I have enjoyed over fifty hours of play time in Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning (referred to as “Reckoning” from here on) in the past month. Re-Reckoning is a technology refresh of the 2012 release which corrects some bugs and adds console support but otherwise leaves the original game largely untouched.
I didn’t play Reckoning back when it originally released. It was/is an open world fantasy themed roleplaying game set in an original world which R.A. Salvatore contributed to. It sounds like a game that I should have jumped on, but for some reason I didn’t even try it out. I vaguely recall being ambivalent due to the problems around its development and the almost immediate collapse of its original developer, Big Huge Games. And for various reasons I missed out on picking it up even as the years (decades) passed. Not even the release of the refreshed version in 2021 drew me in.
But I am here to say that Reckoning is a pretty good RPG even nearly 15 years after its release. Fun and engaging combat, a pretty intriguing story, and decent (for the time) graphics create a fairly enjoyable whole, especially for less than $10 which is what I paid on Xbox Live.
Reckoning’s History
The original release of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning was accompanied by shenanigans of the corporate variety. Developed by Big Huge Games and published by 38 Studios, there were some big personalities behind the game. Chief amongst these was baseball player Curt Schilling whose primary dream was to create a MMORPG to compete with games like World of Warcraft.
Schilling parleyed this dream and his name into something like $75 million in funding from the state of Rhode Island, and another $25 million or so from Electronic Arts. Although Reckoning sold over 1.5 million copies, it needed to sell double that just to break even. And when the state started asking for monthly payments the company essentially collapsed.
One story claims that the events around the loan nearly bankrupted Rhode Island. Whether that was true or not, a lot of good developers and great ideas were harmed in the failure. Two pieces of DLC were released before the business shut down, but no sequel was ever created. And the dream of an MMORPG to rival WoW never came to be.
The game
General gameplay
Reckoning is a single player action-oriented RPG. It allows the player to create a custom character, choosing amongst four races that basically boil down to ‘human or elf’. Character development is through adding points (gained at one per level) to foundational skills like lock picking or stealth. Three separate points can be assigned each level to specific abilities within three ‘standard’ trees under the labels Might (warrior), Finesse (rogue), and Sorcery (spell caster). The base game allows progression through 40 levels, with the included expansions raising that cap to level 50.
The skill tree structure allows creation of characters that are essentially ‘multi-classed’: you can mix warrior abilities with spell casting and back stabbing. Additional ‘destinies’ (single or multi-class archetypes) become available as you progress and reach certain point thresholds in each of the three trees. These destinies provide bonuses for your selections like faster mana recovery or extra hit points.
You can effectively ‘remap’ your point distribution and destines at will, so you aren’t trapped by your choices. This flexibility makes building whatever weird character you most want to play quite easy, but in practice I dumped almost all of my points into Sorcery. I also put a lot of points into the lock picking, detect hidden, and persuasion skills.
Combat is real-time but a basic system of ‘combat pause’ exists for you to choose spells or drink potions. Viewed entirely from the third person, the camera is well-behaved and allows a good view of your surroundings. There is no photo mode, or at least none that I found. Most of the UI will feel familiar to anyone who has played fantasy RPGs with a gamepad before. Autosaves occur frequently, but a manual save system is also available.
There is a three level difficulty system: Casual, Normal, and Hard. I probably would have liked at least one more difficulty between ‘Casual’ and ‘Normal’: I ended up sticking to casual throughout the game, which was at times a bit too much of a power fantasy. I think I only died twice in my 50 hours of play time, and one of those deaths was due to opening a ‘dispel’ chest and triggering its trap while injured.
Quests and narrative
A reasonably well organized quest ledger separates main quests, side quests, faction quests, and tasks. Tasks are repeatable but are also the most ‘boring’ quests at least in my opinion. Receiving quests works in a way that feels so much like how an MMO like WoW functions that there were times that I expected someone to run by shouting ‘LFG!’. Thankfully, for me at least, Reckoning is a single player game.
You can join all the factions you want: there are no conflicts to doing this that I discovered. And I found the faction quests to be some of the most enjoyable in the game, each of which also provides fairly significant gear and character rewards.
Icons for quest givers and objectives appear on the mini-map and reasonably well organized ‘local’ and ‘world’ map screens. The local map provides a good representation to help with navigating the dungeon or zone you are wandering. And the world map allows the use of ‘fast travel’ to specific locations you’ve discovered like dungeons, fortresses, and cities/towns.
The quests are common fare for an old-school RPG: fetch this, kill that, escort there. I never really encountered any “Wow, that was amazing!” quests like some of those from Witcher 3. But the quests worked adequately to get me to see the world and learn a bit of its history as well as to move the story along.
The story itself was enjoyable. It presents a Tolkien-esque approach telling of the death of ‘magic’ in a burgeoning world of young races, and in that sense was not particularly original. But the details were intriguing enough to keep me playing, with a few interesting events and characters that made me pause a bit to reflect. I still have not completed the ‘DLC’ which is included with Re-Reckoning, so there may be some interesting surprises there that I haven’t discovered.
Time well spent
Reckoning is not a genre defining game in any way. But it is still enjoyable, especially considering its age. The visuals remain good enough even after over a decade since release, and that speaks well of the care that was put into the world. The game systems work and provide a ‘MMO but with only one player’ feel that fit very well with my current state of mind.
Don’t expect any great challenges or deeply emotional moments, but do expect to be entertained if you enjoy old-school WoW-like role playing. Reckoning is definitely a good deal: on special for around $10 when I bought it, and I’ve gotten well over 50 hours of play time from that minor expenditure.