review Shagger Says: Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning (PC Review)

[Shagger]

Shagger Says:

 

 

Welcome one at all! Ladies and Gentlemen! Boys and Girls of all ages! I present to you the Shining Star of my first ever Steam Refund!

 

First let me gush for a moment about how brilliant a game Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is. A massive, fantasy western style RPG with some superb combat that allows you to use any of a vast array of weapons regardless of class and doesn't limit you to a specific class through the fate waver system. The graphics are colourful and vibrant, there's a great variety environments to explore and has an epic tale to tell. A must-play for any fan of the genre.

So you see, I love this game and wanted to sing the praises of Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning to high heavens, especially to people who haven't played the original. Unfortunately, and I hate to say it, but THQ Nordic and KAIKO, this is not good enough.

Usually when I do reviews I go into a lot of detail about the game itself, but this isn't really a review of the game, this is a review of the re-master, and as you may have guessed, it's not going to be kind. Still, I should talk about the game itself at least to some extent. So sharpen your bows and string your swords because it's time to get it all wrong with Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning!

 

A King Indeed

Kingdoms of Amular: The Game Itself

 

As previously stated, I'm not going to go into too much detail here as this isn't really the focus of the review, but here's what you need to know.

 

Kingdoms of Amalur is a western style fantasy RPG with a strong focus of varied combat and player advancement options. There is a choice of typical three basic attributes of magic, warrior type and rouge/thief (defined as sorcery, might and finesse in Kingdoms) that any RPG fan will be familiar with. These attributes define the skill trees, an example below:

 

 

As you level up, you acquire point to spend on these skill trees to either unlock new abilities or upgrade current ones, typical stuff. For example, as you see here on the sorcery tree, you can see new spells to unlock and upgrade as well as improvements to be made on you comat with certain weapons like Staves and Chakrams. That's right, there's Chakrams in the game;

 

 

I'm not sure why the Chakrams are considered primarily a mage style weapon in the game, but that doesn't matter because, as aforementioned, you can use any weapon in the game regardless of your class or abilities. The controls are very intuitive, so easy to switch from a bow to war hammer or whatever. You can also any spell you have unlocked regardless of how you're advancing your character, and many spells are useful to multiple classes, so that's worth looking into when you first access the skill trees.

As you spend points on these skill trees, you also unlock new classes with their own perks that get more beneficial the more points spent. You need not just spend your points one skill tree, you can spend them on two of even all three to unlock mixed classes if wanted:

 

 

Whilst the variety and freedom this system offers is certainly a great thing, the best bit is that you don't even have to stick with it. There are persons in the game called Fateweavers, a kind of trades person if you like that can, for a price, reset the skills and abilities back to zero, so you redistribute them all over again.

 

This is a very coinvient system, and convince to the player is a common theme in the game's design overall. For example, in other western RPG's (*cough, cough, Shyrim, cough*), selling your excess gear and loot is a pain in the ass. The stores have little money without the right high-end perks attained, so odds are you'll have to go to multiple store to sell each of your unwanted items mixed with all the stuff you do want, ONE. AT A DAMN. TIME. In Kingdoms, find am item you don't want to keep, but you would like to sell. You hit one button to put it into the "Junk" section of your inventory. When you get to a store, you start to barter, then once again with a single button press, you sell all of your "Junk" in one go. No fuss. I know it's a small thing, but once you see it you can't help but wonder why doesn't every game do this?

 

The star of the show though, is the combat. Brilliantly animated, fluid, skill and timing based combat a great variety of enemies weapons with various threats, poisons and elements to imply enough strategy to keep your head in the game. Like I said, no weapon is locked of to you and the game controls beautifully with a controller or a mouse and keyboard. It might easier to show the combat the let it speak for itself. And yes, this player IS using the Chakrams, consider it an apology for my bad mood in not using the Xena clip earlier.

 

 

And then, there's this;

 

 

There's a purple bar just below your health meter that charges in combat. When full, you can trigger a fate shift. For a short time, time slows down, you become invulnerable and deal more damage. Take down as any enemies as you can in the time you have then performing a finisher with a QTE that will have you press a random control repeatedly to build up and XP boost. Not only is this visually very cool to watch with some great and brutal kill animations, but because of the XP boost and unlike supers in other games, you'll find yourself wanting to use it every chance you get.

 

Story, well there is one obviously, and I like it. I'm not gonna lie, there are better stories in RPG games, especially more recently, but this is still holds up and keeps you interested, and has unique set up.

First, there's a war, because of course there is. More specifically, a war between the mortal races of man and Alfar (A kind of Elf, I suppose) and the Fae of the Winter court. Now the Fae are amongst the most interesting elements in this world. Immortal beings tied to nature, they live, die then rise again to fulfil their never-ending, always repeating roles in "The Song", call it a pre-written fate. There are two types, the Fae of the Summer Court and the Fae of the Winter Court. For example, growth, like Summer and decay, like Winter. Neither are technically good nor evil, just represent different elements of nature The new king of the winter court and leader of the Winter Cour clan called the Tuatha, has abandoned his role in The Song and is now out to conquer. This war has been raging for over 20 years and the mortal races, according to fate, are destined to lose.

As for you, you're dead. I mean really dead. So the games over before it starts, of course not. You are resurrected by something called the Well of Souls, but that's not all they well has done to you. You have become untethered from fate, so lets call the protagonist "The Fateless", and this makes you potential threat to the Tuatha because you possess the unique ability to control fate as you will, so even though fate says the Tuatha will win this war, you  and you alone, can change that. You may have lost your memories from your previous life, but you can still find out who you are as well as turn the tide in this war. That's the goal of the game.

 

So, this is a very good game, and it is massive, don't expect to spend less than 70 hours on a first play through doing side quests and stuff along the way. Unfortunately, this game is no longer available on PC because of a publisher change between the original and the remaster. What we have now for PC and current gen consoles, is this...

 

Frame-Rate Weaver

The "Re-Master"

First thing first, it's important to know my PC specs before moving on. My Specs on my ASUS TUF Gaming FX505DV Laptop.

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3750H. Base Clock 2.3GHz, Boost 4GHz

RAM: 2x8GB DDR4 (16BG total)

GPU: GTX2060 with 6GB of V-RAM and up 1830Mhz boost clock.

Game Installed on a Patriot P200 SSD 2TB SATA III Internal Solid State Drive 2.5 with up to 530MB of read rate and data transfer.

 

To put it simply, that's well above the recommended spec's;

 

And honestly, that isn't even that much more than the original, a game I can run at 50+fps at max setting just fine;

 

 

And yet, when I try to run the game at settings I know this laptop can handle...

 

 

And do you get a massive improvement in visuals? Well one of these screenshots is from Re-Reckoning, the other from the origonal game, can you tell which is which? Please answer in the poll I've provided and/or comment below.

 

Number 1

 

And Number 2

The short answer is no, you don't get much of an improvement.

 

Some people will still claim that it's my system not having enough guts to run the game better, but you're wrong. Now, I am most definitely not the resident tech sensei on this forum, I do think @Crazycrab or someone else might make a strong case for that, but I was monitoring the performance stats whilst getting these captures. Sadly, the overlay didn't appear in the capture itself, but what I found was the GPU and RAM usage was exactly the same in both games, only the CPU usage was higher on the re-master. What was really striking though was low these stats actually were. On the re-master between 45-50% of RAM, hovering around 40-50% on the CPU, and most importantly just 10% of GPU power, that went down as low as 3%. And remember, with the exception of the CPU (at 25% usage give or take of the original game), both were exactly the same. Like I said, I'm no expert and I'll never claim to be and I would actually ask someone reading this that has more knowledge to shed light on this, but I think that because both games are still using the same engine, that engine is only drawing what it needs to load the original game's textures. However, despite how it looks, the re-master is loaded with higher resolution textures (that's why the filesize is so much larger), but the engine isn't compensating for the extra time it really needs to load these textures, and that I think is that is what's affecting the frame rate. If someone with better knowlege wants to give input, I'll update this.

 

In short, this is a software issue, and something KAIKO and THQ Nordic should have thought about when developing this. Or they just couldn't be bothered. As far as I can tell, some are having problems, others aren't as is the useual with these things, but that doesn't excuse this. I'm also a little disspointed that the new game isn't compatible with saves from the origonal, I honestly don't think that would have been much work to accomplish given that the inner software workings are basically the same in both. Apparetly there has been gameplay improvements (I did see a new very hard diffculty mode, so kudos for that), but I'll never get far enough into the game to know what they are. Besides, why fix what was never broken in the first place?

 

Decide Your Fate:

Conclusion

 

Well, it's simple, really. Another great game ruined by a rubbish port. I put is togeather partly becasue I was pissed about this, but also wanted to warn people. It may work better for you on your set up than it did for me, but doesn't mean that this is OK. It's not like all hope is lost for this title, there will be patches and the re-master will get a brand new exclusive DLC expantion next year, but for now either avoiding this re-master or picking it up on console would be my, as always, humble advice.

 

Edited September 12, 2020 by Shagger

[Crazycrab]

26 minutes ago, Shagger said:

Some people will still claim that it's my system not having enough guts to run the game better, but you're wrong. Now, I am most definitely am not the resident tech sensei on this forum, I do think @Crazycrab or someone else might make a strong case for that

 

I haven't had the chance to play the so-called re-master myself but according to Game Debate's user-submitted score for the 1080Ti which I have, the average is 116 fps at 1440p on ultra.  I have tried the original though and I max out at 144fps during gameplay WITH an active re-shader.  That is at least a 20% hit but If weren’t maxing I bet it would be closer to 40% or more in a game that looks almost exactly the same.

 

With that being said you should clearly be getting better performance than you did and I can’t explain without being hands-on myself but it's inexplicable and inexcusable how shallow an effort this is.  Just play the orional with one of the re-shaders on Nexus and you see legitimitly more improvement.

[Shagger]

10 hours ago, Crazycrab said:

 

I haven't had the chance to play the so-called re-master myself but according to Game Debate's user-submitted score for the 1080Ti which I have, the average is 116 fps at 1440p on ultra.  I have tried the original though and I max out at 144fps during gameplay WITH an active re-shader.  That is at least a 20% hit but If weren’t maxing I bet it would be closer to 40% or more in a game that looks almost exactly the same.

 

With that being said you should clearly be getting better performance than you did and I can’t explain without being hands-on myself but it's inexplicable and inexcusable how shallow an effort this is.  Just play the orional with one of the re-shaders on Nexus and you see legitimitly more improvement.

 

I appreciate that, and it's obviously very good advice, but there's one colossal problem. It's OK for people like me who have the game on Steam already, but everyone else is now burdened with no choice but to endure this horrible port as the original is no longer available to buy on Steam because of the publisher change. This will be the one and only time I will ever say I wish EA were still involved.

[Crazycrab]

19 minutes ago, Shagger said:

 

I appreciate that, and it's obviously very good advice, but there's one colossal problem. It's OK for people like me who have the game on Steam already, but everyone else is now burdened with no choice but to endure this horrible port as the original is no longer available to buy on Steam because of the publisher change. This will be the one and only time I will ever say I wish EA were still involved.

 

I wouldn't normally pitch this but I’d tell anyone in this position just pirate the original, It’s not our fault their not letting us buy it!  I'm not ashamed to admit that that's what I would do if it weren’t in your shared library.

 

Think about it, THQ Nordic doesn’t deserve the money for the shoddy remake and they had nothing to do with the original so they don't deserve to cash in for that either.  Furthermore, since EA can't publish it anymore and the original developer Big Huge Games has long since bit the dust it doesn't affect anyone there either, It’s victimless.

[Shagger]

33 minutes ago, Crazycrab said:

 

I wouldn't normally pitch this but I’d tell anyone in this position just pirate the original, It’s not our fault their not letting us buy it!  I'm not ashamed to admit that that's what I would do if it weren’t in your shared library.

 

Think about it, THQ Nordic doesn’t deserve the money for the shoddy remake and they had nothing to do with the original so they don't deserve to cash in for that either.  Furthermore, since EA can't publish it anymore and the original developer Big Huge Games has long since bit the dust it doesn't affect anyone there either, It’s victimless.

 

I get what you're saying, and it makes too much sense to dismiss, but we cannot condone piracy. It may be holding out a hand to have it bitten, but people who didn't buy the game on PC before this have no other options now. Like I said, I'm sure patches will come, but until then and until this new DLC expansion is launched this game, or at least this port, should be avoided.

[Shagger]

A little update.

 

I'm now playing the game on console (PS4 Pro) as it was recently reduced in price. This would obviously have been optimised for console hardware as all concole games are, so the frame rate issues seen on my laptop are gone and the I would say the sharper textures can be seen more easily, most likely due to a larger screen than my laptop. However, there are still issues with odd graphical glitches and pop-ins (on character models, mostly) that I just don't remember being there the first I played the game. So, whilst I call the version at least playable and does actually boast more visual improvement (but again, it's on different screen), I still have a hard time recommending it, at least untill the new expansion is released.

[Shagger]

Another Update

 

As mentioned above, I did buy the game again on console hoping for a better optimised experience, and I got that. A week ago was the moment that every fan was waiting for arrived, the launch of the Fatesworn DLC, and I gotta say it was fantastic... until I was 9o% of the way through it.

 

I had seen slowdown in the framerate and a little choppiness, but I let it go without knowing this was the early sighs of a game that was about to break down. First, enemies started vanishing the very millisecond you defeated them in an incredibly jarring glitch-fest, the there was a hard crash... then another... and another! Had have before and every single encounter so as not to loose progress after trying to get through the same area. The crashes always happened during combat and very sudden. After getting through the part where it all started, I hoped that would be it, but no, it kept happening. Eventually out of sheer frustration I gave up. It's extra annoying that I spend a good two-three days playing this solid and now I can't finish it. It just killed the pace and momentum of the genuinely engaging story and the scenarios that really showed of the games already excellent combat and crafting systems. Such a shame.

 

I'll wait for patches before I make another attempt to finish this game, but even when this game is polished I'll never find it in my heart to recommend it. I was burned big time when I first tried to play it on PC, gave another chance on consoles and now pretty much the only reason to buy Re-Reckoning, this new DLC that they have been working for well over a year, has come out as a complete mess. And BTW, this isn't just me, I've spend enough time on the Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning Discord the last few days to that.

 

Any hope that I had of a new Kingdoms of Amalur game coming and being worthwhile have all but being dissolved. The only thing that THQ Nordic have brought to the fans of this game is the misery of realizing that... twice. We got that back in 2012 with the collapse of the original developer and now we have it again. I'm very disappointed.