Review: 'Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning' blazes its own magical trail

With big-name help, locally developed RPG seeks to set itself apart from 'Skyrim'

So why is it the world of “Kingdoms” isn't more engaging? Maybe it's too much to ask every video game to make you forget you're playing one, but the atmosphere of “Kingdoms” doesn't immerse you in its world as much as it could. The colortones, animation style, the “bounciness” of it all, never let you forget you're playing a game. The races, locations and imagery feel vaguely familiar, harvested from a few centuries of fantasy literature into a hodgepodge that doesn't quite feel like enough to exist as a world on its own. It's hard to get “scared” when you're playing “Kingdoms” because the stakes simply don't feel that high.

“Epic” is a far too overused word in today's culture, due largely in part to the Internet's tendency to beat a linguistic dead-horse into particulate dust. However, afficianados of fantastical fiction and games crave for their adventures to be “epic” by definition. The sheer amount of things you can do and the ways you can do them in “Kingdoms” is certainly of epic proportions, even if the atmosphere in Amalur leaves something to be desired.