Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Review in Progress, Continued

It’s going to be more than a little surprising if IGN doesn’t award an excellent score to Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, judging by the impressions written down by their reviewer in their review-in-progress article. Here’s a snip:

Indeed, it’s Reckoning’s gameplay that keeps rising to the top for me, because it’s just so much better and far beyond what its WRPG contemporaries have done. It’s arcadey, to be sure, but when you compare it to the three popular fantasy RPGs of our time — Skyrim, Dark Souls and Dragon Age — Reckoning easily outclasses all of them in the gameplay department. The competition isn’t even remotely close in any respect.

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At the end of the day, Reckoning consists of one major distraction after the other. I’m trying my damndest to play the game as organically as possible, and holding closely to this approach. As a result, I’ve accomplished scores of side quests and relatively few main game quests, but that’s just the way it goes. Whenever I try to hone in on the main task at hand, I find a dozen things to sidetrack me. The amount of content completely unrelated to the main tale is awe-worthy, and as I’ve described before, the fact that the game also totes deep (albeit convoluted) storytelling and awesome and varied voice acting is icing on the cake. Everything really does exist for a reason beyond length and density.

Then again, it all keeps coming back to gameplay for me, and I’m excited for people looking forward to playing Reckoning to get into it for themselves. I’m sorry to hear that the demo people have been playing doesn’t work properly for many, because the final product works extremely well. Can you believe that the game still hasn’t frozen on me once? That I’ve never had to restart due to getting stuck in the environment? That minor technical hitches are the worst I’ve encountered, and that I’ve seen nothing even remotely game-breaking? The developers should be commended for making a game with such extreme scope that runs so well… at least on PlayStation 3. I haven’t spent any time with the Xbox 360 or PC versions of the game yet, so I can’t speak to how those titles run.

I can understand the comparisons to Dark Souls and Skyrim, but Dragon Age?