When comparing Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning vs Crashlands, the Slant community recommends Crashlands for most people. In the question“What are the best games on Steam with a rich story?” Crashlands is ranked 36th while Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is ranked 59th. The most important reason people chose Crashlands is:
For just the medium difficulty setting there is hours upon hours of content, and that's even if you skip all the side quests and just focus on the main story. Plus there are two harder difficulties to try and in the near future a tool will come out which will let you build your own adventures as well as play other people's.
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 Hours of content just in the main quest alone gives the player plenty to do
For just the medium difficulty setting there is hours upon hours of content, and that's even if you skip all the side quests and just focus on the main story. Plus there are two harder difficulties to try and in the near future a tool will come out which will let you build your own adventures as well as play other people's.
Pro Pleasing graphics that show off a well designed and polished game
The graphics look nice and you can tell time has been put into designing them. While not the most flashy, there is a certain style to the whole game that makes for a very cohesive experience.
Pro Pick up from your last save, no matter the device you are using, thanks to the built in cloud saving
Playable on Android, iOS and PC you're able to transfer the one game between multiple devices (on same or different operating systems) and take it with you anywhere you go. with a Butterscotch ID (the devs self implemented cloud save system).
Pro Excellent progression system where you never feel like you are grinding too much
Progression never feels sluggish or rushed, everything has a good pace to it from the farming of materials and grinding out the various components for the tons of items, to the incredibly unique combat/interaction system, it all blends well into a long gaming experience.
Pro Hundreds items to craft in a deep and varied crafting system that will keep the user busy for hours and hours
There are over 500 items that can be crafted in the game, giving the player quite a lot to experiment with and explore when it comes to crafting items.
Pro Great soundtrack that suits the humor and setting of the game quite well
A great mix of chill and energized music, that fits the setting of the game at all times. A pleasure to listen to on its own as well.
Pro Multiple game modes
Once you've finished the basic mode there's also a challenging and insane mode for replayability.
Pro Good writing
You don't need to read everything to enjoy the game but the writing is very good and really adds to the enjoyment.
Pro Lots of entertaining pop-culture references
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 Cloud saves not through Google services
An extra account will need to be used in order to take advantage of the cloud saving as it does not work with Googles solution to cloud saves. While this does allow for the cloud saves to work cross platform, people may not want to take the extra step to make a new account with Butterscotch Shenanigans.