Weekly Roundup 02/19/2012

I played a lot of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning this week, and I mean a lot. I’ll probably finish it up tomorrow. Man, that game... I almost don’t know where to begin. Last week I talked about how I found the narrative boring, and thought the combat was good for an RPG but still not quite up to action game standards. All of that still holds. If anything, it’s more true now than it was a few dozen hours of gameplay ago. The story, world and characters are all mind-numbingly dull to the point where I genuinely don’t want to be in this world any longer. It probably wouldn’t be that big of a deal if this was a 10-20 hour game, but when you spend 50+ hours in a world it really helps if it’s one worth spending that much time in. Amalur, or at least Reckoning’s version of it, is not.

So many dungeons, all very much the same.

It’s a lot of different things that contribute to the bland world. First, there’s not a lot of variety; the hundreds of caves, castles and forests you constantly drudge through across hundreds of quests all look very much like the last. It’s a shame too, because I really like the colorful art style, and I wish it got put to better use. Even worse are the characters, which isn’t anything new for the genre. I thought Skyrim had lifeless, unrelatable characters as well, and Reckoning is at least as bad as that, if not worse. I couldn’t care any less about any of the characters in this game, which makes it really hard to feel motivated to go through yet another cave looking for yet another Average Joe’s lost trinket. Finally, there’s the game’s story. Despite having a pretty cool setup, the main plot hasn’t gone anywhere with it so far, and is the most generic fantasy story out there as a result. All of the other plot lines, such as the faction ones, are no better. I’ve played almost the entire the game skipping all of the dialogue; I’m afraid I’d fall asleep otherwise.

The boring world even extends into the gameplay via the enemies. You could not divine a more standard set of foes than the one Reckoning has conjured up (the first enemy in the game is none other than the ubiquitous giant rat), and the fact that you fight the exact same enemies for dozens of hours only magnifies the problem. The game absolutely does the whole “It’s like the one you fought before, only blue!”, which is pretty frustrating (and cheap) for a game as long as this. The combat also gets brought down by the game’s length. What would work well in a 10-20 hour game doesn’t necessarily hold up over 50 hours, and that’s definitely the case with Reckoning’s combat. It starts out being pretty engaging and action heavy, but by the end it’s pure button mashing.

Changing up my character to try new abilities helped extend the game a little, but not enough.

The skill tree suffers alongside the combat. There’s a lot of neat moves and abilities to be acquired, and I had a lot of fun building my character in the early stages of the game. The problem is that I had everything I wanted before the halfway mark. That leaves dozens of hours of simply using the same moves over and over again, which is just tiresome. Perhaps Reckoning’s one saving grace in that regard is the way you can respec your character at any time. That kind of non-committal customization is an idea that a lot of games have been fiddling with lately (such as Borderlands and Bastion), and it’s kind of neat to be able to experiment with every character build without having to play the game multiple times. In Reckoning’s case it even helps the gameplay stay fresh a little longer. I went through numerous builds during the game just to spice things up, and while it still didn’t last the entire game, being able to change my character certainly made things more enjoyable for longer.

Maybe I'm not as big a fan of the genre as I thought.

It probably sounds like I hate Reckoning, but that’s not entirely true (I won’t say it’s entirely false either). There are a lot of ideas in here that I like, but it always comes back to how needlessly long the game is; it's simply too big for the ideas it presents. It’s a problem I’ve been having with a fair number of RPGs lately, primarily western style ones. They’ll be really fun for 20 hours or so while you learn the game’s numerous mechanics, toy with character builds, explore the world, etc. But after a certain point you’ve essentially seen and done it all, and yet there’s still dozens of hours left for you to see and do it all over and over again. It’s an artificial lengthening of the game, achieved through liberal use of "copy, paste", that makes the back half incredibly repetitive and tedious. Recently I've found myself really eager to be done with a handful of RPGs well before they're actually done, and Reckoning is one of the primary offenders.

Even so, some people may argue that a game being too big should never be a complaint. It’s certainly an interesting debate, and one I might expand more on in the future. For now though, I’ve spent more time playing Reckoning than I've spent enjoying it, and the overall experience is less for it. Maybe the real answer is just that I’m not as much of a fan of big, open ended RPGs as I thought. Aside from Reckoning, I got tired of otherwise great games such as Dragon Age: Origins and Skyrim well before I stopped playing them as well. Perhaps I just need to be a little more selective with the games I choose to play. Something for me to chew on I guess.

Oh, I also played a little bit of Rhythm Heaven Fever; it’s frickin awesome. If I was IGN I’d probably write that Rhythm Heaven Fever eats Reckoning’s face or something, but I’m not, so I won’t. Instead I’ll just say that hour or so I’ve played of was great, and that I’ll play a lot more of it this week. Anyway, that’s all for now, until next time!

Currently playing: Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, Rhythm Heaven Fever