Every week or so, I get a report from my brother Kenny who updates me on what games I’ve been missing out on. Last week, he informed me about a demo for a game I should try. He didn’t have much to say about the game, other than that “you could unlock free Mass Effect 3 stuff”. ”It’s sort of an RPG. It reminds me of Fable.”, he said.
That was almost enough to scare me away. I loved the first Fable game, but it went rapidly downhill from there. Fable 2 was still ‘Okay’. Fable 3 was of ’Holy Boring crap I’m not finishing this game!” quality. When he added “The FIRST Fable”, I was willing to give the demo a shot.
Review
Kingdoms of Amalur is a game taking place in yet another fantasy world. And this time, a corrupted army of immortal beings wants to destroy everything that’s mortal in the lands. Which just so happens to be pretty much the entire population. I am not going into the details – to be honest I skipped most of the story / talking because I didn’t want to spoil the story for myself.
Like in every good RPG, you’ll have to become the hero of all people and defeat the foes once and for all. Sound generic? Well, at first I did have the impression that this game just stole ideas for a bunch of other games and mixed them together. Then again – what game hasn’t done that the last century? What matters aren’t the ingredients, but how you use them. And the dish Kingdoms of Amalur serves is rather tasty. I chose to play as an assassin, and although the game is pretty much focused on fighting I could actually ASSASSINATE people if I managed to sneak up on them. When not sneaking about, I could rapidly deal damage with my double blades. Life was good.
Of course, a 45 minute demo was a bit too short to fully understand the game. I barely touched the potion making, the enchanting, the smithing and other activities you could take part in. In a way, this game came across as Skyrim because of these activities. Which is no surprise, because I’ve been told that the lead developer of this game used to be the lead developer of Morrowind and Oblivion as well – hopefully he didn’t decide to punish you every time you level up this time around which made me unable to enjoy Oblivion on the higher levels.
To summarize, I rather enjoyed the demo. This taster makes me want to hop online, and buy the game. If Peter Molineux doesn’t find his sanity again, we might as well bury Fable and move on, right?
