(review) Demo of Amalur

The demo of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning that was slowly downloading on my PS3 finally finished yesterday so I was a little excited to give it a shot. The trailers are kind of intriguing, the storyline released so far seems original and the whole game seems to have a whole lot of potential, even after the release of Skyrim in November. At first when I caught glances of the trailer from the corner of my eye at work, I was barely interested; new fantasy RPG game? Surely it's going to be an Elder Scrolls knock-off thanks to Skyrim's predictable success. Never-the-less, the guys at work managed to rope me in and convince me that it was going to be this fantastic thing, a meld of all the greatest western RPGs (plus a little from the east).

I didn't have the volume up too loud so I couldn't hear what the girl was saying at the opening sequence when I started playing it, but from what I could gather in the first ten or so minutes of the game, these Dwarves in some mountain are trying to resurrect the dead either to counter some war against these big guys with big armour or because they just like playing with magic. Your character, who I named 'dicks' for lols, is the first successful resurrection and happens to come alive at the convenient time when these bad guys decide to trash this joint (also known as the Well of Souls). So, they blow up the place while some of your Dwarven buddies try and protect you so you can tell the right people that you survived and this research can continue. You meet some guy on the outside who is another convenient friend of these Dwarves and says he can't read your threads of fate or whatever so you can decide how you're gonna live your life and if you'll be good or bad.

Long story short, you're a zombie who gets to choose their own fate. Or... something.

The demo itself was a 'get outside the first dungeon then you get 45 minutes to do quests and checks out this place', so you don't get a whole lot of time to explore willy-nilly. There's a few quests, a small number of loot to collect, a small town and a decent sized space for you to explore. As a player, you get to choose whether you want to build Might (a Warrior), Finesse (a Theif) or Sorcery (a Mage). The beginning gives you a small range of weapons, being a sword, a staff, daggers, a bow and arrow and a hammer plus a small variety of armour, being leather and plated armour for the light and heavy users as well as enchanted robes and stuff for the Mages. As the game progresses, you have to choose your destiny with some weird looking cards. These cards determine your class and give you abilities or something (I didn't really get to read into it too much).

The first interaction you get in the game is creating your character after one of the Dwarfs pulls a cloth off you. The character designing process is pretty simple; pick a race (between what seems to be human, Viking human, dark elf and slightly lighter elf), male or female, pick a hairstyle, pick a preset face, pick some jewellery, pick a tattoo, try and determine an eye colour and off you go. The create-a-character process was too simpleton to be honest, there wasn't enough to make the character truly yours. What about body size? Height, weight, slanty eyes, giant noses, ears that stick out? Adjustable boob size? Perhaps tattoos that go on places OTHER than the face? There was really only three small pages of options, but at least it quickens the process; I often find myself spending a ridiculous amount of time making my character nice and pretty.

Anyways, you start in a pile of bodies, meet some guys, kill some guys, get some crappy weapons and learn the basics. I did enjoy the fact that this tutorial starting wasn't all that boring; it was very quick and straight to the point, letting you have a go at everything at least once then leaving you do your own thing for everything else. I did find the start and inventory menu a little tedious, however. It's not a really quick process to switch between weapons or armour if you decide that the troll is resisting your damn magic staff thingy and you need to switch back to your giant sword so you can cut that bitch. To counter that I suppose the primary and secondary weapon options come into effect but I'd prefer some way of quickly getting into your inventory, perhaps an option on the D-Pad (though that seems to be taken up by the potions and the ability to switch between friendly fire (I didn't really get the point of that)). Combat is combo style so I found it rather refreshing after an enormous flood of FPS styles in gaming recently (well, the ones I bought). There's a SUPER-ULTIMATE-POWER mode which you get from killing heaps of dudes and is gladly not over powered nor completely useless. There's shields for blocking, rolls for dodging and crouch(es?) for sneaking. The combat is covered, really.

Now, when you get to the exploring, I gotta say I love the bright and vibrant colours. It really brings a light-heartedness the same way Fable did and I did not get sick of looking at everything. True, the draw distance got a little retarded after I ran pretty much everywhere really quickly and some of the people are pretty gross looking (as are their assorted European accents) but the trees and buildings and water and armour are all very cool, the designers going out and over the top. The monsters are fairly decent and go in quite well with their surroundings. The Fae, which are some kind of immortal, elvish race, are actually pretty easy on their eyes from the impression I got from the whole one I met in the demo, it's just too bad they're not a playable race.

If I had to complain about anything, it would be the lack of the ability to jump, the lack of any real skill behind lockpicking or the confusion behind some of the skill trees. Jumping really takes the freedom out of these games; it might be free world, but you can't just jump off a ledge into a lake to swim around (thank god, you can swim though). There are only certain places where you can jump off and that's usually either so you can't go back the way you came or because you're taking a short cut.
Lockpicking was just a big haze. It told you how, sure, but there's no skill behind it. As far as I could gather, it was 'stick it there and hope for the best'. If there is a technique to it all, I would love to hear about it.
And yes, the skill trees. The one involving the weapons was pretty easy to understand but there's a separate skill tree to choose other skills, such as alchemy, smithing, sneak, etc. The boxes lit up when I used my skill point but I had no idea how I was spending them or what each little box did or what the little symbols meant.

There was a few glitches with people getting stuck and the water rendering fucking up but I'm not going to go into that at all; it's a demo, an unfinished copy and you can't expect perfection.

At the end of it all, I'm a little excited for this game. The vibrance is what really gets me into it and I'll definitely be placing a pre-order on it when I get into work next. Plus, from downloading and playing the demo, you get a bunch of cool extras and a bit of DLC for Mass Effect 3 (for those into that game as I am yet to play it).