Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning demo impressions (UPDATE!)

So after 30 minutes in Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, am I still as excited as I was going in?

Yes, you heard that right: 30 minutes.  "But, Kenney," you may ask, "wasn't it supposed to allow you 45 minutes AFTER character creation and the tutorial?!"  To this I must respond: yes, it was.  However, about 25 minutes into the demo the sound totally cut out and every cinematic and dialogue lost sound and fast-forwarded.  It was weird.  That being said: the parts that I did play, I thoroughly enjoyed and I am still quite excited for this game.  Here's why....

You start the game dead and then are brought back to life.  How is that?  I don't know, the damn cinematic that was meant to explain it decided to freak out....

 You start the game dead and you are being carted down some underground labyrinth by two gnomes.  The cart begins with a sheet covering what appears to be a body.  When one of the gnomes pulls back the sheet you are brought to the character creation menu.  There are four races to choose from (which I won't go into detail about, but you can certainly read more about here) and after selecting a race you choose from a list of gods to worship.  These gods grant different bonuses based on what they represent.  Upon choosing a deity you are brought to the character customization sheets.  While not as deep as some character creators, it certainly will yield a number of unique-looking avatars.  I couldn't help but feel that there was a slight similarity to the Dragon Age II character creation method.

After you create your character you are unceremoniously dumped down a chute onto a rotting pile of bodies.  This is where you're character resurrects and you gain control.  Right off the bat I thought that the camera stick was a little stiff, but as I continued to play it certainly didn't detract noticeably.  Speaking of stiff, your character stands like he/she as a broom handle shoved-up their backsides.  That is to say: they stand quite awkwardly.  This was really glaring to me because the quality of the animation was pretty good, other than your characters stance.  Whether your walking or running or being smashed over the head with a huge club by a rock troll, the animations seem realistic enough... but I've never encountered a rock troll nor have I been whacked on the head by a club... so the animations could be way off.

This brings me to the combat.  The combat feels very fluid and a whole helluva lot like the Fable series.  Which isn't a bad thing, rather, I quite enjoyed it.  With one hit of the square button I would swing a long sword but by pressing the triangle I would pull out a fire-wreathed staff and really light the place up.  These two buttons are for equipping and using your primary and secondary weapons (respectively) so you can customize as you see fit.  Pulling L1 will immediately make your character pull out a shield (should he or she be equipped with one) and there's no waiting to finish animations as it's all rather instantaneous.  You can also dodge by holding the circle button and using the left stick.  The R1 button maps abilities but for the part of the demo that I played it had a spell mapped to it.  Pulling R2 toggles a stealth mode which allows you to sneak up on your enemies and (if you are equipped with daggers or chakrams) enable you to pull off a stealth kill.  The double dagger stealth kill was pretty brutal and I enjoyed it.

There were also a few small things that I took great pleasure in.  For starters there are boxes, crates, barrels, and the like which you can smash to gain gold and it really appealed to my base RPG desire to run-in somewhere smash and steal everything and leave nothing behind for the inhabitants.  There were also books and notes scattered about which revealed little stories or more of the main story.  I like little touches like that and I have no problem spending a great amount of time reading up on the lore and the history of the game world that I find myself in.  If what Ken Rolston has claimed is true then I will enjoy every minute of learning the 10,000 year history of Amalur.

The environments looked very colorful and while they reminded me of WoW and a few other games, they certainly had their own sense to them.  I didn't feel like anything was copied.  If something did feel as if I'd experienced it before, it still had enough of it's own character to it that I didn't loose immersion.  I really look forward to experiencing more of the this open-world game when it releases on February 7th.

He's a little pissed because he was resurrected only to lose his hearing 20 minutes later.

 I sent an email to both 38 Studios and Big Huge Games inquiring as to whether or not my experience had been reported by other users yet.  I will update this post if I receive anything back.  Meanwhile, make sure you jump on your console of choice and download the demo for Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning and see what all the fuss is about!

Have you played the demo yet?  Then make sure to let me know your thoughts...

UPDATE!:

My email to 38 Studios bore some fruit last night in the form of this email response:

"Hi, Kenny,

Thanks for playing the demo! Check out our Forum on reckoning.com (http://forums.reckoning.amalur.com/forumdisplay.php?17-General-Discussion) to post and/or read about related questions.

We hope you enjoy playing the full game as much as we enjoyed making it! (The full version, for what it's worth, will include the demo space but even better because it's been through Quality Assurance :)).

Happy gaming,

Big Huge Games/38 Studios LLC"

I am quite pleased with how quickly I received a response!  This certainly can put some worried minds at ease about the quality of the title at launch.  I had the pleasure of getting a little further into the demo this morning and again I only became more and more excited.  So excited that I'm going to post the links to three different places where you can pre-order!

-GameStop: here!
-Amazon: here!
-Best Buy: here!