Review
Played on: Xbox 360Released: 2017
A playable demo can make such a difference sometimes. In KoA: Reckoning's case, it surely did! I hadn't followed any news about this game, saw it on the list of new demo's on Xbox Live and decided to download it. About an hour later I was sold, I bought it on release the following week. This generation of games has surely made me jump into some genres I've never really played much previously.
Let's take a closer look!
KoA:R begins with the player being declared dead and thrown in a pile of corpses, and yes, it literally lets you start life from the beginning again. Awakening here, you have nothing and simply must rebuild your life and understand who you once were. The game has a vibrant and colourful design, a really likeable and almost World of Warcraft art direction to it. Indeed, the game was originally destined to be a MMO, but changed during development.
What starts out as an indoors game, quickly opens up to a huge open world, with great variation between locations and enemies. Each area, of the open world, has a distinct colour and design scheme. From dark forests, to deserts to jungles and mountainous areas. You'll quickly learn to remember where you are, simply by taking a quick glance at the surroundings.
I like that it begins in an indoor location and eases you into the open world after teaching you the basics. The first open areas are also quite harmless, and each area is only accessible from the next, and as such the game controls cleverly how you explore each one in it's order. It's subtle, but works well.
Gameplay in KoA:R is fairly simple. It actually reminds me a lot of a classic hack 'n slash games. There are various classes of characters and races and choosing a more magic oriented style to combat, will result in less hand-to-hand fighting. I chose a more direct approach, with focus on heavy weapons, for fighting with many enemies at once, plus a stealth upgrade with dagger kills, for the more sneaky parts.
Even though a lot of the fighting may seem quite repetitive, I actually, through my 25+ hour playthrough, never tired of it. KoA:R has an amazingly satisfying feeling to hitting a huge sword into enemies, combined with some rather spectacular magic abilities to round the visually appealing and entertaining fights off. I really enjoyed doing stealth kills too, trying my best to quickly get close to the targets and brutally executing them from behind. I could imagine it's equally as fun learning to use magic and throwing nasty spells on enemies or excelling in firing down enemies from a distance with a bow.
In fact, the easy and rather fast-paced combat, combined with satisfying controls and heavy feeling makes KoA:R a really good RPG for me. Perhaps, it shows how appealing the game is when I'm a person who stays well clear of WoW and Skyrim as classic RPG examples. I just found KoA:R a perfect balanced between action and being advanced enough to delve into abilities and armour/weaponry choices, not forgetting training abilities like stealth, lockpicking, negotiating etc. Keeping a fairly RPG-light gamer, like myself, happy for hours.
There are, however, a few downsides. While seemingly rather well written and interesting at the beginning, the story really is a let down over time. It simply runs on empty fumes. I barely followed the main story and the cutscenes connected to it were really poorly made. All side-quests story scenes, I simply skipped. They just seemed so generic and simply a time-filler.
The moral choices you choose in dialogues seem to give no effect and simply did not bear the heavy weight of, lets say, Mass Effect's choices do. The end of the main story simply felt so underwhelming that I was rather disappointed. Had the awesome gameplay been combined with some epic story scenes and the cinematics of Final Fantasy, this could have been a truly wonderful game.
The game simply needs a more focused and meaningful story, more detailed areas to visit. More than often, you feel like you're playing through a list of quests, in empty environments. While colourful and varied, the environments suffer from serious pop-up of, not so, distant objects and sometimes the framerate drops. They could also benefit from being filled with more small detail.
Simply because of the excellent gameplay, variation in weaponry and classes and varied art design in locations, I reward this game with the rating below. Next time, though, I want a story with people and a main character I care about.
KoA:R begins with the player being declared dead and thrown in a pile of corpses, and yes, it literally lets you start life from the beginning again. Awakening here, you have nothing and simply must rebuild your life and understand who you once were. The game has a vibrant and colourful design, a really likeable and almost World of Warcraft art direction to it. Indeed, the game was originally destined to be a MMO, but changed during development.
What starts out as an indoors game, quickly opens up to a huge open world, with great variation between locations and enemies. Each area, of the open world, has a distinct colour and design scheme. From dark forests, to deserts to jungles and mountainous areas. You'll quickly learn to remember where you are, simply by taking a quick glance at the surroundings.
I like that it begins in an indoor location and eases you into the open world after teaching you the basics. The first open areas are also quite harmless, and each area is only accessible from the next, and as such the game controls cleverly how you explore each one in it's order. It's subtle, but works well.
Gameplay in KoA:R is fairly simple. It actually reminds me a lot of a classic hack 'n slash games. There are various classes of characters and races and choosing a more magic oriented style to combat, will result in less hand-to-hand fighting. I chose a more direct approach, with focus on heavy weapons, for fighting with many enemies at once, plus a stealth upgrade with dagger kills, for the more sneaky parts.
Even though a lot of the fighting may seem quite repetitive, I actually, through my 25+ hour playthrough, never tired of it. KoA:R has an amazingly satisfying feeling to hitting a huge sword into enemies, combined with some rather spectacular magic abilities to round the visually appealing and entertaining fights off. I really enjoyed doing stealth kills too, trying my best to quickly get close to the targets and brutally executing them from behind. I could imagine it's equally as fun learning to use magic and throwing nasty spells on enemies or excelling in firing down enemies from a distance with a bow.
In fact, the easy and rather fast-paced combat, combined with satisfying controls and heavy feeling makes KoA:R a really good RPG for me. Perhaps, it shows how appealing the game is when I'm a person who stays well clear of WoW and Skyrim as classic RPG examples. I just found KoA:R a perfect balanced between action and being advanced enough to delve into abilities and armour/weaponry choices, not forgetting training abilities like stealth, lockpicking, negotiating etc. Keeping a fairly RPG-light gamer, like myself, happy for hours.
There are, however, a few downsides. While seemingly rather well written and interesting at the beginning, the story really is a let down over time. It simply runs on empty fumes. I barely followed the main story and the cutscenes connected to it were really poorly made. All side-quests story scenes, I simply skipped. They just seemed so generic and simply a time-filler.
The moral choices you choose in dialogues seem to give no effect and simply did not bear the heavy weight of, lets say, Mass Effect's choices do. The end of the main story simply felt so underwhelming that I was rather disappointed. Had the awesome gameplay been combined with some epic story scenes and the cinematics of Final Fantasy, this could have been a truly wonderful game.
The game simply needs a more focused and meaningful story, more detailed areas to visit. More than often, you feel like you're playing through a list of quests, in empty environments. While colourful and varied, the environments suffer from serious pop-up of, not so, distant objects and sometimes the framerate drops. They could also benefit from being filled with more small detail.
Simply because of the excellent gameplay, variation in weaponry and classes and varied art design in locations, I reward this game with the rating below. Next time, though, I want a story with people and a main character I care about.
