I loved Skyrim.

I promise, this is relevant.

I loved it despite it's Elder Scrolls, which I mostly don't like at all. That game was really something. Sure, it had several awkward moments, but as a whole, it was really lovely. Still not my favourite, but definitely top 10.

When I heard about Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, I was pretty excited. Surely, a game of such pedigree is bound to be amazing?

Let's take a closer look at who is responsible for Kingdoms of Amalur.

Ken Rolston, the lead designer of two Elder Scrolls games, Morrowind and Oblivion, was the executive producer.

R.A. Salvatore, a rather popular fantasy author, created the universe.

Todd McFarlane, creator of Spawn, was responsible for designing the visual side.

Sounds wonderful, isn't it? Oh my, such names can't bring shame to this RPG, those people being so familiar with the genre, right?

Wrong.

Morrowind and Oblivion are perhaps the two worst games in the Elder Scrolls series. Oblivion in particular made me hate it with passion.

Bob Salvatore is guilty of unleashing Drizzt Do'Urden upon us, as well as giving painful birth to several other mediocre at best series of fantasy novels.

I actually love Spawn, but Todd McFarlane definitely revealed what game he enjoys the most: World of Warcraft.

Once I realised that, my excitement diminished. When I actually started playing, it vanished, to be replaced with disappointment.

I got greeted by two gnomes pulling a body cart, just like in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I knew they were gnomes because I've seen them before. They looked very much like in World of Warcraft, except their bodies were slightly more proportionate and hair had normal colours.
They were discussing my remarkably well preserved body in a perverted fashion for a few minutes, said that I'm lucky! Right. Because being dead is a massive stroke of luck. After that, they dumped me into a cadaver hole.

Well, it turned out I'm not quite dead yet, again, just like in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I woke up on the top of a mountain of rotting corpses and with nauseatingly sploshy noises tumbled down to the floor. I walked out of the room, half-expected to be whacked repeatedly on the head and tossed right back onto the corpse mountain. No such luck.

I encountered more gnomes, looking very Warcraft-y, killed bad guys with a sword, a bow, daggers and some magic, in that order. I wasn't allowed to use magic before certain point in the prologue, you see? Thou MUST try everything, or ELSE!

I found out that apparently, this one nutty gnome tried to conquer Death itself and I was his only success! Yay, I'm a special snowflake! So unexpected, especially if Bob Salvatore had anything to do with this game! Anyway, the nutter told me, I must run away, far away, to ensure I survive. He didn't bring me back so I could die again. But first, I must go talk to a Fateweaver, his friend.

And so, the adventure begins.

Character development is based on talent trees, pretty standard fare for contemporary RPG games, be they single or multiplayer. In addition, once every several levels you get to choose a theme for your tier level, increasing your abilities in magic, fighting or general roguishness. On higher levels you can combine two aspects, effectively multiclassing as any combination of the three archetypes. It's nothing original or particularly exiting.

As I mentioned before, I believe Todd McFarlane is an avid WoW player. As I travelled around the world, I could actually point to WoW locations that look suspiciously like what I was seeing ingame. Yeah, the world looks lush and bright and colourful, which is a nice contrast to most contemporary games that look as if seen through shit-coloured glasses, but this is a bit too much. The oddly-angled, blocky architecture, the oversized (and also oddly-angled) furniture, that little tinted mist hovering above certain zones, meant to set the mood. I'm not describing WoW but Kingdoms of Amalur. I think the intention was for this game to look a bit comic book-like. Unfortunately, it ended up looking pretentious and dated, with hints of a rip-off.

Character models fail in every way as well. From hair looking like blocks of wood carved into vague shapes of hairstyles to lack of facial expressions, every character you meet falls straight into Uncanny Valley, much like ventriloquist dummies or Chucky from Child's Play series.

Remember when I said I love Skyrim? Playing this game I had constant feeling of deja vu. Methods of interaction with the world are cloned from Skyrim in the most shameless, blatant way possible, right down to lockpicking minigame. This wouldn't be an issue, if Reckoning was running on a Creation Engine. But no. It's a Big Huge Engine, written specifically for this game.

Other games make bigger or smaller appearances in KoA. Fighting feels a lot like Fable, blatantly so, even. The part of UI you look upon the most is straight up lifted from those games as well. Incorporating an idiot-retardant auto-targeting system dumbed the game very much, at times making it nigh unplayable. When combat turns to clusterfuck of foes mobbing at the PC from all sides, the target jumps randomly from one bad guy to another.

Conversation wheel, so familiar after Mass Effect and Dragon Age II, pops up every now and then during conversations, but only if there's a certain amount of options to be taken. If there are more, good old fashioned scroll down list appears instead. Let me remind you, your character is mute. Even Mortal Kombat cameos here, with Fatalities incorporated as quicktime events.

Inventory, ability the like screens look unfinished and unprofessional, with their black background and occasional big red buttons, textured to look like stones. I find it somewhat ironic, because usually, big red buttons are associated with all sorts of emergencies, alarms and disasters, all of which words could be applied to Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning.

What the developers did, basically, is they took the elements of other games they found appealing, stitched them together creating some sort of Frankenstein's monster, dressed it in WoW-coloured tutu and made it dance.

The epic, masterfully crafted story in the rich, fantastic world the game promised to deliver, is nowhere to be found, buried under a multitude of generic, MMO-like quests of "bring me 10 items X". When finally it is found, it's not nearly as epic as one expects, and I blame Bob Salvatore. I read most of his books, during my bouts of literary masochism, and it is everything I'm used to getting from him. Cliché upon cliché, multitude of Mary Sues and utter naivety fill this supposed fresh spin on classic fantasy setting. A cliché here and there is not necessary a bad thing, but when handled with ham fists of Bob, the setting turns into a trainwreck, just like the gameplay did.

And yet, with all its flaws, Reckoning gave me a sense of nostalgia. It made me long for those sweeter, simpler times, when I was just getting into fantasy and sci-fi and everything I read and saw was amazing. When I was still wide-eyed and unspoiled by mediocrity and half-assed efforts made in my preferred genres of books, games and movies.

This game is like lost little puppy that followed me home and looks at me with its huge, innocent eyes, begging to be taken care of. My heart breaks and I cave, take the puppy home. But, at the end of the day, I need to start looking for a good person who will take the puppy and love it. Someone, who perhaps enjoys books by Bob Salvatore and doesn't mind that the puppy pissed all over their favourite games.