*no spoilers*

Last night I played the downloadable 60-minute PS3 demo for 38 Studios, Electronic Arts, and Big Huge Games’s Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. Lucky for me, conversations and pausing the game stopped the clock, so the demo ended up being closer to 2 hours than 1.

I am a girl who prefers to play games that are mildly challenging and not “scream at the television, throw the console out the window” type games. If there is a chance that I will die multiple times in the fulfilling of a single quest or overcoming of an obstacle, I will more than likely put the game away and never take it up again. Life is complicated enough without injecting that same strife into games, what I use as an escape. Down time.

Reckoning gave me the best of both worlds, a challenge as I learned how to manipulate my character, and an engaging storyline as I interacted with the environments and characters therein. While the character design and character interactions pale in comparison with that of Dragon Age: Origins, the game gave me enough options to make the character and game play experience my own. Reckoning is also more of an action-based adventure game than a point and click, but not so difficult that I found myself unable to get a handle on it. I also liked the fact that there were special moves you could learn, and that switching between using your primary, secondary or even magical weapons while in a battle was rather seamless.

It is a beautiful game. The controls are not overly complicated. The transition to battle is seamless, although there seems to be a bit of a hiccup when shifting to an NPC interaction, and the “skill tree” allows you more intricate advancement of your character’s skills than that of DAO. The voice acting and music also fit well with the game, making me wish all Anime would invest the same time and effort into their dubbing projects…. *ahem* But that is a different post altogether.

Reckoning also allows you to choose your own destiny (brawler, rogue, sorcerer), or intertwine them as your skill tree allows. You can also commit crimes, allow guards to take you to jail or resist arrest, or serve your sentence or break out of prison. Keep in mind that if you break out, or resist arrest, you will no longer be able to easily interact with people in that particular hamlet, making it difficult to complete quests.

The first portion of the demo was setup like a mild tutorial, which are usually so tedious! Thankfully, this one was not! The tutorial aspect allowed me to not only get a handle on the controls, but to toy with the different skills of future destinies, making it easier for me to decide to focus on the ‘rogue’ destiny for my character. The NPC that followed me around at the first, also used succinct interactions with my environment to clue me in to the fact that I was not your average character….

Reckoning is definitely worthy of more in-depth play, so I will be eager to see the disc come in the mail from GameFly so that I can give it the thorough exploration it deserves.