Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning

While this ambitious and expansive role-playing game (RPG) labored to find an audience when it first arrived in 2012, its small but devoted base of followers spent subsequent years pining for more. Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning isn't really more (though it will be getting an original expansion sometime after launch) so much as it's a lightly refurbished take on the original. But it's still a treat for people who want a resolutely single-player old-school role-playing game. Featuring an enormous amount of voiced dialogue, great writing, and grand world-building, it's a transportive experience, successfully delivering a busy fantasy world that feels alive and bursting with possibility. It's also devoted to providing players with choice -- not just in dialogue and in what tasks you take on, but also in how you want to play. Players can grow their character in a variety of ways, and experiment with multiple play styles ranging from sneaky to strategic to brutish. And while the size and scope of the game is massive, there's barely any noticeable slowdown or technical hiccups, regardless of the platform. The Switch version runs just as well as the more powerful consoles, with only a few muddy textures here and there that remind you of the age of the original game itself.

But be warned: this is a very grindy and loot-driven game. Players will spend hours exploring every last nook and cranny of each area looking for treasure chests, hidden caches, and plants from which to harvest reagents while picking fights with every creature they see in order to eke out as many experience points as they can in their slow quest to level up. This is the sort of Zen action experience that some RPG fans crave, but others will understandably find it a bit repetitive and dull. This rerelease is, in all likelihood, a means of gauging which side of the fence most gamers fall on: whether there's still a place for single-player old-fashioned RPGs with grand scope and vision to thrive in a world where many modern players are looking for social and competitive online gaming experiences. Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning gives a second life to a good game that never got its due when first launched, but which could potentially grow into something more now.