VideoGame Game of the year at least
I would just like to preface this with saying that I'm playing the PC version, so there may be bugs I'm not aware of for the consoles.
This was an impulse buy. I saw it on Steam, played the demo, and bought it for 60 bucks. I hate it when I do that, and I always regret it. I ended up with Tiberium Twilight that way.
I don't regret buying this game for a second.
Amalur is absolutely beautiful—in every sense of the word. Everyone except the player character is professionally voiced, and Scenery Porn abounds. The entire world feels magical, vibrant, and alive. But at the same time, the graphics engine is low-powered enough to not cripple your machine. My PC isn't exactly an old clunker, but its definitely not cutting edge either, and it hasn't slowed down for even a heartbeat. The plot is deep and engaging; not just the main plot, but also the many (MANY) sidequests. At one point you save a village that is under siege by an ancient spider-queen, who was freed from an eternal cycle of rebirth and defeat by a fey-king's jilted lover—and this is just a minor quest chain in an easily forgettable zone. I'm fifty hours in, and I think I've just passed the halfway point.
The gameplay is likewise incredible. It uses a talent tree and class system easily comparable to World Of Warcraft (though not without twists), but combat is completely real-time. Tactics are important, especially at higher difficulty levels, though once your character gets to a certain point difficulty starts to peter off. You also don't have to worry too much about mistakes in character building. There are a few special NPC's scattered around who can reset your talent and skill points.
There are a few problems:
Gameplay Problems: As noted above, combat starts getting too easy, even at highest difficulty. Switching between the local and world maps should be easier. It would also be nice to be able to unbind the camera, if only to be able to look around at the gorgeous scenery better.
Story Problems (no spoilers): Everyone goes on about how alien the fae are, how impossible they are to understand...but they're not, really. Other than being dedicated to playing out the roles of ancient heroes, they're really not all that strange.
I'm out of space. Very good game, huge time sink.
VideoGame Ripping Off Better Games: The Game
I watched the Let's Play of this game by Day Nine and Felicia Day; they looked like they were having fun. I enjoyed both Rise of Nations and Rise of Legends; and hey, R. A. Salvatore and Todd McFarlane. How bad could it be?
Well, it's competent, and there are some good choices, but they're all cribbed from other, more successful titles. Even worse, they grabbed the mechanics but not the logic behind them. "Let's have Action Commands for Finishing Moves! God of War did!" Yeah, they gave us Quick Time Events to create tense, spectacular Puzzle Bosses; Amalur's Button Mashing only lets you earn bonus EXP from an already-defeated boss. "Let's have a dialogue wheel with nice & mean options! Mass Effect did!" Yeah, but that game featured a Karma Meter and embraced Multiple Endings; Amalur offers Railroading. Item Crafting, the "versatile" Point Build System, Socketed Equipment, the profusion of Fetch Quests, the occasional Persuasion check... They seem like Shout Outs to other games.
Creator's Apathy is blindingly obvious. Camera Screw is prevalent, solely because someone insisted on adding an auto-targeting feature. As Zero Punctuation pointed out, much of the Scenery Porn is lost because the camera spends its time pointed at the ground. The worldbuilding is pretty deep, but with a Featureless Protagonist and incredibly-bland NPCs, the Eight Deadly Words take over. And you know how the Player Character is Immune to Fate and can Screw Destiny? Imagine how cool it would be to actually be able to shape the lives of the game's NPCs... and then keep imagining it, because you gets no plot- or story-relevant powers, just a lame Bullet Time Super Mode.
In video games, what you do never matters—it's a video game, for crying out loud. But some games are better about disguising that fact than others. Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is not one of them. It's the Mockbuster version of better games. It's the equivalent of slapping a Formula One paint job on your minivan and expecting to go faster. Play accordingly.
VideoGame Great Foundation and Concept but mediocre execution but still fun.
Kingdoms of Amalur is a fun game with a great foundation and concept (An open world, hack-and-slash RPG) but suffers from somewhat repetitive gameplay and terrible world building and storytelling.
Most of the story is told to you rather than shown and most of it is uneventfull until the Siege of Mel Senshir, which is the beginning of the third arc of the main story. Outside of the main quests there are self-countained sidestories from various factions across Amalur which include the Warsworn mercenaries, The strange House of Ballads, The magical academy of Scholia Arcana, The thieves and performers of the Travellers and the ancient House of Sorrows. All of these stories suffer from the same problems of the main quest but allow for a final benevolent or selfish choice at the end of them that give you different permanent buffs for the rest of your playthrough.
Gameplay-wise the game is funtional and can be fun if you keep experimenting with the different weapon types and abilities. However, the game suffers from a predictable enemy A.I, a terrible friendly A.I (when you're escorting people) and a unbalanced set of abilities and techniques that can break the game. Also the game has a lot of developer oversights at the beginning and the end of some optional quests, with some leading to game-breaking bugs.
The role playing in the game is pathetic as most of the time, the game only gives you two dialog choices in most story conversations which are benevolence/curiosity or selfishness/snark. There's not a morality or reputation system and the biggest choices in the game are from the self-contained sidestories from the factions and most of them only lead to a permanent buff with some exceptions.
One of the biggest things the game lacks is companions to introduce and immerse you to the world of Amalur. Most NPCs only give vague descriptions of the things/topic you ask about or their opinion without explaining the thing/topic you were asking, making world building very poor and the worse thing of all is there's a huge world with a huge backstory here but the game's script was made to be straight forward and desinterested in the little details of the setting.