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So I decided to put my new computer through its paces and on the recommendation from the games store I got Reckoning : Kingdoms of Amalur. I am aware that this was available on consoles at least one month earlier.



Its a nice RPG I have to say, and I was satisfied with my purchase. I think the last computer RPG I played was either Wizardry 8 or the Might and magic 8, so the genre has certainly changed since I last played. Some of the features I see improved on Amalur are most probably standard, but I will mention them anyway.

Whats good

In no particular order

1. Love the combat - different from the modes where you could alternate between turn base mode and real time combat RPGs I used to play. Its purely real time, but its relatively easy to use the combat moves. Their is a tutorial showing how to do the various moves with the weapons. I particularly love the Faeblades. I must admit I got past the main quest without using them, then continued to play some sidequests using different combinations.

The Faeblades look like a Klingon Bath'leth, only it can be held in one hand, so your character is armed with two. In real life it most probably isn't very practical, however when your character can spin around at ridiculous speeds continuously then it becomes a killer.

Currently I am playing with a combination of Faeblades and Chakrams, but I keep other weapons in hand to switch.

2. Love the customization of your character

You aren't locked into a profession, you can put points into sorcery, might and finesse categories. All of these allow certain spells, but sorcery obviously has more powerful spells arguably. You can also reset your character for an in game fee. You essentially get refunded all your ability points, and get choose to redistribute them as you see fit.

3. Forge your own stuff.

I find that the stuff I create turns out to be more powerful than what I find in the game. Its a nice feature which allows me to boost my health and mana dramatically, where even weapons can be configured to add x% to health. This really builds up as your advance more levels, as x% of a bigger number gives you more extra health / mana.

You can also name your stuff, so I tried a few combinations here.


Dalek Plunger for a bow.

Because Voltron was cool when I was a kid.


Keeping with the Voltron theme



4. Fast travel

In the M&M series you needed spells to fast travel from town to town. This is a standard feature in Amalur (unless you haven't been to that place before). I think this is a standard feature of other more recent RPGs as well.

5. Great depth of world

RA Salvotore created a 10000 year history. You can find it on their website. Essentially the game is set during the age of Arcane, where humans start mastering magic, whereas only the Elves and Fae could do it before. The more recent age is the age of heroes, which I suspect its the age where they plan to set their MMORPG in. However the creators have stated they do plan to make more singe player RPGs as well as other spin off merchandise.

6. Helmet off option

Your character can wear a ridiculously powered armoured helmet, but you have the option of displaying them in combat without it. I discovered this feature by accident and I must say, some armour looks cool, some not so great and your character looks better sometimes without the helmet.

The bad

1. Can't jump off from anywhere. You have to jump from selected jump points. The up side of this feature is, you can't accidentally kill yourself by running off a cliff. But then you can jump from a ridiculous height at a jump point and remain unscath, so maybe in universe you just end inconvenienced.

2. You also can't cut corners, which prevents you saving just that extra time.

3. Downloadable content restriction

There is an extra house of valor quest which apparently is only available to early adopters who buy it online. I would have loved to play that extra quest. This obviously is disadvantageous to those who buy second hand games to prefers to wait for reviews (like me).

4. You can't cast remove curse spells. Which is irritating because you have to seek a healer when you are cursed.

The funny side

1. One of your "guide" characters always seems to dress in the most skimpy costume reminiscent of the stereotype Sword and sorcery Howardesque archetype. You know like Red Sonja mode of dress.

2. You can steal items from a person (I only did so as part of a quest) and if you are caught (very likely, unless you use the trainer) you can get away with it by simply paying a fine.

Well the fine for steal is the same as it was in the elder scroll series.
But yeah the curse were annoying especially if you deep underground at the time. Or a mark/teleport spell.

Why'd the same people who go ga-ga I've crafting (broken in every game ever) shit bricks about having to fast travel to a vendor?

Anyway not being disabled by a PC I played this a while back and it's a solid Diablo roamer. The story is completely ignorable and the combat is fun (although I hate the animation locking). It also isn't riddled with bugs like certain other RPGs one could mention. Complaining about being underground is lame because none of those segments are very long and I never saw a curse that did anything dangerous anyway. I spent hours at half armour and didn't even notice because there's no reason to ever get hit except 'I mis-timed'.

But then I'm not impressed by how 'cool' my items look.

Curses (and diseases) are mildly annoying until you remember to cure them.

Crafting is less broken in this game than it is in That Other Open World Game, because you're still somewhat limited by the maximum quality of your components, but it is the way to make the best stuff.

I'm close to the end of this now, will polish it off when I'm finished being Commander Space Jesus.

Stark wrote:
Anyway not being disabled by a PC I played this a while back and it's a solid Diablo roamer. The story is completely ignorable and the combat is fun (although I hate the animation locking). It also isn't riddled with bugs like certain other RPGs one could mention. Complaining about being underground is lame because none of those segments are very long and I never saw a curse that did anything dangerous anyway. I spent hours at half armour and didn't even notice because there's no reason to ever get hit except 'I mis-timed'.

But then I'm not impressed by how 'cool' my items look.

How did you avoid getting flanked and getting king hit? It was difficult during the fight with the Maid of Windemere and during my early battles with the Farlanghi cultists I was routinely killed because I had wandered into a dungeon when I was perhaps at too low a level.

I wore the item because its the most powerful, even if I find it doesn't look aesthetically pleasing. However the helmet off features allows me to have the best of both worlds - having a powerful helmet for the bonuses without having to look at it.

mr friendly guy wrote: How did you avoid getting flanked and getting king hit? It was difficult during the fight with the Maid of Windemere and during my early battles with the Farlanghi cultists I was routinely killed because I had wandered into a dungeon when I was perhaps at too low a level.

Dodging, cancelling, and more significantly, the timed parry move. Timed parries are the king of combat when you can do them well, enemies automatically get downgraded a level of protection against your attacks for a time after a parry, if they were resistant to whatever you're using they're now taking full damage, if they were neutral to it they'll take bonus damage as if they were vulnerable, especially when you get the parry special move to punish enemies hard, I can take 3/4 of most enemies' health off with one parry special with Faeblades.

Once you learn where the animation locks are it's much easier to fight smart. For instance, you can cancel out of any attack except the last hit of your weapon's combo into a block, dodge, or spell, you can cancel out of that last hit into a spell, but you can't cancel out of a spell so be careful where you use them. Also, a dodge has a few frames of animation lock at the end where you're vulnerable, so spamming it is a bad idea. Blink has a longer window of vulnerability. Once I got the dodge special move I mostly started using blink as an offensive move, blink into or through enemies and come out of it into a launcher that means that anything that was in position to punish me after the blink can't do so. (I use Faeblades, so my dodge special is a radial attack as well)

The only things that give me serious issues any more are large concentrations of mages that can stunlock me with fireballs.

Anything with those slow tracking projectiles annoyed the shit out of me, because I seemed to take serious damage even if I blocked.

But I just used dodging and parrying (which is very easy vs some guys and hard vs others depending on how they telegraph their moves). The big bonus of teleport doge is that you can dodge through someone and be safe for their whole combo and then mark and explode their stupid faces. All 3 trees have AOE stuff, and I was even surprised how useful the '25' damage mines were. Four of them killed a guy that didn't die to 250 points of mark and explode, soooooo ......

Stark wrote:Anything with those slow tracking projectiles annoyed the shit out of me, because I seemed to take serious damage even if I blocked.

Crudoks? I basically ignore them due to lolhigh poison resistance. Their attacks are negligible now.

Early game they were a problem, lots of resistances on them and their melee was serious damage as well, but I've reached the point where my build is seriously good against them.

Yeah I just ignored resistances the whole time. Can't even be bothered running the shield power I have lol. It's all self-inflicted.

I usually played by raining death from spells, or using the block and then sweep with the staff. The blast covers a wide area and it charges up your fate meter. The good thing with it is that the sweep makes you retreat so you put some distance between yourself and the enemy. In other words, I relied less on combo's and more manouvering into a more defensible position. The problem with this is, some of the foes particularly the Bolgans had shields strong enough to completely resist the staff I was using at that time. I am not sure if they can resist my new improved wanktastic staff, but I might test it out next time.

The other tactic I used was a harpoon (reminds me of MK Scorpion's "get over here" cry) and draw the enemy closer to me for several whacking with the staff. Once they are knocked away I use the harpoon again. If the foe is larger than me, the harpoon simply launches me close to them and I do the same thing.

Now that I am experimenting with faeblades, I use a combination of faeblades and chakrams. At this point I am so powerful it most probably doesn't matter too much about combos more than the basic ones.

On another matter, Amalur has a new downloadable expansion. It looks neat for $10, with your own personal fort (which I actually got one as well in Amalur) but this fort is more detailed with retainers (who each have their own personality and side quests etc). There are unique armors (not useful since none of them can match my self created ones), and 3 new twist of fate cards. The problem is it doesn't appear to let you climb levels beyond 40, which is a bit of a let down considering I am already at level 40. I am on the fence whether to get this expansion.

Here is the trailer for the new downloadable expansion available tomorrow.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... sxNBX_DDWQ

At this stage I pretty much broke the game, where I am so powerful I don't really need any skill as such to win the battles. However I still find some of the quests engrossing enough, and for only $10 I will most probably get it. If its not challenging enough, I can always down power myself by using weaker armour. Although I suspect I would still win even fighting unarmoured.

Why do people make big statements like it's hard to 'break' or 'be tough' in a single-player game? I mean do people think they discovered some secret or something? Amalur is 'broken' by the time the first area is done unless you do something wrong.

It's kind of ironic that by being way less pretentious and self-aware than other RPGs the quests take much longer to get old. They have the same limited variety, awful writing and simple scripting, but thu're not overblown, bombastic or FOR SRS.

I wouldn't say its hard to break Amalur, but it would be time consuming to get all the relevant bonuses, forge the powerful equipment etc.

In Amalur if you go to a higher level dungeon before you advance it would still be quite a challenge. I wasn't the only one who noted this as some reviewers mention as well (and complained about it). So I wouldn't say its broken by the time you finish the first area.

But once you advance past a certain stage it definitely easier. I guess I was fortunate to wander off into more higher level dungeons earlier, so it was challenging still. After it becomes relatively easy that the challenge lies in breaking the game further, and just competing against yourself to see how far you can improve your statistics. Which was interesting considering I was already at level 40 then, so I just maximised all the lorestone bonuses, got a few more twists of fate, and learnt how to manipulate the crafting section to get better equipment.

Since then it turns out I do have the House of Valor questline, and while the actual quest itself wasn't difficult for a level 40 character, defeating the other Arena matches in a row without using healing potions, mana potions, not using reckoning mode etc on difficult level was still a challenge. Then I tried beating all the arena matches non stop without armor, which was actually required me to use tactics again.

Stark, will I like this? I was pretty undecided after the demo and the whole GIANT WEAPONS thing. Although bonus points for making characters naked.

I donnthink you really need the ubber lewts, you just need the skills around timing and at least one decent attack. I barely killed anyone with my weapons, because it was easier to use magic.

Hav, you might like it. It's a laugh, has dressup, and not all the weapons look retarded. But if you do like it there's a bunch if reasonably fun fantasy choppers around.

I personally only tried the oversize hammers and swords a few times, but didn't like it. They do look ridiculous, although I guess its now a convention of video games and I suppose some people find them cool. In universe though, given that a character is strong enough to parry a 2 metre bear and force it back 1 metre, or knock back a 3-4 metre high ettin, they are most probably strong enough to handle an oversize weapon, albeit much slower. Which is why I prefered the other weapons. I could strike faster.