Recent reviews by Jaskar

Rocket League
A haiku

Gliding through the air
Miss the ball, opponent scores
What a save! Sorry!

If you’re looking for a solid action-RPG to play, Kingdom of Amalur: Reckoning would be a great choice, but it’s not without its faults. My 89 hours at the point of this review are straight after completing the main storyline and the vast majority of the sidequests, but while I’ve enjoyed my time I won’t be going back to 100% or play the DLC any time soon.

The Good:

+ Combat is sharp, responsive and entertaining. I played a rogue/mage hybrid, using a combination of either daggers or faeblades, with a bow and magic to support throughout. Once you get used to the combat style, you quickly learn a series of useful combos. I only played briefly with some of the other weapons, but they seemed ok as well. I was using the Xbox 360 controller for Windows that worked really well.

+ The creators have put together an interesting world, with a few ideas that put it above the generic tropes it could have fallen into. Lore isn’t normally my sort of thing, but I felt more interested in the world than I do with similar games.

+ Loads of content. My playthrough was a fairly swift run, despite doing most of the sidequests, and I think I could have padded this out with an extra 10 – 15 hours if I was a bit more thorough. Sidequests are largely solid with a minimal number of fetch quests. The House of Sorrows faction questline towards the end of the game was a particular highlight for me.

However, it felt like the content became sparser as you got closer to the end – with fewer sidequests per area. I remember spending ages in the first area, but got through the final continent in no time at all. Might just be me though.

+ Loads of concepts. Blacksmithing, alchemy, two types of lockpicking, stealth, enchanting, hidden items, player housing, interesting collectables – the game feels like it has it all. Admittedly, each of the areas are fairly shallow, but they do help spice the game up.

+ The game is fully voice acted with the exception of the protagonist. I know this has annoyed a few, but to me it felt like a conscious choice by the devs to help the player project onto their character. Real choices in dialogue are fairly minimal and the consequences irrelevant, but the voice acting is consistently high quality and there is loads of backstory in the dialogue if you’re looking for it.

+ The graphical style holds a nice point between realistic and cartoony. The art is sharp and colourful throughout and works well.

+ The game performed well on my mid-range PC, with no slowdown at 1080p. I’ve read that many people had lots of technical issues with the demo, but these seem to have been resolved for the end product. A couple of issues do creep in more towards the end of the game (getting stuck on scenery, interaction with some objects), but nothing gamebreaking at all.

+ Lots and lots and lots of loot. Most of it is fairly useless, but the illusion of variety holds strong in the items you pick up.

The Bad:

- I’m a fairly average gamer, and found the difficulty far too easy after the first 10 hours. Once you find your playstyle and learn how the limited number of beasties attack, you will be in cruise control for the rest of the game. The only times where the difficulty was higher was against mages, where their attacks can be harder to dodge and they also back away from melee types. This is quickly sorted by the ‘fateshift’ mode, which offers from stylish killing blows but removes any real challenge.

The difficulty completely fell apart in the last 10 hours for me, as I made my own equipment (without playing the system) that ended with me being so overpowered I was one-shotting most of the regular enemies with my bow.

The final boss also failed to land a single hit on me.

There is an attempt to up the difficulty by making the ‘harder’ enemies more frequent on the second continent, but it’s too little, too late in my mind.

It’s worth noting that I was aware of the issues around difficulty before starting, and played through the full game on hard. I’d recommend that everyone does the same if they are a vaguely competent gamer. A fan made difficulty patch is around if you are looking for more challenge, but I haven’t tested it.

I seriously doubt I would have finished the game on a lower difficulty, there would have been no challenge at all.

- Content repeats itself far too often, and disappointingly the developers failed to offer up even reskins to give the impression of there being more enemy types. This extends to the dungeons as well, which are limited to a few themes with only the minority feeling unique. Given the size of the world, this becomes a big issue around the midpoint of the game – I had to take a break from playing for a solid week to avoid getting bored.

- Like almost all games of its ilk, money becomes completely pointless after the opening 20 hours. I finished with about 12 million gold, and this was with salvaging all of the equipment in the last 15 hours. For perspective, the biggest gold sink for me were trainers, who only cost 45k each at the highest level.

I rolled my eyes after a quest to collect a set of books across the world, spanning about 60 hours of game time, rewarded me with 800 gold on my return.

- The main storyline is a disappointment. While I said above I enjoyed the lore of the world, the main storyline was about as bland as it comes – amnesiac protagonist travelling across the world to face the big bad. Amnesia can be played well, but you learn nothing of your past until the final 10 minutes, where one of your companions gives you a load of exposition. A really lazy effort in storytelling.

The main quest also suffers badly from being too sparse. You end up doing a larger quest in the story, but then get sent a few areas across the map before you can progress it further. After doing all the sidequests along the way, I’d completely forgotten what was going on by the time I reached the next point – this being the only game I was playing at the time.

- The camera, especially in combat, is slightly odd and far too low angle. While you do get used to it, it is a shame there is no flexibility.

Conclusion:

Reading the above, it seems like I don’t like the game. Quite the opposite – I really enjoyed my time playing and do recommend it. I think the negative points above stem from the fact that the game is close to greatness, and with a bit more time and direction Big Huge Games could have made something really special. It’s disappointing to see that they went under after finishing the game – although something this large is a huge task, especially for a first game. I would have loved to have seen a sequel to solve its issues – the finale also set up nicely for the proposed MMO if it was successful.

Overall, this game gets a recommendation from me. If you’re looking for a fairly light action RPG, you could do a lot worse.

Undoubtedly the best game ever made.