The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I played a game by the name of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning.
Boy, was that a video game.

Reckoning had so much potential. Dialog Trees! Combat that seemed potentially fun! Um… Dialog Trees! It was trying so hard to be Dragon Age, only better. Surely it wouldn’t be terrible? Certainly some of that would rub off and it would be fun!

Not really!

I mean, alright, it was fine, you know? It was fine. There were plenty of quests? Lots of talking. You had plenty of character customization and could choose what you wanted to do in combat. I went pure mage, and it was really pretty fun! You eventually get this skill where your dodge instead leaves a deadly ice cloud behind, so you can kind of zip through enemies and slow them down while you’re running away. That’s neat. I threw millions of ice shards at enemies until they died. That’s pretty neat!

That’s about it.

I think now I’m just going to make a list of everything that disappointed me in no particular order.

I had a persuasion skill that was maxed, and I failed the last persuasion check in the game. REALLY? REALLY, GAME? Plus, persuasion, and conversation in general, never did anything besides get me gear that wasn’t as good as what I had on. Persuasion was “give me a free thing.” That’s really unsatisfying.

I played on Casual, but at the end, the game got really hard. On Casual. Granted, I might have been underleveled because I only did two side missions because they were all insanely boring. But that fact just kind of strikes me as really weird. I mean, I was playing on Casual.

All the characters in this game are super boring stereotypes. “Hello, I am a warrior who used to be great but now I drink a lot ha ha!” “I am mysterious lady from your past you can’t remember who isn’t telling you anything and has large breasts!” On top of that, none of them have anything vaguely interesting to say. At least, say, Oghren from Dragon Age, while being a stereotype and being voiced by Steven Blum, was pretty interesting once you actually talked to him. These characters are not anything other than your first impression of them, and they can talk and talk at you and not say a goddamn thing. All the dialog in this game is skippable, and in an RPG, that’s insane.

There are at least two mainline “run around in this area and get into a lot of stupid random encounters just to walk to a place and press a button before walking to another place” quests. I get it, there’s an open world for some reason. Can we please move on? Why not make some more interesting quests instead of filling your game with padding?

I enjoyed Amalur well enough, I guess, but only because I basically just charged through the main storyline without stopping, and even then, I was kind of nearly sick of it by the time I was running towards final boss land. It is just devoid of creativity or anything interesting, which just seems crazy to me, as they kept talking up what an interesting world they had. But a bunch of lore doesn’t mean shit without characters, and this game has none. Sure, it has some decent combat, but that’s really it. Rent it if you want, it’s an okay time if you just want to smash your way through like I did. But goodness, just wait for Mass Effect in a week or so, and play a good dialog-full game with fun combat.