tataki wrote:
The demo is out, here are some impressions after finishing it:
It's kinda like Dragon Age, only a lot better, I'd give them that.
With that said, it's still an open world game done wrong (for clarifications read Insomnia's GTA4 review) and while the scenery looks ok, the world is somewhat barren of living things.
The combat is like an even simpler God of War, QTEs included. (They can net a bonus EXP if you mash hard enough, lol.)
The only rule you need to remember is that you can't cancel the last hit of a chain to a roll, so you should avoid using it. Other than that it's just mash button and cancel to a roll on reaction until victorious.
It's somewhat heavily stat based (and chance based) and has a leveling mechanic, hence the whole "RPG" premise.
You also spend a lot of time doing mindless managing. When you loot a chest or a corpse you can just see the name of the item, not it's features. So for every piece of equipment you find you have to take it (the inventory has limited space) then go to the equipment screen and find it in the list, check if it's better or worse than what you have, and then go and sell the lesser one.
And that's even before you realize equipment has limited durability and in constant need of maintenance. Alchemy and similar shit is all about gathering materials you come across like a woman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer) and (I guess) making stuff out of them.
Lock-picking are ward dispelling to open chests and doors are simple minigames of timing or pure guessing that cost items.
Potions grant a full life recovery and I had like 11 in the demo. Too easy.
They also incorporated stealth into the game in what looks like an elegant way but it seems overshadowed by the simple and direct approach. (An enemy with huge stats you won't be able to beat normally, cannot be stealth killed anyway.)
They allow you to attack NPCs and become hostile to everyone ("role-play"?), but they only punish you for doing so. I butchered the whole village and the only thing I got for it was having no more access to quests and stores. I didn't even get EXP from killing the guards, only from killing non-combatants.(lol?)
It seems that the game will reset the local hostility after you spend some time elsewhere but why allow it if it just causes the game to halt progress rather than elegantly continuing a-la Deus Ex.
The aesthetic style is very similar to Dragon Age, the graphics are mediocre and it has some funny bugs here and there:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3duDIWaXQY
Overall to me it felt like a single player WoW, only a bit more fun, but that's about it. Probably a 3 star game.
Didn't know anything about this game, but the following piece of info I saw on its Wikipedia page makes the above comments quite unfortunate:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdoms_o ... _Reckoning
R. A. Salvatore created the game universe and lore, with Todd McFarlane working on the artwork
I guess the designers dropped the ball on this one -- though to be honest, I really doubt that Salvatore would have poured all of his creativity in making a world specifically for a videogame, and he's not that good a writer to start with anyway. McFarlane is awesome though and nothing much can be said against him.
tataki apparently has an account here, though under another handle, probably so that I don't ban him for stupid shit he may have said or done elsewhere. At any rate, if he ends up playing the finished game at some point, and decides to elaborate the above into a full review, he should consider letting me know about it.
