Kingdoms of Amalur Switch Review - Exploration in your hands!

By Sam Coles: 

If you know me personally or on social media, you would know that I have a new love for Nintendo’s latest portable hybrid The Switch. It is a fantastic companion console when I want to take a break from my main consoles, where I can cuddle up in my bed and explore a different world. Kingdoms of Amalur got a fresh coat of paint recently on the PS4 and Xbox One last year, however we Switch owners had to wait for a bit for the portable experience. How does it fair on The Switch? Really well, although when it first came out there were some framerate and image clarity issues, but I will get into more detail later. 

The game takes place in the titular kingdom where you play as a fateless one, you start off dead or so one thinks. However, you bend fate and rise from a pile of corpses, and you must seek out the Fate Weavers to find out what is going on and why you survived. It turns out that you are what the Fate Weavers deem as “Fateless”, which means you can bend fate to your will which basically breaks the laws of time and fate. This revelation gets the attention of a hostile outfit called the Tuatha who are interested in utilising your fate bending powers. The story is nothing particularly groundbreaking as it is once again another chosen one set up in fantasy, but the world itself is great with its background lore.  

Now let’s get to the gameplay and to put it simply it is fantastic, the combat is easily a highlight as it takes inspiration from more action focused games such as Devil May Cry or God of War. It’s not anywhere near as complex as those games with their combat, but it is basic and functional with its weight and brutality. You feel every swing of a sword, axe, dagger and staff as you shoot fire to turn your enemies into ashes.  

What is great about this combat system is that you can mix and match combos, as you have a primary and secondary weapon which you can use with the X or Y button. This is great as you can mix great sword swings with quick jabs of daggers, or combine magical staffs with warhammers. The combat is really good as it never gets boring, as the game encourages you to experiment with different weapons and combinations.  

This doesn’t just apply to combat but to your classes too, you can mix and match your classes to make effective and interesting combos. Do you want to be a sneaky thief that shoots lighting out your hands? You can do that; you want to be a hulking warrior that is also adept with magical staffs you can also do that. It is a very flexible system where it keeps the combat fresh, it never gets boring the combat and it is easily one of the best combat systems in an action RPG.  

The exploration aspect of the game is good not the best, but think of the world structure on the same lines of Fable with a sprinkle of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Which is very ironic as the lead designer of Oblivion worked on this game, which makes some of the gameplay design choices make more sense. Anyway, the game is open world, well sort of but it is more linear in structure, so going off the beaten path isn’t as common. Don’t get me wrong it isn’t a corridor like Dragon Age II, as it is very much an open-ended game world but you can’t create your own path to a destination as you are very much on a set path.  

Now to the meat and potatoes of this review, how the game runs on the Nintendo Switch and it works rather well. Let me get the negative aspects out the way first, when the game first launched the framerate was all over the place especially during combat, but fortunately they have fixed that via patches. The other issues were image quality, again at launch the game’s image clarity was rather blurry and fuzzy which again has now been fixed with updates. Since the updates Kingdoms of Amalur is a captivating game and it works really well on Switch, the pick up and play nature fits in Amalur’s gameplay and world. It feels fantastic to be led in bed, with the room dimly lit and just explore as you are snuggled up under the covers.  

Kingdoms of Amalur Re-Reckoning on Switch is my new favourite way to play one of the best, and underrated RPGs from 2012. If you have a Switch this is a must play for Nintendo’s portable hybrid.