Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

What stretches out before you over the coming hours is a brilliant example of “RPG-lite”. After literally waking from the dead, your blank canvas hero is quickly settled in to effortless questing and pleasantly familiar gaming territory.

Playing very much like the Fable series by plonking you in a new fantasy world that appears to have more than a passing resemblance to the lands in World of Warcraft’s Azeroth, there are no surprises that a lot of your time will be spent despatching this or that monster and tasked with retrieving their horns, teeth, car keys etc. At first we were worried this was going to be another cardboard adventure title, but this game has a serious pedigree behind it, Ken Rolston of ‘Elder Scrolls: Oblivion’ steps up as executive designer and Todd McFarlane (the creator of the Spawn comics) lends his hand to the artwork conjuring up some suitably McFarlane’esque horrors for you to fight – its secret weapon however is that really the game is as deep as YOU want it to be.

The combat in Kingdoms of Amalur is (at first) a simple button press that triggers your primary or secondary weapons (or magic – if you’re into that kind of thing). Fighting is so intuitive that we spent the opening hours stumbling into side quests, being more than content beating up the local wildlife and running back to villages to get our rewards, blissfully unaware of the major plot points being dangled ahead of us. Around the six hour mark however we were getting to grips with the whole “chosen one” destiny side of things that the developers hope will set the game apart. The gimmick to the story that everyone is bound to their own inescapable fate where as you – you can do whatever you like! It is in fairness just a novel way to look at skill trees; it wasn’t until the major characters started commenting on it that we paid it much attention at all. From then on however things stepped up a gear and we starting learning combat moves and the such that went beyond the button bashing that was serving us just fine. There is plenty of opportunity to mix magic and combat, specialising in one area for a while and then wiping the slate clean when it was time to level up.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning strikes the perfect balance in adventure gaming, not as daunting as Skyrim but almost as customisable, more “pick up and play” than Warcraft (it’s nice to know that eventually you’ll reach the end of your quest), there is little to dislike here. True some of the voice acting is tantamount to a fantasy world hate crime but we’ve heard far worse.

What’s great about this game is how it draws you in and lets you set the pace for how you want your adventure to pan out, you can stop and learn the histories of the world and its races – or you can run straight past pausing only to swing your sword and loot the bodies. Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is a perfect slice of gaming that has as much to offer to casual questers as it does hard-core dungeon trawlers, grab your sword and shield and give it a go – you won’t be disappointed.

Those picking up a copy new will net themselves some bonus quests, some snazzy Mass Effect inspired armour and if combined with the Mass Effect demo -TWIN OMNI BLADES! – if that’s not an incentive we don’t know what is?!