolls. It’s still good value for the money and if you’ve got some patience, it’s a fun game that’s worth playing!
This review was based on a digital copy of Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning. It was played with a PS4 Pro using a 55” Sony 1080p HDTV. Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning is also available for Xbox One and PC on Steam.