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While it looks promising, this game has a number of failures, both in game mechanics and in terms of the RPG experience.
After watching a few let's plays of Kingdoms of Amalur I thought it had promise and picked it up. Since then I've sunk in about twenty hours of play, and all that promise has evaporated, leaving me severely disappointed with the game.
Game Mechanics Problems
Camera: Oh god, the camera is the worst camera I have ever seen in a single player RPG. To start with, it seems like the Field of View is too narrow, and there are no controls for it. The FoV wouldn't be an issue, but the camera is centered too low, making it unnecessarily hard to see further ahead of you, while giving you a very nice view of the couple of meters of ground directly behind your character. Because that's where all the action is, right?
There's also no zooming in/out, which only makes this problem worse. The camera also doesn't focus on your character per-se, but on some weird point behind your character that seems to be attached to your character via an invisible spring.
By far the most annoying problem with it however, is that the camera moves automatically when you enter combat. In theory, it seems to want to give you the best view of the combat field. In practice, it will give you awkward camera angles that aren't at all centered behind your character, and more than a few times I've seen the camera go behind object, get stuck too close to my character on a wall giving me only a view of the ground, and sometimes phased through the ground, obscuring my view completely.
I hate games that think they're smarter than me. No matter how advanced software is, it can't do better at determining where I want to look during combat than I can myself. That requires that games give me a degree of freedom to control the camera of course...which this doesn't.
Combat/Attacking: The game has quite a few weapons, including some somewhat original ones that aren't common in RPGs. With the exception of wands and bows, each weapon's main attack (mapped to the left mouse button) chains performing three to five different moves. While they look cool, some of the attacks are really slow and leave you open to enemy attacks. Combine this with the camera problems, and I've had a lot of cases where the game thought I was attacking something completely different than what I wanted. It can be cool to watch, but it feels annoying sluggish.
Each time you hit a normal (non-boss-y) enemy, or an enemy hits you, you/the enemy stumble for a few seconds, leaving them open for attacks. Taken in a 1-to-1 fight, this often makes combat hilariously easy, as you can stun-lock an enemy for the entire fight just by mashing your LMB. Against multiple foes, you can find yourself stun-locked and killed withing a few hits without even having a chance to react (even on easy mode, this can happen). Finally, most of the attacks for the player keep him more in less in place, while a majority of the enemy attacks lunge them forward a very large distance - including human enemies - which means you can swing an attack that will miss the enemy because you're too far, but when that same enemy attacks, it will lunge forward towards you moving much further than you could have moved.
Combat/Dodging: Dodging is actually annoyingly not useful. Trying to dodge in the right direction can be a pain due to the above described camera issues, causing me to dodge right into the enemy a number of times. But even if you do dodge in the right direction, you can find that it didn't work because you were stuck on some small piece of terrain that didn't even look like it was in the way. This is because the game doesn't have jumping at all and you can't so much as walk over a twig. Dodging is also made very much useless because some enemies can literary change their attack direction in mid-attack animation, and will result in your thinking you dodge an attack, only to have that enemy turn towards you (sometimes in mid-air) and hit you with an attack anyway. Enemies are also incredibly agile in combat, while your movement options are severely limited because attacking has an animation lock that prevents movement for a second after it finishes the animation, and dodging also has animation lock that will prevent you from attacking a short time afterwards.
So while the game looks like a fun fast paced action combat game, it actually plays like a buggy, slow and encumbered combat system that is, most of the time, not as responsive as you think it would be.
Combat/Aiming: If you use a bow or a wand, you'll have to aim your attacks. But you don't actually have free aiming. Instead the game will automatically lock onto targets for you, but there doesn't seem to be a reliable way to determine which target it locks on to. I've had a clear shot at a powerful enemy, only to have the game lock on to a not so dangerous one that was slightly to the right, but also slightly closer...despite the fact that I was clearly aiming at the powerful enemy. The camera (again) is your enemy. If you want to look at an enemy, you'll be looking at your character's backside instead. It's hard to describe, but the aiming in this game is really unintuitive and very hard to use reliably.
Inventory: The inventory is really weird, and makes some things kind of hard to do. It's a list based inventory that uses an item counter, unlike say Oblivion/Skyrim inventory which is also list based, but uses item weights. You don't have a full list of your items, instead it's all categories, based on equipping stuff. But it's strange - there's one category called Armor which lets you equip all your armor pieces (head, chest, arms, legs, feet, shield), but there are two categories for weapons - primary and secondary weapons. It seems like they ran out of money to make a slot system that's usually used in rpgs. Unless this was a purposeful design choice to get away from that slot system - except it's not an improvement at all! Figuring out what's filling up your inventory so you can go sell the crap is more difficult than it should be too, because there's no way to quickly look at item counts in the different categories. But at merchants, you get to see one long list of items (and only one long list of items), without having a good way to filter items - there are categories, but you still have to scroll down to see the next category, making it still just as useful as a single long list.
Stealth: I play mostly a melee/rogue character. I dabbled in magic on a different character, but none of the systems seem as broken to me as stealth. Sometimes enemies will detect you even though there's no clear way for them to see you. This doesn't happen often, but when it does, it's really annoying. Almost none of the game seems designed around stealth, as you can't even hide behind some objects because the collision boxes are much larger than the actual objects (I'm assuming to prevent clipping issues) - so on the very very few occasions where you're told to sneak by, you'll end up cursing at the physics. Even in those sections though, stealth isn't required. I thought being caught in one quest would result in some sort of failure, instead I was caught and proceeded to slaughter everyone in the castle... only to complete my 'stealth' mission of planting back a cursed ring without problems.
The other issue is that attacking from stealth is annoying. Some enemies actually walk faster than you can move in stealth (and there's no skill to upgrade the speed), so even if you manage to catch up to them, the stealth attack animation (which removes all player control for a second or two even after it's finished with the actual attack, by having your character look around stealthily) MISS. So you can have a situation where you attack someone from stealth, miss, and sit there and watch without being able to do anything, while the target calmly gets up, alerts all his buddies, and surrounds you, preparing to kill you the moment your animation is done.
Another issue is that there's an annoying large amount of enemies that will spawn right around you (and if you're unlucky they'll have a short intro cutscene, which actually cancels any press-hold attacks you've had prepared) - making stealth even more useless in the game.
Last is the fact that only two weapons benefit from stealth attacks - daggers and fae blades (fancy elven daggers). Want to use a bow to get sneak shots at the enemy? Too bad. Go play another game.
Game settings issues: Key Re-Binding. Yes... you read that right - that's a problem. The game lets you rebind keys, and because of its weird initial setup (ctrl runs, shift blocks, space dodges), I tries to re-assign them. I could change all of them EXCEPT the dodge button. I could assign another button to dodge, but no matter what the options menu said the spacebar will ALWAYS dodge, and re-assigning it has no effect whatsoever. The other problem is the Anisotropic filtering - I can't tell why exactly, but anisotropic filtering keeps turning off all the time. You'll load into an outdoor area, and you'll suddenly notice that textures look blurry. That's because anisotropic filtering won't stick. A work around is simply to force it to be always on via your gfx card, but it's still annoying.
Fate mode Fate mode is like bullet time with a timer during which you do more damage and can do a QTE of key mashing in order to get double xp for any enemies you kill during this time. It's supposed to be the way your hero changes Fate itself. But it's actually just an unnecessary game mechanic that I ignored throughout the whole game. The game will nag you to use it, if you have tips on, but its really just best to save it as an emergency button use when you're being overwhelemed. Unfortunately, it doesn't work too well as that either. You have to hold X to activate it, but sometimes it won't start the activation animation until a second later, which results in the player thinking that it didn't register the key, only to find out it actually had and I had to wait for the stopping animation to finish before trying to activate it again. So if you try to use this as an emergency button when you're outnumbered and surrounded you'll likely just end up dying. A lot.
RPG problems
World and Lore: I was intrigued by a new world to explore and interesting lore. Instead it's still mostly cliche. Two slightly different humans and two slightly different elves are playable. They're not called that, but they are actually humans and elves. Then there's gnomes. Then there's also the Fae... who just look like elves with weird eyes. Yes, they are supposed to be different, but they're just the immortal elves of the game - not just by looks, but also by their society, behavior and arrogance.
Questing: Why is the questing of this game so boring? Go kill X of Y is pretty much the only quest type. Delivery quests also exist. There's very few variations. There's also an annoying linearity and constriction in questing. Very early on I met a woman in a graveyard, waiting for her husband to return from the war. An hour or so later, I found a dead soldier who was delivering a death notice for that woman's husband. I quickly ran back to the woman and tried talking to her... only to not be given any option to bring up the death notice I clearly had in my inventory. Only later did I find out that there was a quest given by someone else I had to get in order to be able to bring this up to the woman. This is really annoying, and is really immersion breaking.
Bugs: There are a LOT of bugs. There's even a game breaking bug in a dialog tree where you can exit the dialog and must Alt+F4 and reload an earlier save. There's a bug in a quest that will prevent you to fast travel from then on. There's bugs in some NPCs following you and doing what they have to. There's a random game breaking bug (i saw it four times during my play, and have no idea what causes it) that makes the game entirely unresponsive to any input, and you have to Alt+F4 and reload.... and these are only the ones I ran into personally. A list on the Wiki will show you more... And of course since 38 and BHG are gone, there will be no bug fixes.
Immersion: If you want immersion, just turn this game off and play something off. Something as simple as being able to sheathe/unsheathe your weapon doesn't exist. Wakling? No. Sitting? No. Buying food/drink to recover hp/mana? No. There's a day/night cycle, but there's very little visual difference, and NPCs actually don't do anything different... I've seen the same npc be asleep during the day and then again during the night. Interactive world objects? Only if for quests really. This isn't a big deal to a lot of people, but in a single player RPG, immersion is one of the things that keeps me playing (because why else would I?)
Innovation... or lack thereof: Thiss game comes off rather pretentious. Many standard rpg features have been changed, in an apparent attempt to innovate, but they only ended up making the game feel worse - as seen by my comments above. Taking all this into account, I don't feel sorry that 38 studios went belly up.
Someone submitted this, I already reviewed it.
Posted: Mon Dec 30, 2013 3:59 pm
zachofat
A Winner is me!
Joined: Dec 23, 2012
Posts: 521
Location: Makkah
It was actually more in-depth than your review, but not enough cuss words and ignorance so 0/10
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