Before the demo from two weeks ago, all most people knew about Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning was that it’s the first product of a studio that boasts a roster containing baseball legend Curt Schilling, comics and action figures guru Todd McFarlane, Dungeons & Dragons scribe R.A. Salvatore, and Internationally Celebrated Game Designer Ken Rolston. That, along with the basic boast of how Reckoning mashes up the combat of God of War with the expansive world of an Elder Scrolls title, dominated public awareness of the game.
We’ve seen the game a few times, but even those demos were either a brief and out-of-context presentation or, in Jeremy’s case, a long yet woefully out-of-context hands-on session. Jeremy had the unenviable task of jumping into a late-game area completely cold, dealing with a combat system and boss encounter designed for people who have been playing the game for 30-plus hours and a story moment that, while cool-looking, was dense with Salvatore’s Amalurian jargon. In contrast, I’ve been playing a final copy of the game for a good 40 hours (and have only recently reached the area that Jeremy was thrust into), and while my final thoughts will have to wait until next week’s review, I find that once I played the game at my own pace, it managed to grab and hold onto me more than any other time I’d seen it.
