Remakes and remasters are starting to be so commonplace in the industry that it seems that every month there is yet another dusted off classic being reenvisioned or enhanced to support all the new consoles. Your definition of remake vs remaster may vary, depending on your expectations of what you want from them, but in the end, the publisher has a responsibility to deliver a fully polished and enjoyable product. While some of the more recent remakes, such as Spongebob Squarepants and Destroy all Humans! were rebuilt largely from scratch, played alongside their original audio and gameplay, THQ Nordic’s latest with Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning just barely enhances the original and feels rather shallow in its remastering.
Now, that criticism aside, I adored Kingdom’s of Amalur when it originally released back in 2012. When it was added to the Xbox One’s backwards compatible list, I booted it up and started yet another playthrough. When THQ Nordic revealed that they intended to remaster the game, I wondered if we would be getting the same remastered treatment that they have been doing lately, having parts of the game either rebuilt from the ground up or other changes to modernize the game in some small but significant ways. While the game now runs at a much higher resolution with nearly double the framerate, these changes don’t feel as drastically noticeable as they should or feel enough to warrant buying the game all over again.
Regardless of how little appears to have been done here graphically, there is no mistaking that the game does look better, but it’s somewhere between “a bit better” and “just barely” since none of the character models, environments, or menus have been really touched at all. The UI and character menus themselves still have the same low-resolution font size of the older game and the load times of going in and out of buildings, or even just opening books for some reason, feel like things they could have addressed, given how much more powerful these new consoles are. Make no mistake about it, If you enjoyed Kingdoms of Amalur back some eight years ago, you’ll still love what this remaster offers, but it just feels like a little to no effort port instead of giving us a re-release that really stands out, especially since this is priced at $40-$55, region and platform depending. In fact, in Canada, the Xbox One version is $14 cheaper than that of the standard PS4 version, as the Xbox version in Canada shares the same $39.99 US price.
By adding in all the DLC expansions and content, there is a very long adventure to take in here and might very well be the biggest reason most people will purchase this edition as I’d assume that several people likely never played the added content. While you could likely streamline the story in around 30 hours, there are at least 80+ hours here should you invest in all the side content, and even more so should you dive into the crafting systems and ability to create your own homestead, complete with taking care of some various creatures, some of which you can bring alongside you. That said, there is a glitch going around where your creature companion will disappear if you fast travel, so there’s that.
While the things that most people are going to first notice about the game, myself included, is going to be the increased resolution, the biggest changes to the remaster are alterations to the procurement of loot, a new harder difficultly, revamped enemy placement, and how it calculates difficulty. Loot you find in chests is now calculated as you open the chest, making it more relevant to what you need at the given moment, ensuring looting each and every chest to be vastly more important than ever. The game also changes how enemy difficulty is calculated upon entering and exiting zones to keep the game challenging, instead of the original where each zone had a minimum and maximum level range. Enemy placement has also been altered, but still doesn’t help out those looking to main a stealth character. This caused me to alter my stealth-based assassin to respec them away from stealth as it rarely felt like I could really take advantage of enemies facing away from me when hardly any encounter is staged to even allow that to happen.
The ability to respec your character is one of Amalur’s best design choices as it allows you to tinker with what you want from your character instead of placing points into something you end up regretting. By allowing you to reset all your skill points, you can get a feel for what you want from those abilities and experiment with everything the game has to offer. While the game does have builds towards being a warrior, rogue, or mage, you can borrow and place points into whatever you want, allowing for hybrid classes that benefit from each other’s key abilities. Tho, some armor does require some high points in those categories, so it’s best to mainline your focus and dance around the others.
Since this remaster is essentially the same old game with some minor tweaks, you still get the same Todd McFarlane art direction, and the R.A. Salvatore high fantasy narrative. The story can start out feeling a bit lacking, but the fact that you play as this being without their own fate, it allows your inclusion in the world to be questionable; are you a hero who is able to save everyone, or a villain as you’re upsetting the natural balance. The story thankfully doesn’t shy away from these ideals and nearly every major character has either a problem with you or sees you as their savior; and sometimes both. The side quests that you’re able to tackle don’t quite explore this, and are usually just your typical fetch or kill quests, but several of them are charming enough due to the characters involved and the small narratives they spin. Nearly every aspect of the story or those side activities allows you to choose dialogue that will alter their outcome in several ways. You don’t quite have a morality system that leans one way or the other, but rather in how you yourself will take to conversation during these dialogue moments. You can sink points into persuasion to get your way more often, or find other ways to push through the guard that many characters can put up.
Combat is one of the more enjoyable aspects to Amalur that I remember the most due to just how engaging and fast it is. While it does have its fair share of problems with locked animations, and being hit constantly by out of frame attacks, is still has remained one of the more defining traits of what Amalur was doing different back in 2012 than what most of this genre was doing back then. Combat flows nicely despite what overall class you choose, the abilities flowing from your fingertips, to the weapons you’ll wield. You can roll out of the way of attacks, perfectly time an enemies strike with your shield to counter, and use a mystical fate power to unleash hell, ending the battle with a button prompt to viciously tear apart your foe. Most weapons have skills and combo attacks attached to them, such as raining down arrows with your bow or adding a rapid dash strike with your daggers, an attack that causes so many flashes on the screen that I had to eventually close my eyes during the attack to stop from getting sick. Amalur is the first game to ever actually give me headaches from flickering lights. That attack aside, combat excels to the point where you won’t actively avoid battles and instead leap into the fray and trounce everything you come into contact with.
As you hack and slash away in combat, you’ll have a variety of items to hotkey to buttons to use during encounters, such as health or mana potions, but also bonus experience or critical damage ones as well. During big skirmishes, I would constantly use experience potions to level up faster, which then grants you skill points to place into various passive and offensive abilities. Each level grants you a single point to place into certain traits such as your ability to persuade during conversation, or your skill in lockpicking or dispelling chests. You’ll also gain three points that you will place across your three skill trees, unlocking abilities, or upgrades that grant you new attacks or increasing the damage those attacks do. Should you end up not enjoying what you’ve created with your skills, as I’ve mentioned before, you can respec your choices by speaking to a Fateweaver and select “Unbind Destiny”. These Fateweavers are found almost everywhere, so you’re rarely far away from resetting your skills and trying out something new.
During my time with Re-Reckoning, I encountered a ton of bugs, crashes, and various other means to ruin my fun. While I haven’t thankfully experienced the game-breaking running bug, my game would reliably crash almost every hour. I’m well past several dozen crashes at this point to where I would have to actively save every few minutes in fear I would lose progress again. I’ve seen several players on PC seeing their characters becoming partly invisible as body parts would just flat out disappear unless they changed armor pieces. Thankfully, my only consistent visual glitch is that all my chests had no lid, so it was often silly to see my attempts to lock pick it fail due to what appeared to be something I could just reach into.
I did have a few other problems like having to select dialogue choices multiple times for them to register, conversations having camera angles blocked by NPCs or parts of the environment, and reading books often came with a 10-15 second loading time just to open them up. I also had massive framerate drops during battles of all sizes, and one section of the game where would I couldn’t break past enemy barriers, causing me to research the glitch and use a workaround from the original release. I also had a section of the game as seen below in my gallery where the entry point for enemies contained massive mystical marshmallows that spawn enemies, or at least, that’s what I assume was happening. While these issues and more can be addressed with patches down the road, it’s a shame that some of the original game’s glitches are here, despite them being widely known for almost a decade.
While there is nothing terribly memorable about the score, the audio here from a character standpoint is both impressive and yet vastly repetitive. One of the issues I still have to this day with Skyrim is the overuse of some of the same few actors. Hearing the same voice appear on character after character became tiresome, especially that of Jim Cummings. While I have always enjoyed the actor, hearing the same voice of his popping up within minutes of each other was something that drove me to not interact with everyone I met. Here, in Amalur, Cummings, as well as several Skyrim actors, are here in full force, playing a multitude of characters, but Cummings is seemingly used in some sections of the game far more than others. In one of the included expansions areas, he seems to voice almost every second character, using the same tone, voice, and pacing that he uses to also voice Gadflow, the game’s central threat. Unlike Skyrim, thankfully, there seems to be more than just a handful of the same actors providing voices across the entire game and while some are drastically better than others, there is a such a wide range of interesting characters that you’ll interact with, and have with you on your journey.
One thing that is immediately noticeable is how much darker this version of the game is when compared to the original, hell, you can see it in the screenshots I’ve taken. There is a change in color saturation and contrast that has some of the brighter areas looking much better but when you are in dark caves with little to no light, the game can be incredibly dark. There are instances where shadows and some small details are low-end sprites with some poor pixelation, but to be fair, that’s me looking at things you likely aren’t going to notice as you simply run around hacking at things. One thing that really helps this remaster is the ability to finally move the camera back so it’s not so close, a feature that was not present in the Xbox 360 version anyway. While pop-in is not anywhere as bad as the latest Sword Art Online game, there are several times where the game had some really awful pop-in to most areas having a few instances of it here and there.
While I still find Kingdoms of Amalur to be a very satisfying action RPG with a few problems that still remain here from its release back in 2012, it’s the remaster treatment where I find my biggest disappointment with. Developer Kaiko has taken over the development chores of the game since the closure of Big Huge Games and 38 Studios, and while making the game run in 4k with a better framerate, and all the changes under the hood are good additions to a re-release, the bulk of the heavy lifting here is solely from the original title, one that doesn’t see a drastic of enough difference here. I do enjoy playing the game but honestly, this remaster isn’t as impressive as I feel it could have been, not to mention the constant bugs and crashes that run rampant here. If you’ve enjoyed Kingdoms of Amalur before, this is the best looking version of the game by far, but if you didn’t take to it then, it’s hard to say if you’d be into it now, given nothing has fundamentally changed. Kingdoms of Amalur was a vastly enjoyable action RPG back in 2012 and if you can look past a few dated gameplay systems and the odd frustration in combat, it’s easy enough to lose dozens upon dozens of hours here with this re-released classic.
A review code for Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review and played on an Xbox One X.
All screenshots were taken on an Xbox One X.