Kingdoms of Amular: Reckoning is an upcoming action RPG being developed by 38 Studios and set to release on the 7th of February here in the U.S. The demo for the game just released, so here are some of my thought on it in a sort of preview for the game.

First off, the story seems to be very interesting. You are either a human or an elf, involved in a struggle against an old race of creatures that were once allies, but now under a new leader have become your enemies. To make matters worse, while your allies are being whittled down, the enemy’s numbers only increase, because you cannot completely kill them, they are sort of imortal or something along that line. You begin as a blank slate, finding yourself in a pile of dead bodies deep in a laboratory of sorts. You make your way out of the the castle, and help the workers fight against the enemies who are attacking the place. There is more story involved in the demo, but I don’t want to spoil it as I found it very interesting.

The gameplay is action RPG, with stealth, melee, and ranged aspects. You can build your character in whichever style you prefer. I found the melee combat to be a little rough, but extremely satisfying. You can block and dodge enemy attacks, and the enemy A.I. seemed to be pretty sharp, I really had to work hard in some of the battles against multiple enemies. The ranged combat was a little less interesting in my opinion, you don’t have a reticle or any way to aim like that, once you get the center of your screen close to an enemy it locks onto it for the bows, and seems to do somewhat the same for magic combat. I found the little magic I learned in the demo to be quite fun, and useful in a fight. There seems to be a decently deep skill tree, and leveling system, though it is hard to tell in just a demo. The fate shift aspect of the combat I didn’t fully understand, and found the key mapping involved to be cumbersome, though it likely can be changed in the options and remapped to an easier to access key. I found the gameplay hit all the right spots for me, I thoroughly enjoyed every moment of it.

Graphically the game looks very nice. The world is very bright and vibrant. There were a number of graphical glitches in the demo, such as your shield being inside of you in the menus when equipped, and a characters hand was not lined up correctly on a cart handle, but other than that it looked very nice, and didn’t seem to be extremely graphically intensive. I suspect that the reason for the glitches and such would be that this is likely an older build of the game, and should be ironed out before release.

Overall, this is shaping up to be a very promising game, and has solidly moved onto my radar, and possibly may be a game I pick up shortly after release, which is something I have never done before. 2012 looks like it may be the year of the RPG for me, and it if is this definitely will be a mainstay for me.