You know what, I actually quite enjoyed this. It weren’t no Skyrim, it weren’t no Mass Effect, but it was an enjoyable enough way to spend a few evenings. Quite a lot of evenings, actually, as it is undoubtedly massive. Perhaps a bit too big to maintain interest throughout. A little less size and more work on the character interactions would’ve been time well spent, I think. It had a slightly young adult feel, a little on the cartoony side, but was certainly very pretty at times. Perhaps it had slightly the sense of an MMO without any other players in its rapid fire quest giving and constant battles. Cheesy world-building, one would have to say – you got some kinda dwarves, some kinda elves, a foresty area, a deserty area, a jungly area, you know the type of thing. Fantasy 101, one would have to say. Lots of background and stuff being said, history of this or that, but I really wasn’t listening too closely after a while because, being honest, the way the conversations were rendered was pretty stiff and dull, not so much the voice acting, although that wasn’t really A-grade, but the tedious way the whole thing was shot with the same three camera angles endlessly employed, the utter lack of convincing emotion on either your character or any others, all made for a bit of a stultifying experience, especially after the quality of Mass Effect, which really does lead the pack in that regard. The saving grace of Amalur is really the action, which is pretty cool, actually, probably one of the better efforts I’ve seen at combining RPG with arcade-y elements, and a nicely flexible method of character development, all of which ties in nicely with the game’s central conceit of unteasing the threads of fate. It all does get a bit easy once you’ve worked things out and mastered the item crafting, though. Game developers seem to have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to the whole area of crafting…
Anyway, it won’t blow your mind, but a pleasant enough romp.





