Back To Amalur

I want to see a cooking show on tv where the chef has Tourettes. "Now you just add a pinch of salt AND SOME FUCKING PEPPER, give it a good stir and you're done. HITLER! PENIS!" I'd watch the crap out of that.

If you happen to own an account on EA's gaming platform Origin and you're even remotely interested in RPGs, go download Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. They give you two whole days to try it for free and it's 50% off after that, so there's a pretty good deal on a fantastic game, which most people didn't have on their radar when it came out, what with all them Fallouts and Skyrims and Witchers around.

It's a damn shame, too, because wow - this game is so much fun! Like every good game, Amalur begins with your death. But you get better and it turns out you have no fate. You see, everyone in Amalur has a fate and the whole place is destined to be fucked. A bunch of super hateful humans wage war against all the elves, dwarves and other weirdos and they're about to win, but then you show up and you're in control of your own fate and you can change the fate of the whole world, so everyone is hoping for you to save the day - unless you need gear or potions or something. You still gotta pay for those, saviour of the world or not.

"Not tonight, I'm about to have a splitting headache."

What makes this game so great is its combat system. It's not as visually impressive as Skyrim, it doesn't have the epic story of Dragon Age: Origins and the clunky console interface on the PC version is actually worse than Skyrim. But the battles, holy shit, those battles. You can sneak up on enemies and backstab the crap out of them, hack them to bits with "fae blades", which is just fancy speak for warglaives. Pound them to pudding with hammers and greatswords or shoot them from a distance with a longbow. Or just throw a pair of burning chakrams at your enemies, because that's totally possible.

The game lets you map two different weapons to your attack keys at any time, so you can combine attacks and combos from your two favourite weapon types and chain them up as you please. Alternatively, if you're reeeeally into, say, swords, you could map a flaming longsword to one and a frozen longsword to another attack button, so you'll be able to take down enemies, who are resistant to one and vulnerable to the other.

You get warrior, mage and rogue skilltrees, which you may power up upon level ups as you please. Be the ultimate warrior, be a rogue spellcaster or do a little bit of everything. On top of that you get adventuring skills like lockpicking, blacksmithing, persuasion and lots of other cool, self-explanatory stuff. So creating just the kind of character you want, something to match your preferenes and play style is really easy and lots of fun.

Getting through the main storyline roughly takes 20-30 hours, but you can easly slap on another 100 if you want to do ALL THE  THINGS, like side quests, dungeons and so forth. For instance, there's this cursed wolf, who has been turned into a human by a bunch of bored spirits, and he reeeally wants to go back to his animal self, because he hates having to wear pants. Sure, the quest itself plays out like any generic RPG sidequest, but the story is great and I had lots of fun with it.
There's also some DLC content, which adds even more stuff to do, but even without it, Amalur is absolutely massive and you can go pretty much anywhere you want, anytime you want. It's not as completely open as Fallout or Skyrim, but it offers a lot more visual variety.

Eat up!

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning also features elves with goofy Irish accents and some of the best music you'll ever hear in any RPG. Even if you don't usually give a crap about my videos, click on that thing at the end of this entry and just play the first two minutes and tell me that tune isn't awesome. It sounds like something taken straight out of a Batman movie. Well, one of the cool Batman movies, before they were about nipples or stupid voices and shit.

Sadly, this game never got the attention it deserved and lots of people completely ignored it. Give it a try. Look at the combat in that video below and tell me it doesn't look fun. I never finished the game when it first came out, because there were too many other great RPGs around and I completely forgot about this one. But this time around I'm gonna finish this.

-Cat