WARNING! I spent almost 200 hours on this.
Well, that's just the choice I make. Kingdoms of Amalur is packed with some 200 quests, of which 80% of them are side ones, some are fun depending on your taste, though most of them just boil down to kill-this-dude and fetch-me-that kind of stuff. Luckily, the game world is just so beautiful that the grinding and boring tasks are bearable at least for the first half of the campaign. The game rewards exploration and have plenty of unique and set items for the loot junkies. The incredibly vast landscape is divided into forests, plains, deserts and swamps, which makes up a lot of room for quite a good variety of creatures that are well animated. Watching them die is also fun :)
Character abilities and skills are not unfamiliar to the typical gamer, though the combat techniques are a fresh take. There's just this one thing I'm baffled with here, that is, the dialogue. There are tons and tons of spoken dialogue, like over 1000 lines with hundreds of NPCs, and they're all well-acted! So, what's not to like? Because it's just so much lore and backstories it's creepily overwhelming until a point when you realize you get sick of it... they still have new things to say! In terms of production value, this aspect is insane. If you've played Mass Effect and know what I mean, the amount of dialogue here is times 3.
But even with all the good points, the gameplay still stretches too unnecessarily long for me to leave a satisfying impression. This is a game that seriously tests your idleness level, be warned.
KingLim