Kingdoms of Amalur [PC, PS3, Xbox 360]

Some people have been asking me to review Kingdoms of Amalur (KoA) as I have been playing it and by some people I mean no one and by asking I mean, fictitiously within my mind. I give it a punishment mark of 7.9/10, why?

Because it really adds the action element that Skyrim was missing. Sure it's EA and thus any bugs in it have no support whatsoever as they pump out pay-for-DLC but the game shipped with way less bugs than Skyrim. Sure you don't care about half of the dialogue spoken to you but you didn't care about the same ratio in Skyrim either, and sure it makes no sense why most people are Irish but neither does rampant alcoholism on St. Patrick's day. The point is you get fast paced combat that gets more exciting as you level up and get to explore the possibilities of your character.

You get to beat stuff up in your own way. Get bored of your class? Well just change it, you have no fate, so nothing is set in stone in this game. At times it takes itself a little seriously but for the most part it is a game that realises it is a game and lets you do what you want which is fun and refreshing especially for RPGs.

I love the graphic style and these alleged reviewers with their criticisms of it seem mad. Sure it can be cartoony but it is in a fantasy world and for the most part they capture the beauty of that setting. Faeries whizz about the forests and beautiful waterfalls flow into rivers and dales. This is the fantasy world you read about, you know in books. I quite like the way KoA has taken classic fantasy beasts and interpreted them in it's own way whilst adding new and exciting creatures.

Some things do let it down though. It lacks the support of Skyrim despite the fact it sold quite well; there are still bugs that need to be squashed within such as, no quest text displaying at high resolutions (in fact reading about it in forums there are a lot of problems at higher res') and the extreme slowness between pressing the talk to NPC button and the actual starting of the conversation.

There are moments of pure joy in this game like when you discover a new place and it seems so beautiful, exotic and enchanting, or when you find and kill a devastating monster, which are weighed down with moments of pure horror as you re-skill only to find that Blacksmithing cannot compare to Detect Hidden or that the quest you just did is boring and derivative. Had this game come out before Skyrim people would have made sweet love to it with their words, had this game been released by any publisher other than EA it would have received the support that it deserves, had this game done this it would have not received it's punishment score of 7.9.