KoA: Reckoning - The most accessible RPG ever @ CNET

Three of CNET's editors, Dan Ackermann, Scott Stein, Jeff Bakalar have joined together to pen an article on this theme. Here's Scott Stein's take on it:

Amalur gets the most important part right: the game is, indeed, easier and more direct in its pick-up-and-play style than any RPG I've recently played outside of Zelda. The action feels like any hack-and-slash game, but that's far preferable to any sense of simulated combat where I tend to get lost in the weeds. The world, with its various main and subquests, unfolds in a labyrinth of subplots. The very, very deep lore, crafted by a fantasy novelist R.A. Salvatore, has problems escaping its own genre force field. Enthusiasts may not mind, but after so many conversations with random townsfolk about the epic history of the Fae, my eyes started to glaze over. For once, I'd prefer a game that somehow balanced its epic lore encyclopedias with a compelling dramatic pull in the here and now (the original Star Wars game does the best job in that regard, perhaps because much of the tangled lore hadn't been written yet). Reckoning succeeded in sucking me in with its interface and design, not by its strength of storytelling.