Way back in 2012, Big Huge Games and 38 Studios released an enormous single player open world fantasy RPG called Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. I still have my PS3 copy in my collection, not to mention the massive book on the game I bought at a half-price store years later, detailing all of the quests and flora and fauna and everything else about this massive game. Co-developed with the talents of Ken Rolston, R. A. Salvatore, Todd McFarlane and Grant Kirkhope all working together, KoA: R was a feat.
Now enter THQ Nordic and their very agreeable approach of picking up rights of older titles and revitalizing them. I like a lot of what they do; and when I heard they were doing a remaster for KoA, I was stoked. I was fortunate to receive a review code on the PS4 and have been playing through Amalur ever since, enjoying the nostalgia, sure, but it had been so long that most of this feels like a fresh experience, and one that is easy to sink a lot of enjoyable hours into. If you find yourself stuck at home these days more than you’d like to be or more than normal, this is the perfect game to dive into.
For the remaster, players get the complete KoA experience obviously, including the Teeth of Naros expansion pack. About an hour or so in you will hear of a group of characters that are going to brave the waters and head to Naros, to try and reap the great amount of loot there, if they can survive the trolls and other hazards. This is intended for players at level 10 or higher, and the game does make that known, so it’s best to save that quest for many hours down the road. It took me about twelve hours to get to a level 10, for example. Besides including all of the base game and its expansion, a few gameplay tweaks have been made. I was provided with a list of the changes, and they include the addition of a ‘very hard’ difficulty level. From the pause menu, it’s nice that you can change the difficulty up or down as you please. I stuck with Normal, and found it at times to be comfortable — sometimes maybe a pinch too easy once I started making my own healing potions, but at the same time I was having a lot of fun and making solid, constant steady progress so I didn’t have any compelling reason to make the combat harder.
The rest of the changes are subtle and likely entirely transparent to anyone that played the original game. Level lock has been removed, meaning that instead of the level of a particular area being set once and left, it’s actually now recalculated every time you go there. This helps in making both combat and looting more interesting and dynamic. Other changes include how XP is awarded; for example if you’re playing on hard or very hard, you don’t get more XP for beating a higher leveled enemy. Loot containers are also now more dynamic in that their contents are generated when they are opened instead of when you first enter a zone. Finally, loot is also now more catered to your skill set and to your character. This is nice in that you won’t constantly be getting useless stuff to add to your junk pile.
All of these under the hood changes are transparent, but they work in concert to make the experience more dynamic and enjoyable. I do wonder, however, if these changes maybe account for some of the longer load times that I experienced on my PS4 Pro. In one of the earlier towns, for example, when I would leave the tavern and go back to the main open world, the load times were about twenty seconds. And often, I wouldn’t be spending more than twenty seconds in the tavern anyway, as I was just there to sell some goods. As I look back on my notes, the load screens were the thing I struggled with the most on this remaster. Well, that and inventory management gets to be a bit of a chore, because if you’re like me and prefer to loot everything so that you can break it down for crafting or selling later, or stash it away until you’re a high enough level to use it, you’ll find yourself managing inventory pretty often. But if you take out the disappointingly long load times (at times, mind you — sometimes the load times are pleasantly snappy) — and the pauses for inventory management — everything else about the return to Amalur has been a treat.
No remaster would be complete with out some work on the graphics. To that end, KoA:RR looks great and runs very smooth. The colors are vivid, framerate is silk, animations are great. I love the variety of attack animations for all of the different weapons (chakrams for the win). The music and voiceovers and effects are still excellent, for the most part. There’s a quest about eight hours in where the NPC’s (Agaroth) footsteps sound like a horse for the half hour you’re running around with him — weird, and kind of nitpicky, but for the most part things sound great, matching the great visual presentation, too.
In brief, it’s great that THQ Nordic revitalized this classic. I appreciate the presentation boosts, and the under the hood changes to leveling and difficulty. I would have liked to have seen shorter load times and a revised inventory management system so that players can more easily avoid spending so much time in their inventory, but these are things that could very well be addressed with patching. Those two gripes aside, Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning is an awesome game and a wonderful experience to sink into.
###
