Having just recently finished the approximately 1-hour demo for Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, I would like to official request the last hour of my life back.

It isn’t that the game is bad, per say, it is just another action-based roleplaying game that fails to draw you in.

After some pretty basic character creation, we find that we are dead, brought back to life, and now are free to roam the world to collect plants and complete quests of the standard fare. Even the cinematic, while better than anything I could personally create, was just blah at best.

I don’t know if I’m a bit jaded these days or not, but there are a million story-driven, dialogue wheel roleplaying games. If you are going to follow the lead, you need to do something to make your game stand out from the rest. While the graphics are pretty good, the music is rather uninspiring. Even the voice overs seemed out of sync, and the animations didn’t always match what the characters were saying.

Unfortunately, it isn’t like you get to experience a lot of the story demo, and what you do see is rather bland. The character development seems traditional and I was presented the option between a warrior, mage, or thief class before the demo’s end. The combat was responsive and I did enjoy slicing up the dozen or so enemies that I faced.

However, if the purpose of the demo was to get me to purchase the game, it didn’t work. The 2.8 GB demo was downloaded, installed, and deleted in a single afternoon. The one saving grace is that R.A. Salvatore created the lore and Todd McFarlane did a lot of the artwork. Every geek worth his salt knows these two names, but it won’t be enough to make this sleeper a hit.

The rumor is that the developers plan to expand the world of Amalur into a full-fledged MMO. If they take the Bioware route of attaching some raiding and PvP to a single player RPG, the MMO industry will officially be doomed.

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