When comparing Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning vs NieR: Automata, the Slant community recommends NieR: Automata for most people. In the question“What are the best games on Steam with a rich story?” NieR: Automata is ranked 11th while Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is ranked 59th. The most important reason people chose NieR: Automata is:
The combat in NieR: Automata is fantastic. It has a hack-and-slash feel to it, with an emphasis on agility and showy acrobatics. With the fluid and responsive controls, you can switch seamlessly from using swift attacks with your weapon to devastatingly strong attacks as you combo them together. You also use customizable ranged missile attacks from your personal robot pod, such as powerful laser beams or a giant hammer attack. It can be difficult to win battles sometimes, especially on the harder gameplay settings, but it's worthwhile to keep at it and watch yourself progress and improve.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Encourages exploration thanks to a massive game world
The world itself is absolutely massive, featuring two whole continents. There are dozens upon dozens of locations including a few giant, fully explorable cities. You are free to travel anywhere at will on the first continent, with the second one unlocking around mid-game. From there, you are free to travel between them. Getting around is easy, since you can fast travel to any location on the map that you've previously discovered. This makes exploring and discovering new things a breeze.
Going off the beaten path is often encouraged, with treasure chests, crafting reagents, out-of-the-way dungeons, small villages, and side quests everywhere. Everywhere you go, you'll be finding someone who needs your help or a new dungeon to explore. The sheer amount of content in the huge open world is incredible.
Pro Excellent and downright fun arcade style combat
The arcade style, fast-paced combat is where the game truly shines. Whether you're swinging a massive battle hammer, slicing with daggers, or throwing fireballs, it's just so incredibly responsive and smooth. Hits feel powerful in your hands, and the accompanying vibrant and colorful battle animations are great to watch. Additionally, you can dodge and block actively giving it some strategic depth as you're rolling between enemies and holding up your shield to soak spells.
Despite its fast-paced nature, there's no complexity weighing it down. Executing attacks and chaining combos is made super easy in just a few button presses. Enemies are auto targeted when they're in range, so you'll never miss the mark. That means you can hit an enemy in front of you, and just by attacking again, your character will spin around and hit the one behind you. It looks incredible, feels awesome, and is just straight up fun to play. The combat is easily one of the best aspects of this game.
Pro Fantastic and intriguing story will draw you in
You play as the "Fateless One", a character who was dead but brought back to life at the beginning of the game. With your second chance at life, you are now freed from the bonds of fate in a world controlled by destiny.
During your adventures, you meet many different factions and characters, some hostile and some friendly, but most have interesting stories to tell and quests for you to complete. Oftentimes these main quests branch off into many varied and interesting side quests which will lead to even more lore. Almost everywhere you step in the game world offers a new story of a village in peril or a lost treasure waiting to be discovered.
The story and lore itself are written by best selling fantasy author R.A. Salvatore. All the locations and characters were thus given an intense attention to detail that makes the world a deep and interesting place. Everything is interconnected, rather than just a bunch of lore that was hastily thrown together. While it may seem overwhelming at first, once you have a few hours under your belt, it's easy to become intrigued with this world, it's dynamic characters, and plethora of mysteries.
Pro Engaging, cleverly designed skill trees
There is no such thing as a bad build in KoA:R. The skill trees are constructed so well that literally every build is viable. Due to the fact you can respec at any time, you are always free to experiment and try something new.
For combat abilities, there are three main skill trees with the basic archetypes of warrior, mage, and rogue, but you are not locked into any particular tree. You can mix and match any skills from any tree to customize your own fighting style. If you want to be a sneaky rogue that carries a huge longsword or a warrior who casts spells, you can do it.
In addition to battle builds, you can also choose among skills like dispelling, lockpicking, blacksmithing, persuasion, etc. These non-combat skills will dynamically effect your interactions with the world. With dispelling, for example, you'll be able to loot hidden treasure chests that are protected with magic. With persuasion, you'll be given extra dialogue options such as convincing merchants to give you discounted goods.
Thanks to the flexibility and great design of the skill/ability trees, you will always be finding engaging and exciting ways to pummel your foes in combat and interact with the world.
Pro Exciting crafting with a personalized touch
You can craft your own armor, weapons, and potions. Reagents can be found by salvaging/disenchanting unwanted equipment or finding it out in the open world via gathering skills and looting. You can use recipes, but the most fun comes from randomly mixing and matching ingredients together to customize your own craftables. Once you've forged that perfect piece of armor or weapon, you can even give it whatever you name you want. Being able to custom build and name your crafted creations adds an exciting new layer to crafting and makes it feel very personalized.
Pro Fast-paced, action-packed combat
The combat in NieR: Automata is fantastic. It has a hack-and-slash feel to it, with an emphasis on agility and showy acrobatics. With the fluid and responsive controls, you can switch seamlessly from using swift attacks with your weapon to devastatingly strong attacks as you combo them together. You also use customizable ranged missile attacks from your personal robot pod, such as powerful laser beams or a giant hammer attack. It can be difficult to win battles sometimes, especially on the harder gameplay settings, but it's worthwhile to keep at it and watch yourself progress and improve.
Pro Unique storytelling with a real emotional impact
NieR: Automata's outlook on storytelling is incredibly special. To get the full experience, you have to run multiple playthroughs of the game, each of which offers a new experience and perspective. Your world view of the story events and characters expands drastically as you complete each playthrough, playing on your expectations to help you develop a deeper emotional bond with the protagonists and become invested in their plight.
Things take a real turn on your third playthrough, putting you on an emotional roller coaster all the way to the true ending. The plot twists and knocks on the fourth wall elevate the story to a truly unique place. Getting all the way to the very end can be a religious experience from how much heart and meaning you discover in the symbolism.
Pro It's got a hauntingly beautiful environment
NieR: Automata is set in a post-apocalyptic landscape after Earth has been overrun by hostile machines, and the artists really nailed what that would feel like. Abandoned and overgrown cities litter the landscape along with old refineries, graveyards, and eerie forests. When you add the beautiful soundtrack to the experience, it fills you with a bittersweet mix of loneliness and hope.
Pro Varied genre-spanning gameplay elements
NieR: Automata has different types of gameplay to keep things interesting. From the very start, you're on an on-rails bullet hell section, and then you switch over to the more traditional action RPG style of fast-paced combat. Things change up again not long after with some side-scrolling platforming from a 2D view. Later on in the story, there's a hacking mini-game where you navigate a tiny ship through a short puzzle, with the music changing to a charming retro sound to fit the theme and mood. This is a game that doesn't stay boxed in a single genre.
Pro An incredible amount of content
Outside of the main story, there's plenty of optional content to dive into. The side quests are the best way to get to know the characters and lore of the world, with some of them giving clever and subtle foreshadowing of the game's most critical events. There are also weapons to collect and upgrade, each of which offer nice little tidbits of lore after you get them to max level. And after reaching a certain point in the story, you get access to Chapter Select that lets you go back and replay whatever you want. You can easily spend 60+ hours exploring the world and still have much more to do.
Pro Gorgeous, ethereal soundtrack with amazing vocals
NieR: Automata's music is out of this world. It's so stunning and elegant in a way that nothing else can really live up to. The soundtrack manages to emotionalize the game through music, from the action-packed tracks with hard-hitting wind instruments and percussion, to the softer, somber songs that encapsulate the hauntingly beautiful environments and story moments you encounter. Vocals in the lore's indescribable language makes the music even more memorable, adding to the ethereal quality of the sound. This soundtrack is definitely one that you can go back to again and again without getting sick of it.
Cons
Con Some annoying aspects to navigation
There is no jumping in this game, making some areas annoying to navigate. Sometimes doing something simple like getting over a fence, small hill, or rock requires a long walk around it.
Con Not very challenging
With the exception of a few dungeon bosses on hard mode, the difficulty level is a bit on the low side. Most enemies pose no real threat, even in large numbers. One reason for this is that it's very easy to become overpowered. Even at lower character levels, the weapons and armor you can find or craft feel disproportionately strong.
Con No camera zoom
You cannot zoom the camera in or out. This can be disheartening when trying to look around, especially when trying to take in the view in some of the gorgeous areas of the game world.
Con No skill rearranging
In the most of the RPG games one can rearrange the order of skills for using while in this game there's no such thing. In whatever order the game puts them in the slots, that's what you get. Sometimes this is the cause of death of the character.
Con Limited open world
Even though NieR: Automata is technically an open world game, it doesn't always feel like it. It's more that there's a big open space in the center of the ruined city you explore, with branches that lead off to vastly different environments, like a desert, a village, and a few other places. These locations aren't that spacious, either, and it's a bit of a stretch to even imagine all of these places being so close together in the first place. It's not too much of an issue as long as you find the story and combat engaging enough.
Con Second playthrough can get repetitive
Once you get to Route B, your second playthrough, you may find that too much is the same. There are some big differences, such as the new way you get to see things play out, but a lot of it rehashes Route A, your first playthrough. There's a ton of hacking you have to do as well, which gets pretty boring after repeating it over and over again. But if you stick with it, Route C and onward are absolutely worth the time spent getting to that point.
Con Some boring fetch quests
The pacing gets messed up when you're forced to run certain fetch quests near the start of the game. This is somewhat forgivable after the fun and action-packed introductory level, but the quests themselves are still a drag to play through. Some of the side quests can also boil down to the same thing. Even though these quests give a lot of useful information about the world, they're not all that fulfilling, and you may dread having to repeat them when playing through the game again.
Con Buggy on PC
Some players complain about the game crashing, freezing, their save files mysteriously disappearing, and more. As of June 2018, over a year after the game's initial release, there is still no patch to fix these problems. Not everyone on PC will have these bugs, but it's still quite prevalent. If you continually run into issues, your best bet is to find a mod or play the console versions instead of waiting on an official patch that may never happen.