Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning isn't a game I had any plans on playing as quickly as I did. I didn't know much about the game until the demo dropped, and even walking away from that demo, I was left with a kind of "meh" feeling about the whole thing. It wasn't until watching a friend play through a majority of the game that I felt inclined to give the game a try. (I also have to throw in there that a nice hole in my gaming schedule was created when "Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City was released and flat out sucked). Thus, my journey begun.
The thing I want to point out about Reckoning is that the whole experience has a very "Fable" vibe to it. Maybe it's because the art style is similar, I don't know. All I know is Reckoning is basically the game I've always wanted the Fable series to be. You start the game out in an interesting enough predicament: you're dead. Yep, you died, and you come back to life (thanks to some magic mumbo jumbo), honestly if there's one thing I didn't really care about in this game, it was the story. I can sum up the story in one simple sentence: a series of fantasy cliches that embodies a plot-line. Nothing about Reckoning's story will strike you as original, and I found myself skipping through most of the dialogue. What kept me coming back was the excellent and highly rewarding combat system, and the loot system. The loot system isn't as intuitive as Diablo or Borderlands, but it does have a system behind it that is advanced enough to have a random loot drop into the chests. The loot is so random that the massive strategy guide can't even compile all of it. Now if you're like me, you will find the whole idea of random generated loot as a dream come true. It's within this loot system that kept me from putting the controller down.
The combat flows fluidly enough that it becomes an enjoyable experience, but towards the end of the game's main campaign, I found myself being overrun (never to the point of death), by so many frequent enemies that I needed to use a combination of heavy attacks and health potions to even make it through. Granted, I played this game on the hardest difficulty, but I can't honestly say anything in Reckoning is too much of a challenge. In fact, the final boss of the main campaign is a gigantic push over, and I was actually shocked how easy the end of that game turned out to be.
My other complaint about Reckoning is that while the campaign is lengthy, there are just so many side-quests that I found myself being side-tracked from the main quest for a good twenty-hours before I decided to go back to it. I know, in 2012 it is kind of silly to think that a game has just too many side quests, but Reckoning is filled with so much content it begins to over stay its welcome towards the end.
In a post-Skyrim world, it's hard to release a competent role playing game that will capture gamer's attention span for more then twenty hours or so. Hell, I dropped 120 hours into Skyrim in just under two weeks, which is insane, I know. Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is by no means a perfect game, it has it's fair share of issues, however, you'd be hard pressed to find a more polished RPG this year so far. If you're looking for a fun distraction while you wait for that inevitable The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim dlc, Reckoning can be that distraction for quite some time.