Time flies. It seems like it was just last month that I was playing Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning for review, and just last week that I took a look at its first full-sized add-on, “The Legend of Dead Kel.” Big Huge Games and 38 Studios seem to be putting these DLCs out with surprising regularity and speed, and while that might be cause for concern, “Dead Kel” was a very solid addition with a few new game mechanics and some surprisingly varied level design behind it.
In other words, things were looking promising for the newest add-on, “Teeth of Naros” as well. Unfortunately, that promising start with “Dead Kel” hasn’t been something that “Teeth of Naros” has been able to follow through on. Although the quantity of much of the content is more than acceptable, and 38 Studios pulled out all the stops in building a beautiful world to explore, the quality of the gameplay has abandoned many of the positive strides forward made by “Dead Kel”.
From Legend and Myth
“Teeth of Naros” gets off to a slightly sloppy start with one of the worst cases of gameplay and story segregation I’ve seen in a very long time. Enlisting in an expedition to find a rumored lost, floating city in the unexplored southern regions of the Faelands, the “inhospitable terrain” and “weeks-long journey” amount to what is effectively a ten-minute cave dungeon. One by one, the paltry three members of the expedition are picked off in almost unbelievably silly ways (seriously, can nobody but the player character carry a health potion?), and before long it’s just the Fateless One left to reach the end.
After this slow and awkward beginning, things begin to look up as daylight shines down and the world opens up once more – “Teeth of Naros” certainly does bring a new world ripe for exploration and questing. Thematically, the Teeth of Naros and its floating city of Idylla are based heavily on ancient Greece, both in the architecture and much of the culture. There’s a lot of it to go around, and I have to wonder just how on earth 38 Studios are able to build such a huge world in such short order.
The entire region is home to a new race of people. The Kollossae are towering, fifteen-foot-tall living statues, and their culture has a strong streak of vanity running straight through it, a vanity that predictably is their downfall. Unfortunately, the Kollossae feel a bit strange next to the rest of Amalur. Whereas the original game had a generic fantasy base with a twist of Irish folklore, the Kollossae feel like they’re inspired by Disney’s Hercules film more than anything else. They’re cartoonish and poorly fleshed out compared to some of Amalur’s other races (not that that’s an extremely high bar), and I had a hard time taking them seriously. What could have been an interesting addition to the world of Amalur instead feels arbitrary and more like a gimmick than anything else.
Story-wise, “Teeth of Naros” hits all the standard beats, but because of this, it’s also extremely tame and predictable. Centering around the Kollossae and their attempts to appease their silent gods, the decent setup doesn’t really go anywhere interesting. The plot twists are extremely obvious and uninvolving, and there’s a lengthy section at the beginning of the story which involves the culling of some Jottun, which as far as I can tell exists solely to fill up an hour of time. There’s even a magical artifact with ill-defined powers which seem to change to whatever the plot needs them to be at a given moment, which I’m surprised wasn’t just called Applied Phlebotinum. Granted, Amalur‘s own storyline wasn’t the greatest thing ever, but compared to “The Legend of Dead Kel” a month ago, “Teeth of Naros” is under-developed and lacks any of the gravity it seems to think it has.
Treading Water
On a purely technical and aesthetic, “Teeth of Naros” is actually a step above both the base game and “The Legend of Dead Kel”. In fact, I would say that 38 Studios have produced their most stunning environments yet, and while it’s not exactly The Witcher 2, I’ve always thought the world of Amalur came across as a lush and vivid place, and “Teeth of Naros” raises the bar in this respect. Likewise, the move away from distinct “zones” into a more open, ring-shaped world makes everything feel a little bit more open and free to explore, and also gives a greater consistency and realism to the game world, with more natural transitions between different locations.
At the same time, “Teeth of Naros” is content to simply tread water when it comes to its quest design and gameplay. If you can pick a standard MMO quest trope, “Teeth of Naros” has it. Fetch quests, kill-the-monster quests, and so on are all present, and while the original game often turned these basic concepts around by providing twists in story and gameplay, they’re played completely straight in “Teeth of Naros.” At its worst, I honestly just wanted to stop playing, rather than trudge through another generic cave dungeon with monster closets every twenty feet.
There are some definite moments of levity, originality and playfulness that appear from time to time. The Kollossae’s version of “debate”, for instance, follows a might-is-right philosophy that sees questions on life, the universe and everything answered by the one with the sharpest steel, and I came across a mad hermit in Idylla’s sewer system who had some rather curious things to say. The problem is that for every five minutes of interesting, entertaining and clever things going on, there’s an hour of boring fetch quests, or repetitive and grindy combat against the same three enemies. There’s even a single dungeon the game makes you run through four times, with the exact same enemies at the exact same intervals. Yes, four times.
Even the gameplay additions made feel extremely modest in “Teeth of Naros.” There’s a new class of weapons, primal, which are able to inflict a “primal magic” status on monsters, which lowers their magic resistance and opens them up to spells and special abilities. There are also few new additions as far as monsters go. The Pteryx, a large flightless bird, is the most original of the creatures, but otherwise you’ll be spending hours button-mashing through the same old Sprites, Trolls, Kobolds, Wolves, and Marauders (effectively reskinned bandits) that you’re probably sick to death with by now.
“The Legend of Dead Kel” stood out by providing a genuine change of pace from the norm – as I noted in my review, it had a different theme, a lengthy ongoing quest to rebuild a keep, some varied level design, and new enemies that required new tactics to defeat. Even the filler – the endless treasure chests and monster ambushes that plagued a lot of Amalur – was reduced or removed in favor of more thoughtfully constructed encounters. It felt much more like a traditional RPG to me, if on a smaller scale, and a big improvement on some of the MMO trappings of the original game. “Teeth of Naros”, meanwhile, represents a regression into Amalur‘s worst portions.
Conclusion
The fact is that “Teeth of Naros” just doesn’t bring enough new anything to the table. Yes, it’s got beautiful new artwork, a large city to explore, a sizeable and gorgeous overland area to cover, and about a dozen new dungeons to plunder, but the unfortunate truth is that it’s just more of the same. Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is a game with 200-ish hours of content, and as I noted back in my review, it didn’t have enough interesting gameplay to sustain it nearly that long. Strapping on some new art assets and an ancient Greek theme doesn’t change the fact that the gameplay itself simply isn’t new or exciting.
As a result, “Teeth of Naros” is a DLC I can recommend only to die-hard fans. If you’re still playing Kingdoms of Amalur and need more places to explore, more loot to find and more quests to complete, then you’ll get exactly that out of “Teeth of Naros.” However, as someone who expected a lot more after “The Legend of Dead Kel” and its substantial improvements in gameplay and design, it’s hard not to be disappointed by the return to monotony. Hopefully 38 Studios and Big Huge Games will go back to the drawing board and make some more genuine gameplay improvements for their next DLC adventure.
