Recently I completed Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. My final play-time on Hard difficulty was 128:56:36. That time includes both The Legend of Dead Kel and the Teeth of Naros downloadable content. As always, possible spoilers ahead.
I thought Amalur was a fun game. The world sort of grew on me after awhile when I finally started recognizing the various races and learning bits about the lore of the world. A lot of this lore comes from doing the various faction quest lines. Of those questlines my favorite was - unsurprisingly the Scholia Arcana. Who doesn't like chasing after a hot all-powerful sorceress? The other factions questlines were also pretty enjoyable. The Forsworn questline contained an NPC voice by Laura Bailey, one of my favorite voice actresses. She keeps popping up in games when I least expect it (I'm looking straight at Final Fantasy XIII and Final Fantasy XIII-2 where she voices Serah Farron). Every time I look at her IMBDB page I see something she's in that I've played and had no clue.
Anyway, while the main questline and the faction questlines were fun the other quests felt like filler. A few of them would turn out to be rather interesting but for the most part they were just busy work. Unfortunately, though, a few quests in the game sort of forced me into positions where my character had to do things she wouldn't normally do. I'm not super hardcore about role-playing my characters, but I still have some idea of things they would and wouldn't do. Most of the game is fine in this regard but there were a couple instances where I was put into a position where my choices were do something my character would never do or skip the quest entirely. Being put in that situation sucks when it would have been very simple to provide alternative methods of completing the objectives. I only ran into this issue once or twice, though, so it wasn't a huge issue.
Combat was about as hit and miss as the quests were. While combat as a Sorcerer remained fun for a large part of the game, it did eventually get boring. It's no coincidence that boredom set in right around the time I acquired the Meteor and Tempest spells. Those two spells do tremendous base damage. With the addition of gear that increases damage from all sources and elemental damage it becomes possible to one-shot virtually any enemy. I've read others who have maximized their gear and the numbers that can be achieved are staggering. I didn't bother doing this and I still slaughtered everything in one-shot except large creatures.
By far the biggest problem with the game, though, is the world itself just feels dead. This is a typical problem I've had with these open-world games like Fallout, Oblivion/Skyrim, Dragon's Dogma and now this. Due to the game being so large and open the player tends to run into people who look like that one person two quests back or hear the same annoying voice over and over. None of the people really react to the world around them or acknowledge anybody exists outside of their little quest hub. It is particularly bad in this game since it isn't quite as grand as a Bethesda game.
Don't mistake the preceding paragraph as an indictment against the game, though. I really enjoyed it. I wouldn't have spent just shy of 129 hours into it otherwise. The main quest was rather interesting and touched on some pretty cool themes. I liked the idea that everybody is bound by fate except the Fateless One. I also found it interesting that if the Fateless One altered the fate of somebody who was slated to die, that person also became Fateless.
I also have to give the game credit for how it handled Alyn Shir. The game really sets her up as the obvious friend secretly working against the Fateless One and/or using the Fateless One to further her own master's goals. The latter is partly true but she's not working with the enemy and she doesn't betray the Fateless One. I fell for it, though. I suspected she would reveal herself to be Tirnoch manipulating the Fateless One. While Tirnoch was manipulating the Fateless One it wasn't through Alyn Shir.
The DLC for the game was fun and provided many hours of content. The Legend of Dead Kel is the longer and probably more enjoyable of the two although Teeth of Naros was also good and still took awhile to complete. Unfortunately both DLC have some annoying quirks like broken quests or quests that are classified wrong causing clutter in the quest log. This doesn't impact the overall enjoyability of the content, though. There are many hours of fun to be had from both DLC.
Speaking of bugs, though, they are, unfortunately, an an issue with the game. The game really needed a bug-fix patch to iron out some of the problems. I personally ran into an issue with one quest that meant I could not complete it. Any time I would interact with a certain quest object in the game world my Xbox would crash. I also read about a bug in one of the main quests that occurs late in the game. Users who experience this particular bug are unable to proceed with the game. Fortunately I didn't encounter that one since I was like 100 hours in or something when I completed the quest.
In addition to various quest progression issues there are also issues with quest items. There are numerous items that remain marked as quest items long after the quest is complete. These items remain in your inventory. Fortunately the vast majority of these do not take up inventory space (although some do). It adds to the clutter, though, and by late in the game it gets old having to scroll through 20 items that are no longer necessary but can't be disposed of.
There are other minor issues like chests showing up on the map outside any area accessible to the player. I also recall at least one locked door to which there is no key. From time to time some of the dialog right in the middle of a conversation with an NPC will suddenly sound completely different. Usually it sounds like a different voice actor although in one or two cases it sounds like they forgot to apply a voice filter to make the dialog sound like the rest.
Overall, though, despite it's problems there was nothing significant wrong with the game. The game just needed more polish. One more patch could have fixed up a lot of the problems. It's unfortunate that 38 Studios collapsed after the game's release meaning it's unlikely to ever see another patch. I would also like to see a sequel with some more polish and care spent ensuring some of the more annoying things are eliminated. The gameplay itself was fun and there are some interesting themes underlying the story.