14 DAY TRIAL // Re-Reckoning was a successful rerelease, at least for those nostalgic or looking for an old school RPG. The Fate edition, promising a brand new DLC of the game went somewhat under the radar, but now the time has come to embark on fresh adventures. Unfortunately, the new is as stale as they come, and you are better off staying away from it.
To save you time we can say from the beginning that the new Fatesworn expansion is short, bland, lacking anything new or original and can be interesting only for those who did not get tired of the combat system from the base game. It adds a couple of hours of gameplay that feel just as empty and uninspired like the new region they take you to, Mithros.
In order to face the new menace represented by the rising Telogrus, the God of Chaos you have to have finished the base game and the previous DLC. As an incentive to embark on a new quest to save the world the level cap is raised from 40 to 50. Each new level comes with three extra ability points that can be invested in one of the three ability trees. But since there are no new core abilities of destinies, you can either diversify your talents by adding points to the ability trees that you neglected before.
Skills wise you get a new one called Vision of Chaos. Although unlocked pretty quick, this new skill does not do anything other than help you identify the Rifts and Chaos Portals spread around Mithros. The highest tier ability will make all of these portals visible on the map so you can hunt them down and spend some hours closing them without any connection to the main story.
To tackle the new challenges, you also receive some new equipment and new powers. Most of them are not more powerful than the endgame items you already have, but they will be necessary to defeat some of the new foes you will encounter, since their health is protected by an invisible chaos armor. This extra gimmick raises though another issue: the limited inventory space. If you were struggling with inventory space, now it will be impossible to manage the quantity of your items without selling some of the rare and unique pieces you have already collected.
But the new struggle is not really worth it. Even if you are a fan of the original game, the new are heavily inspired by Skyrim will prove to be a disappointment. The quests are uninspired and most of them are fillers included to justify the few extra hours of gameplay. For example, you will be tasked to recover some papers in order to find out that the person you have stolen them from has been the rightful owner from the beginning. The biggest problem is not the lack of originality, but the fact that in order to finish this simple task you will have to make six trips among three NPCs.
Technically and visually the new region pales compared to the ones from the original game. Basically, most of the monsters from Mithros are tougher versions of the creatures you already encountered, most often with the very same skins. Since it is a DLC we did not expect new graphics, but some new skins and creature designs would have made Fatesworn feel fresh and worth investing time in.
As things stand the new DLC feels more of a hastily put together remix of things already seen and experienced in Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning. Although the gameplay aged well and it can still be fun, Fatesworn fails in providing any extra motivation to spend more time in the game. The fetch quests are clearly fillers, the creatures are the same with higher stats, and entire experience screams lack of originality or attention.
We cannot really speak about good intentions that failed, since the new content is worse than the original ones, which were not so great to begin with. If you felt the original game having too much of an MMO flavor for a single player RPG, the new DLC will do nothing else than wind you up even more. Re-Reckoning would have been better left alone as a remaster without the promise to add new things just to make a quick cash grab.
Conclusion
Fatesworn although short, is much longer than it needed to be. It cannot be recommended even for hardcore Amalur fans, because they are better off doing some other unfinished tasks in the world, rather than wasting time with closing chaos rifts.
Review code provided by the publisher.
