[Demo Spotlight] Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

This is an anticipated single-player action role-playing game that may actually please many role playing gaming fans for 2012. Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning seems to have all the traits of a great RPG, such as a gripping story line, beautiful environments and incredibly liberating gameplay with interesting customizable sets of talent trees that will make for interesting combat.

The demo begins by explaining that the world is at war with a race called the Tuatha, who are trying to gain control Amalur. Your character was a victim of the Tuatha, but is brought back to life by the gnomes’ secret weapon known as The Well of Souls. Without revealing too much about the story, this is where your journey begins. The demo gives hints that your decisions in the game may affect the course of the story, very much like Dragon Age: Origins.

Character customization involves four playable races: the Ljosalfar, Varani, Dokkalfar, and Almain . During customization, you choose your deity which helps boost certain attributes such as critical hit or increase health and mana. You have a limited range of customization for your character’s facial features since you are only given five presets to choose from. You can change your character’s skin, eye color hair style, make up, tattoos and accessories. When it comes to the eyes, face and other features, there is no adjusting. Whatever preset you pick is what your character will look like, maybe with different tones and some design changes.

With most RPGs, class selection is done in the character customization screen, but that is not the case for this game. What makes Kingdoms of Amalur so interesting is that your character has no set class. In fact, the class is built as the game goes along. Your character starts off with a clean slate or as the game calls it, “Fateless.” Your class, or “Destiny,” also has a lot of liberty behind it. In most games, your class is set; you can only get certain abilities for that class. But in this game, your Destiny Points can be spread towards different categories, making your character a hybrid class. You can be a warrior with mage and rogue like abilities, which make the real time gameplay unbelievably enjoyable. The gameplay itself has an odd mix of God of War's action and Skyrim's customization with gamers having total control of the character’s action.

Kingdoms of Amalur will be released for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC on February 7. We can't wait to jump back into the role playing madness after the short post-holiday slumber.