heard that THQ acquired the game's IP I felt like the happiest gamer in the world. I purchased the game as soon as it was possible, but it came with a few issues in the beginning. Either way, I've finally got around to playing it. Since we can't progress with our old save file, I've had to restart the game but mainly focused on the main quest, so I could try the newest DLC as soon as I could. Although this version feels slightly buggier than the original (or was it just me?), it's still a great revisit to the game.

Looking forward to what THQ has in store for this franchise!

The amount of content in this game is genuinely ridiculous. I have over 110 hours in it and only just beat the main quest, one expansion, and all of the vanilla + one DLC factions. I did most side quests I came across and according to the in game journal that is 221 quests completed... And I skipped some in regions I didn't like and I'm sure I missed plenty and didn't do every dungeon. In terms of sheer content per dollar spent, this is easily worth it, the expansions are honestly very high quality and come bundled into this version, likewise all the DLC is here, including the pretty fun Arena faction, the House of Valor.

The combat in this game is super fun, very simple hack and slash with unlockable abilities and the core of it being focused around weapon switching on the fly. Build variety as such is almost limitless, the Fate system is great and unlocking new ones and new Twists of Fate are fantastic. I recommend playing on Hard difficulty, the game is fairly easy and Hard offers just enough challenge to still make you have a fantastic power fantasy but not be completely on auto-win.

I'm not a huge fan of the character's art-style but the landscapes, cities, and dungeons, all look amazing and beautiful! The architecture is very fun. The lore at first glance looks very generic but there are some interesting things to be found there. The main story is so-so, but the meat of the game is in its free-form exploration and combat. Join some factions, steal some things, do some dungeons, unlock some of the many houses. It's good fun. Not a masterpiece, but it is the perfect mindless fun ARPG. Turn your mind off and have fun.

Update: Finished the DLC content, all of it is honestly so good! One is set in a Mediterranean Greek setting populated with living Greek statue people. It has new enemy types, pretty visuals, and fun lore. The other is a gothic pirate story set on a gloomy island with a bonus of castle-ruling and a new pet mechanic! I love home-bases in RPGs and while the base game had housing, this adds a proper castle you build up and recruit for, it's great. The island is gorgeous too with dark forests and spooky undead pirates. The House of Valor faction is really fun with an arena questline as well as a lot of extra challenge content, honestly one of the best arena factions I've seen in a game, Oblivion's and this are probably tied now.

I dabbled with this game back at its Xbox 360 launch but only committed to a few hours and then bounced for other games. I was intrigued by the release of a remaster in 2020, though. Ended up dumping 175 hours into this and, needless to say, I am a big fan. Essentially, they created a single player MMORPG and it was a nice callback to my WoW days without having to pay $15 a month. It has a large map with tons of quests and if that sounds good to you then it is an easy recommend. Too bad some of the original game's bugs were ported over as well, so beware of some that can bork your game completely.

The story of the game takes place in a classic fantasy world. Amalur is divided into several regions. The story begins with the death of the main character, followed by his resurrection in the Well of Souls. Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning we create a hero from scratch and together with him we save the world from evil. Despite the possibility of making decisions in dialogs similar to the Mass Effect series, the story presented in the game is essentially very linear and we don't have much say.

We start the adventure with an extensive character creation screen that allows you to choose one of the four available races, Almain, Dokkalfar, Ljosalfar and Varani, as well as change their appearance. We don't choose a class at the beginning of the game, but as the game progresses you can develop your character in three skill trees. These are warrior, rogue and mage. Among the available skills, there are both ranged and melee skills, over 60 in total. In addition to these in the skill tree, you can also develop your character in crafts and social skills, such as alchemy, blacksmithing or persuasion.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning immerses players in a very open and expansive world filled with various stories created in the head of R. A. Salvatore, the creator of the Universe. In addition to the main story, Salvatore has written numerous side quest stories in the game, including guilds scattered across the various regions of Amalur, much like in The Elder Scrolls series. By completing quests, we receive experience points and gain reputation among the various factions if we wish.

But the main focus of Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning's main focus is on combat, which is very arcade with Quick Time Events that often make the game closer to the hack and slash genre. Winning battles is therefore determined not only by the skills gained through character development, but also by the player's skill and the appropriate use of items, such as bombs or spells.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning is a single player game. It also includes new story-based DLC packs: The Legend of Dead Kel, Teeth of Naros and Fatesworn. The enhanced version Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning, its graphical style takes influence from the Fable series, Divinity II: Ego Draconis and games in the Forgotten Realms universe, slightly improving on the original's graphic design. Resolution and texture quality have been increased and the game runs at +60 FPS on eighth generation consoles PlayStation 4 and Xbox One for greater smoothness. The game offers over 100 hours of gameplay in the story campaign with all side content.

I think far too many Quests in this game are either "go here, kill x monsters" or "go here fetch x item" all while following someone in a dungeon. One standout quest in the game is the bell, book, and candle quest. You're approached by an elf that asks you to help him break a curse of the undead attacking him because he's part of the legendary family that governed that area ages ago. It's believable because this quest takes place in the 4th or 5th large area of the open world so I've been fighting these undead throughout the entire game. So you follow him into a castle to do a ritual. As you progress you start to notice that he's lying about some details. The undead isn't only attacking him and he slips up and tells you he wants to raise an army of undead if you pass a persuasion check. By the end, you meet his ancestor that started the curse and he says that the elf is a liar, and he wants to use the undead for an army while the ancestor wants to break the curse. The elf says he wants to use the army to protect the area.

You're now left with two choices, side with the ancestor, kill the elf, and break the curse. Side with the elf, kill the ancestor, and allow him to raise an army of the undead. Morally, both guys have done wrong, ancestor cursed his family while the elf is a liar, there's also no guarantee that the elf can truly control all of these undead.

My problem with this is that you have choices but few consequences outside of killing one of them, and never seeing the other for the rest of the game. The undead still spawns throughout the game if you side with the ancestor, and you'll never see the army or hear about them from anyone else in the world.

The game still has a good amount of reactivity. I was in the underground part of Rathir and I started combat with one of the citizens, and the rest of the citizens fled in fear because they were not fighters. If this was the surface, the guards and the rest of the citizenry would've attacked me back.

One thing they should've done is had recipes for the shards in sagecrafting as they do for alchemy. I can't remember all the shard combos to make the gems without testing all of them. A big oversight on their part.

There are a few other technical issues. One quest had to do with a dwarf in a cave, I suppose the dwarf was supposed to die but he doesn't and I can still talk to him but he won't move. The other dwarves outside all believe he died though.
There is stuttering every time you walk through the long hallways between zones and the loading times are terrible on the PS4 Pro.

Fae blades & daggers stealth kills: The game forces me out of crouch after the kill. It also doesn't have an animation for some of the kills which is weird. I don't like the context-sensitive assassinations because it is so easy to press the button and it instead counts as a regular attack because the button prompt didn't come on the screen. If a monster is moving while you press the assassination button, the attack doesn't hit the enemy and instead, you're forced out of stealth and exposed. WTF? You also can't assassinate enemies that are sitting in a chair.


Missing Keys is another quest that would've probably been decent if the game had some proper faction system that remembered choices. I did this quest after completing the traveler's faction questline. In doing so, their primary camp is raided by the gnome authorities, and their leader is imprisoned, but our PC is named a legend of the camp and the entire traveler's faction. The quest giver did not even know who I am, she mentions visiting the sun camp but is completely unaware that it is raided and destroyed by the gnome authority. She also comments on me being a poor fit for the travelers if I ever try joining because I gave her the stolen documents for free which are funny because she's completely oblivious to the fact that I am a member of the travelers. At least the game acknowledged the fact that I stole the document and read it before ever attempting the quest. However, it is funny that an elf downstairs is completely aware of what happened to the sun camp.

It's far too easy to be OP. Exploring and finding Lorestones and completing main and faction quests give the player permanent stat bonuses. By the end of the game, I had 50 permanent stat bonuses. On top of the OP random gear, I found that it was far too easy to 2 or 3-shot bosses and barely take any damage as the archmage, the most OP destiny in the game.

No real point in using money since NPC shops are instanced and will spawn items the first time you ever speak to them and will never update items to be better than that afterward. So I ended up with 8 million gold that I no longer used for anything else because I just sold gear and didn't need to create new equipment because randomized gear was good enough.

By mid-game pure damage matters more than everything else. All armor in the game has a meager stat investment necessary to wear them. For example, to max any of the three ability trees in the game: might, finesse, and sorcery, you need about 115 points. However, to wear the best armor in the game, you only need 35 points in any tree. Since most builds in the game involve finesse or might, it means your player character will already have enough stat investment to wear just about any armor for your specific build by the very early game. Finesse aka the rogue build is just as tough as the might build because finesse gear generally has about 70% of the armor rating of might armor. You will never be threatened by enemy attacks due to how ridiculously tough most builds will be in this game, and that's before you even bother socketing gems in rare armor or building your own gear.

On the flip side, the archmage build is the most powerful in the game. You can generally one-shot most groups of enemies and bosses with the meteor or tempest spells. These are the only two abilities in the entire game that are actually powerful, however, things become boring once these two spells are constantly spammed. There isn't even a cooldown for tempest once you've got upgraded it past its limit.

Overall, this was a long game. Took 122 hours to complete everything. I didn't play the fatesworn DLC, because I wasn't going to buy it since they recently released this remaster but wanted to charge for DLC separately. All in all, there was a lot of potential for this title to be one of those big open-world franchises. Wouldn't mind a new installment in the future.

This game is currently in the Humble Choice for November 2022, this is part of my coverage of the bundle. If you are interested in the game and it's before December 6th, 2022, consider picking up the game as part of the current monthly bundle.

A remaster of a classic style RPG.

Kingdom of Amalur was released in 2012, three months after Skyrim, which is probably a big reason why it didn’t take off. But that also should put players in mind of what they will see here. This is a remaster of that old game that looks and plays well. There’s a heavy influence from MMOs of the time as well as some work from Todd Mcfarlane and an attempt at world-building for a franchise that well… This is the only game from that studio, so clearly it didn’t work out.

With this being a remaster, this is gameplay from over ten years ago, though there are not many RPGs done in this style anymore, so there is still a place for it. The story is well told, but it’s a generic fantasy as well. It’s more of a quantity than quality for the story, and while it came out at the same time as Skyrim, well Bethesda was already a force to be reckoned with, so realize this was always going to be a weaker quality.

Pick this up if you like fantasy RPGs. I actually own and beat the original release earning every achievement, and I’m even considered picking this up again because I enjoyed the original game and wouldn’t mind checking it out again.

If you enjoyed this review or want to know what I think of other games in the bundle, check out the full review on or subscribe to my Youtube channel: https://youtu.be/sFC7gi3ZDQc

Un juego penoso, agravado por un alargamiento absurdo. El guion no genera más que indiferencia; el combate tiene una débil gracia por apenas unas horas, la exploración no es atractiva y el sistema de loot es de los peores que experimenté.

Tengo la leve sospecha de que es un proyecto que fue concebido como MMORPG, pero en algún punto de su desarrollo todo se desvió.

El único logro de Kingdoms of Amalur es que me dio ganas de jugar Skyrim.

With the caveat I dropped this after only about 5 hours, this really didn't grab me. May have been better at the time and the combat isn't bad, but the intro area has incredibly MMO-ish design in terms of questing (linear, self-contained, minimal reactivity). New Vegas came out two years earlier and the team worked on Morrowind, so I have to assume this is either pointless filler content that isn't signposted or just the way the game works. The thing that ultimately turned me off can be explained in a small anecdote:

After hearing mention of the situation from another character, I organically find an undelivered letter informing a woman in town that her husband has perished in the war. I go to bring it to her, and while I can ask her about the same 7-8 keywords everyone else can talk about, I can't give her the letter.

If I had picked up the original during the height of the PS3, I would have loved it; now though, I feel like this is not quite what I am looking for in a videogame.
Leaving aside the graphical part of the game (it is a PS3 game) the character creation is actually quite fun and the lore and story very interesting. The attacks don't have a lot of weight on them (movement in general felt floaty) and the continuos equipment of new pieces of armor was not something I particularly enjoyed.
For a PS3 game it does look quite nice but unfortunately it is victim of the 2000s color palette of black, grey and brown; everything is poorly lit and not very vibrant to look at.
I feel that this would be a good game for MMO players.

Positives [+] and Negatives [-]
+ The faction quests are actually interesting despite it being optional.
+ Fun to try different builds with diverse skill trees. I found Finesse to be the most fun for me.
+ The OST is memorable and really improves world immersion.
- The main story/quests are not that interesting.
- Exploration was moderately tiring and perhaps unnecessary to even explore. I gave up opening chests and picking up dropped enemy loot by mid-game.

Originally played this on the PS3 and dropped it after some time. Though, I did have many burnouts, I would always find myself wanting to play and finish the game so I bought the remastered.

I can only recommend this game if you have a lot of time to spare and are willing to commit to a long journey of this RPG.

Enjoyable open-world RPG with a solid gameplay foundation but exhausting repetitiveness and lack of polish in many areas.
+ excellent build customization that encourages combining and switching between the three worthwhile classes
+ frequently challenging but rarely frustrating difficulty for a normal playthrough
+ robust action combat facilitating both tactical and reactive playstyles
+ enormous amount of optional yet decently written and rewarding side content
+ (almost overbearing) lore giving depth to anyone and everything
- appealing art style and interesting world blemished by a pervasive barenness
- easily exploitable crafting system that can trivialize anything
- many long walks without any possible movement speed increases
- mute protagonist who is only given the illusion of choice a few times
- 3 at best mediocre expansions
- frustrating inventory management with too little space and no sorting options
- terrible cutscenes and storytelling in general
- forgettable characters and plot from beginning to end

Platinum trophy #125
Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning [PS4]

Difficulty: 4/10
Fun: 7/10
Playtime: 44hours 52mins

Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning is a remaster of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning on the PS3. Ang creative nila mag isip ng remastered title ano? kidding aside, for me this is an underrated game from the PS3 era. And yes, nostalgia is a powerful thing and this is yet another game I replayed hahaha. Sadly in terms of a remastered title, parang upscaling lang and little ang added quality of life features. As buggy parin siya like the ps3 counterpart. I even encountered a game breaking bug pero buti na lang may multiple saves ako. Other than that, ayun masaya naman. Yung sa plat video ko, nag no armor lang ako for the laughs. May armor naman ako nung nag lalaro ako

Tips for plat:
-have multiple saves! As mentioned sa review ko, buggy parin yung game
-upgrade your persuasion skill first since one of the missable trophies is tied to having 50 success persuasion attempts
-make sure you play the game at hard difficulty and dont ever change it until you complete the main story
-always look out for lorestones, for less clean up time

A complete joke of an “RPG” that encapsulates every bad design decision to come regarding the RPG genre. Awful and useless skills, nonexistent variety for builds, you’re locked into 3 classes with yet another set of useless and boring skills that don’t enhance the role playing in any meaningful manner. The over-world’s level design is needlessly convoluted, mountains blocking your way and leading you down a contrived linear path, making an already snoozefest game even more of a chore to go through, with laughably slow “running” and no mounts, you spend the vast majority of your time running from quest marker to quest marker, with those quests themselves requiring you to just meet someone, who then tells you to go to a place. And to make matters worse it has ridiculous side quest bloat, every 20 steps you take in the overworld you’ll be greeted by a side quest that has no connection (thematic or otherwise) or bearing on the main story, all of them revolve around someone being lost/dead and their friend/lover/compatriot asking you to find them/take revenge/secure their remains, every single one.