If you still want to hunt bears and wolves after more than 100 hours of Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning, this expansion is perfect. Otherwise, rather not.
Fatesworn is the name of the brand new expansion for Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning and brings a few extra hours of gameplay after completing the main story. You go into battle against the god of chaos and his fanatical cult, forge new chaos weapons, enter chaos dungeons and fight chaos monsters there. The new story takes up a good six hours of your time, plus there are some new side quests to keep you busy for a while.
It all takes place in a new snowy zone with lots of cliffs, mountain peaks, medieval towns and fortresses. If you absolutely can’t get enough of Amalur and are done with the main story, Fatesworn may be worth your while – however, the expansion is nowhere near as great as it sounds at first.
Table of Contents
From one hundred to zero
You travel to the new game area Mithros, where you have to take on the new archfiend Telogrus and his crazy chaos cult. Sounds great, and at first glance it doesn’t look bad at all: Mithros offers great mountain and snow landscapes, some really picturesque new villages and towns, and brings a bit more visual variety to the game.
The voice actors are good, the environments great and the plot also sounds exciting at first: After your deeds as a Fate-less, the fabric of fate begins to unravel. Chaos manifests itself – and some devote themselves to this chaos.
But before you get to see any of it, you first have to kill the same bears and wolves that you have already spent a hundred hours fighting in the main game. Later, the creatures are also available in blue, then they are called polar wolves and polar bears, which doesn’t feel very much like the end game. Here and there lurk goblins and vagabonds and similar trash that you have known for years from the basic game. You have to play for quite a while before you finally come into contact with the chaos.
Then it turns out that Telogrus, the god of chaos after all, is just a guy in pink armour. You follow him into your first Chaos dungeon, where you capture your first Chaos weapon. This lasts about five minutes, then the dungeon ends, you lose the weapon again and start killing bears and wolves again. Super.
ABBA-Revival
Fatesworn holds off on its new chaos mechanic for far too long, then finally shows it to you very briefly, only to take it right back away. Then again generic monsters, far too long running paths and endless back and forth. Whereas in the base game you complete quite short, less complex dungeons, here you are sent criss-crossing through countless corridors and into every last nook and cranny.
A cave suddenly becomes filled to the last pixel with enemies, each of which you must hunt down before moving on. For many quests, you’ll run from A to B and back to A, only to be sent to B again. When you finally unlock the chaos mechanics properly, disillusionment sets in.
To make chaos dungeons visible in the first place, you level up a new ability. How good that the level cap for this has been raised from 40 to 50! The dungeons themselves look quite nice: Lots of purple, strange plants with lots of eyes and purple monsters like chaos spiders and chaos niskaru. So mostly old monsters in new colours. To be able to hurt these enemies, you have to forge chaos weapons.
These cover all weapon types in the game (chaos greatswords, chaos chakrams, chaos bows and so on) and are the only ones that penetrate the armour of the chaos monsters. That’s nice in itself, but there’s a catch: a standard Chaos weapon is too weak to take on the new final boss. You have to strengthen it by repeatedly dismantling and reforging it.
Grind instead of content
In order to increase the comparatively low damage effect of your chaos weapons, you must play as many chaos dungeons as possible. There you will find the resources with which you can make your bludgeon new and somewhat stronger again after you have dismantled it.
The trouble is, you won’t find the rest of the crafting ingredients, such as handles, rivets and other components, there. If you haven’t hoarded tons of materials (or gold for them) in the course of the game or simply never levelled up the blacksmith’s craft, you have a problem here. As an emergency solution, you can ask an NPC to upgrade your chaos weapon in exchange for resources from chaos dungeons. In our test, the helper upgraded our chaos chakrams from 166 to 169 damage points in exchange for 110,000 gold pieces. Groovy!
Through such chicanery and an annoying, put-on grind, Fatesworn creates something that has never existed in Kingdoms of Amalur before: Boredom. Here they try to get as much extra playing time out of it as possible with very little really new content and features. Even if you don’t mind this and are just happy to run through a few new dungeons and collect homeopathically dosed weapon upgrades, the gameplay suffers from the lack of polish.
Technically lame
During the test, we repeatedly noticed large and small bugs. Sometimes we are supposed to activate some magic cubes by their symbols in the right order, but the symbols disappear into the cubes and are only partially visible or not visible at all, which makes the puzzle an ordeal.
Many times the main quest only progresses when we read letters or books. However, the game only registers them as read when we laboriously activate them from the endlessly fiddly inventory list and not when we read them while picking them up in the game world. In a chaos dungeon, the boss monster waits in front of the so-called chaos node. You have to destroy this to finish the dungeon.
In the boss fight, we accidentally destroy the node with an area attack and thus immediately close the dungeon without harming a single hair on the boss monster’s head. Also great: The new Chaos dungeons have no music in the test and not even any ambient sounds, but remain completely silent. Bug or feature? I don’t know, but we don’t hear the “15 minutes of new music by Grant Kirkhope” from the press announcement.
While the original soundtrack was one of the great plus points of the base game, nothing of the few musically accompanied moments of Fatesworn remains in the ear anyway. Thus, even for the purchase price of a modest 18 euros, this expansion is no great revelation, unless you have completely played through Re-Reckoning from front to back and are desperate for some very mediocre new content.
Editor’s Verdict
This was quite obviously an attempt to squeeze as much extra game time as possible out of relatively little content with a small team and low budget: At times an unnecessary amount of back and forth and overly long running paths, at other times exaggeratedly large masses of enemies, most of which are simply old creatures in new colours. None of this plays as smoothly as the content from the base game, nor is it particularly well thought out: If you haven’t hoarded any crafting materials and are dependent on the blacksmith NPC, you’re screwed in the grind for stronger chaos weapons. In general, I find “dismantle your weapon and reforge it” as a grind mechanic very boring, unimaginative and a bit cheeky. Extending the new level cap by ten counters to then make the new ability to discover the chaos dungeons practically compulsory isn’t really that great either.
After all: Mithros looks really great, the designs of the chaos weapons are also quite chic. The German voice actors are also competent. But completely silent dungeons are just as unforgivable for me as fights against some wolves and giant rats, after I have just completed a game with around 100 hours of playtime and supposedly find myself in the endgame. At least make it zombie wolves mutated by chaos. Or wolves with chaos creatures riding on them! Just something that is at least somewhat new and creative. Just painting the creatures blue and calling them ice wolves is just boring. I’m a very big fan of Kingdoms of Amalur, but you can give this expansion to the bunnies.
