Recent reviews by T I M E B O N E S

I want more games that meet this bar for quality while still being uncompromising in their creative vision. An excellent story. Support these devs.

I think if I'm almost at 1000 hours played I'm pretty much obligated to leave this a positive review.

A great adaptation of the stellar arcade game. This one is 4v4 instead of 5v5 and the combat works a bit differently, but it's still very solid.

This is easily the worst game I've ever played. It's not even fun in the "wow this game is bad" way, like Bad Rats or Duke Nukem Forever. It's actually unplayable, with such insultingly unplayable and brain-dead mechanics, stages, and voice acting that I would rather receive an actual pile of poop in the mail for this price.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning succeeds in some important ways, but in my opinion inevitably falls flat on its face for anyone who has played RPGs before. It really depends on why you play RPGs.

KoA has a story that is at times refreshing and inspired, like with almost everything surrounding the Fae and their interactions with your character. At other times, it is cliche and groan-inducing; just about anything having to do with the "Fate" concept in the game was at best predictable and at worst actually insulting in its lameness. The dialogue outside of story missions was also trite and felt written around a quest that had already been programmed into the game without a justification. This is extra egregious in a game that advertises how a famous fantasy author developed the story.

It has an art style that screams in vivid colors and exaggerated animations, which I personally love as a longtime ex-player of World of Warcraft. However, if you're a fan of dark and gritty, you won't really find it here.

And honestly, most problematically, the game has a huge difficulty curve problem: it's way too easy. By halfway through the game, I had broken it even on "hard" difficulty. My warrior character, built in an extremely obvious fashion (and avoiding the bugged Last Stand talent), was nigh-invincible and two-shotting everything except bosses, and that's before stacking over 100% damage and several layers of mitigation in potions. The fundamental axis of interaction in KoA is combat; when it becomes so trivial as to be boring, the game falls apart unless you were happy playing on easy anyway.

Overall, I really, really wish I could recommend KoA. . . but I think for most people that would read a Steam review, it's just not going to be the right choice.