Matthew Rodriguez

For its time, this game was ground breaking. It achieved a cult following and now almost a decade later, the game has been re-released in a near identical state as it was released in. Unfortunately, this game has not aged well. Button inputs are very laggy- sometimes having to wait almost a full second between pressing a button and the start of a character animation. This is made worse for those playing with slower weapons and heavy armor. The new difficulty that was supposed to make this game actually challenging for a change was implemented in the laziest way possible. Making every enemy a damage sponge while cutting your damage potential in half and doubling damage received makes the game harder. Sure. For the first few hours. Then it just makes combat take slightly longer. That's it. That's not "more challenging" it's more tedious than anything. I would comment on what else they added to the game but there's nothing. The graphics are not remastered. It just looks like they changed color filters and called it a day. The game struggles to consistently output 30fps so I don't know why 4K support was a selling point for the "remaster". So what are we left with? A game that used to hold up as a great Western RPG with innovative combat. Nowadays, nothing in KoA is innovative. Most RPGs allow the ability to respec. The combat, while being the strong point, gets extremely tedious and boring in comparison to newer titles. And the narrative elements... Here comes the hot take: It's AWFUL! Even if you read old reviews that praised this game, Almost no praise went to the story itself. For good reason too. Every NPC just exists to dump lore on you or send you on boring fetch quests. There's hundreds of hours of side missions in this game. I played through about 50 of them before stopping completely. They are all the same and none of it is memorable. In fact, none of the characters are either. I couldn't tell you the names of more than a few NPCs in the entire game. Oh and the "thousands of years worth of lore"written by RA Salvatore? Boring drivel. Nothing about the story is engaging. If you skip every bit of dialogue in the game, you still won't miss anything. Don't even get me started on inventory management. It's some of the worst I've ever experienced in a game. Clunky menu navigation to access anything, stupidly limiting carry space unless you glirch the game, and all that does is discourage looting in a game with lots of gear to try out. It's counter intuitive. Well at least they polished the bugs for this remaster, right? Wrong. The same performance issues and bugs from the original have made it to this version. Not small issues either. I'm talking about quests soft locking due to bugs, enemies becoming invulnerable and getting HP reset if they go too far from their spawn points, bugged vendors that allow you to duplicate any item in the game, and even endgame abilities that simply don't work as intended. I understand the nostalgia factor. People with fond memories of this game likely love being able to play it again. But 5 stars?! Really?! These are reviews. Tell it like it is. Not how you want it to be. This is a cash grab. Almost no effort was put into this "remaster". They just wanted to charge full price for a 9 year old game because they knew their "cult following" would eat it up. It seems they were correct. This is mediocre at best. The combat isn't enough to save it but it does save it from me giving it 1 star.