Gameplay
After all of the customization, the cut scene continues and the two gnomes drop you into the pit of bodies. After fading back out and then in again, you awaken from the pile of bodies and immediately start gameplay. Everything was pretty simple to pick up with standard controller controls feeling quite intuitive. B performed a roll while holding A allowed your character to run. LT performed a defensive block (or a parry if you time it right, which adds to the perception that the game is indeed an action game).
The first area of the game is a large mine-like environment where you’re basically trying to find your way out. The nice part about the mine is that it serves as both an introduction to the story and a tutorial of sorts to push you through many of the main gameplay elements in the game. Here you are introduced to several different weapons including a sword, hammer, dagger, bow and arrow, and a staff. Each of the weapons can be used in different ways. For instance, when daggers or Fae Blades are equipped, you can sneak up behind enemies in stealth mode and perform a stealth kill. Staffs, on the other hand, can add to your magic skills or provide necessary magic to complete quests (there were spider webs like in Zelda that needed to be burned to pass through the area).
In the vein of an action game, you are given the ability to equip both a primary and secondary weapon, each of which is assigned to a button (X is primary, Y is secondary) so that you can seamlessly switch between the two. I chose a dagger and a bow so that I could sneak up on unsuspecting enemies (in the vein of a pirate-ninja-assassin), attack at a rapid rate, and use my bow to strike enemies at a distance. Combat felt very precise for the most part, though I found the camera to be a small issue at times (I wish it would have auto panned more often than it did) and the targeting of the bow also seemed a little limited (the soft target chooses an opponent to target but you can’t actually cycle through a group of opponents using a button).
There were several parts of the combat that shined compared to other games in the genre and I was very impressed with the overall responsiveness of the controls. Along with the overall fluidity of your attacks (you can seamlessly cycle through your main weapon, secondary weapon, and spells within combos), you could also easily cancel attacks (so it’s not a dial-up button masher like Soul Calibur). To use a spell or action skill, you can assign up to four moves to each of the four face buttons and they’re used by holding RT and pressing the corresponding button. Thus, as I built my character, I focused on both weapons and one spell so that I could rack up a massive combo with my weapons and use a spell at the end as my coup de grace.
There are many moves you can unlock along the way depending upon how you build your character, and these directly affect your attacks. Also, you can also perform more advanced techniques by performing briefly delayed actions. Thus, like was previously mentioned, you can block by holding LT or you can parry by quickly pressing it soon after your enemy attacks (which stuns the enemy and allows you to strike back devastatingly). Or you can do the same thing with more sophisticated attacks that you learn.
The comparisons to God of War come from the quick time events linked to special situations throughout the game. Whenever you face a boss or a mini-boss throughout your quest, the finishing move you perform is called a Fate Shift, which is essentially a quick-time even that prompts you to press a certain button rapidly to fill an experience meter. The higher the meter, the higher the experience bonus you receive from the boss (ranges in tiers from +25% to +100% extra experience).
Also, there is a special mode called Reckoning mode that can be utilized once a fate meter is filled (destroying enemies slowly fills the meter). In Reckoning mode, time slows down, you become much stronger, and you can essentially wreak havoc on your foes. The meter slowly depletes in Reckoning mode so as long as you still have some fate left, you can stay in the mode. Each enemy you destroy in this mode begins to unravel but since time is slowed down, they don’t get fully destroyed until you’re out of Reckoning mode. At any time during the mode, you can also perform a Fate Shift (this uses the rest of your remaining fate and takes you out of Reckoning Mode). However, instead of just destroying the enemy you’re attacking, it destroys all of the unraveled enemies at the same time, allowing you to get massive experience bonuses.
I enjoyed the way the team tackled adding massive amounts of story elements into the game without breaking up the gameplay. For instance, players have the choice to read a number of different dialogues with NPCs if they so choose, or they can pick highlighted commands that signify the correct dialogue to move the game along. This allows gameplay enthusiasts that care less about the story to be able to breeze through dialogue portions and back into the action. Also, strewn throughout the land are a number of Lore Stones that you can access. These stones give you a detailed story about the specific location but rather than forcing you to read through lines of text, a voice narrates it for you allowing you to hear the story as you move on through the area. Not only does this allow the team to further educate the gamer about the game’s detailed history, but collecting rune stones increases experience by a small amount as an incentive to find them, and collecting them all also does something special.
Character Building
In case you haven’t gained a level by the end of the mine, you gain one automatically at the end so that you can learn the basics of character building. Character building is split into several different categories, each of which slowly shapes your character into the style of hero you wish to create. When you gain a level, the first area that you can improve your character is in combat skills. Each level grants you 3 skill points that you can allocate to any given skill amongst three different skill trees.
Rather than limiting you based upon your level, however, the game’s skill trees are more dynamic and limit you based upon the amount of total skills you’ve allocated into each specific skill tree. Thus, you can add skill points into tier 1 skills in any of the three skill trees from the beginning, but to reach tier 2 skills in a tree, you must have a certain amount of skill points allocated into general skills within that specific tree. This makes overall character building more attuned to the actual type of player you’re trying to build and rewards you for focusing on a specific category. Here, I’ll detail each of the three skill trees to give you a better idea of the types of skills you can learn:
Might abilities: These are, as you could guess, based upon physical strength and durability above all else. You can add a skill point into increasing your passive abilities with swords, hammers, and axes, use specific skills with the previously mentioned weapons, increase attack speed, increase passive defense or go into a frenzy. Also, you can get a skill called quake that stuns nearby enemies and add to other skills that further change the effect of the move (for instance, the aftershock skill adds damage to the quake so that it both stuns and damages nearby enemies). Finally, you can also add skill points to reflect damage, to increase overall vigor, increase critical hits, increase stamina when successfully landing hits, and add War Cry to your arsenal (which decreases enemy damage) and terror (which adds reduction of enemy armor to the War Cry). Overall, the skills are great for building a tank type of character that relies mostly on hand to hand combat.
Sorcery: This skill tree, obviously, is based solely upon spells. Here, you can increase passive damage of magical weapons (scepters and staves), add special charge up moves, summon a Faer Gorta to fight by your side, increase the Faer Gorta’s damae, and increase its attack chains. Also, you can use healing spells and a sphere of protection as support spells (blocks back percentage of damage, can add orbiting orbs, and can add the ability to fire off deadly splinters at enemies). Finally, the gambit of elemental spells are also available such as firing a meteor, a storm bolt (you can add chain lightning to make this hit multiple enemies and add into the tempest skill to summon lightning to hit enemies from the heavens), as well as a few ice attacks, and the ability to use less mana for any spell as well as increase overall mastery of spells.
Finesse: These moves are in the thief/ninja category of sneakiness. For weapon mastery, longbows, daggers, and Fae Blades are the three different types of weapons that you can add mastery to. You can also add special attacks to each of these three weapons such as a quick attack that allows you to dash and strike an enemy up to 5 times in a row. As for the bow, you can increase the amount of damage and shots, add spread shots, and add piercing shots. The finesse skill tree also gives the ability to set traps, add poison damage to attacks (and increase the amount of poison damage dealt), as well as increase poison resistance and even add spreading poison attacks that hit multiple enemies.
As you can see, there is a wide variety of choices that can be made while allocating your skills into the skill trees. In order to reach the highest skills in any given tree, you’ll need to focus on that specific one. It was noted that all skills in the demo maxed out at 5-6 skills and they confirmed that items can increase your skills beyond this cap up to a certain extent.
There are a number of different character sets that can be created using skills from each of the different skill trees and rather than force you to “specialize” sets to create the “best” possible characters (like most RPGs require), Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is unique in that it rewards you for your own unique character building through its Destiny System. A destiny is a subclass of character that can be obtained by allocating a specific amount of skill points into each of the different skill trees. There are six different categories of destinies: Might, Finesse, Sorcery, combinations of two of the three, and a jack of all trades destiny that requires input into each of the three skill trees. Each of these categories contains 5-6 different destinies that can be unlocked and these destinies both increase your overall stats based on the type of character build and add to your skills.
Thus, if you’ve placed six skill points into one of the three skill trees, you can unlock a destiny in that categoriy that increases your stats; the first I obtained was “Rogue” that increased my passive ranged attack damage by 10%, damage resistance while dodging by 30%, and piercing damage by 5%. Only one destiny can be equipped at any given time so the goal is to choose a specific type of character building and shoot for the strongest destiny in that category. And, seeing as the best class in any of the six categories gives you extreme boosts to your character’s build, there is no penalty for making a barbarian mage, for instance (The best destiny in the jack of all trades category increases all skills by +3, increases passive skills with all weapons by +1 and does a number of other things).
The final aspect of character building is the addition of non-combat skills. The following are the non-combat skill categories that you can increase at each level-up:
Alchemy: This increases your success rate and abilities while creating potions and such using the character’s alchemy labs.
Blacksmithing: This increases the success rate when creating items as well as the amount of raw materials you receive when destroying them.
Detect Hidden: This increases the ability to find hidden treasures and traps on the adventure field as well as allows you to eventually see enemies on the map.
Dispelling: This increases your character’s success rate of dispelling chests and also makes the dispel mini-game easier.
Lockpicking: This increases the success rate of lockpicking and makes the lockpicking mini game easier.
Mercantile: This increases the amount of gold you find throughout your adventure.
Persuasion: This increases the success rate of the dialogue commands you choose. Thus, you will be more diplomatic with NPCs throughout the adventure.
Sagecraft: This increases the success rate of the sagecrafting ability.
Stealth: This decreases the chances of being caught in stealth mode.