As the brainchild of artist Todd McFarlane, writer R.A. Salvatore, and “Elder Scrolls III and IV” lead designer Ken Rolston, “Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning” has an impressive pedigree that sets high expectations. “Reckoning” is meant to be the launching point for a vast new fantasy universe, and though it doesn’t serve that purpose as well as 38 Studios wants, it provides a lengthy and entertaining — if sometimes flawed — experience.

“Reckoning” takes place in a section of the world of Amalur known as The Faelands. Though it follows the “Elder Scrolls” formula of dumping tons of side quests and faction quests onto the player, it’s not an open world in the way of Bethesda’s RPGs. Instead, the game is structured like an MMO, funneling you from zone to zone by way of various quest lines. Environments lean heavily toward cheery, oversaturated forests at first, but eventually open up into a variety of canyons, swamps, and mountains.

Areas tend to be fairly self-contained because of this layout, which allows the story threads for each quest hub to grow and climax in an entertaining (if predictable) way. Each area is huge and full of secrets, and there’s fairly strong motivation to return after you’ve already solved the local population’s problems.

In addition to hidden treasures and bonus dungeons unconnected to sidequests, each area features a number of lore stones — objects that provide a bit of back story on Amalur. While the history lessons aren’t necessarily enthralling, if you find every lorestone in an area you will get a powerful permanent boost to your stats. Certain quest lines provide similar permanent stat boosts, ensuring that thorough gamers will become increasingly godlike as the game progresses.

“Reckoning’s” plot exists to mostly explain why your character — who is dead at the outset, then resurrected — can defy fate in a world where everyone else is imprisoned by it. It’s a cool concept that provides some helpful context for why your character is powerful enough to fix things for virtually every citizen, but the developers fail to make it seem as though your actions are having much of a visible impact on the world.

The hundreds of quests are full of minor twists and turns, but they never quite go anywhere interesting. Both the main story line and most of the lengthy faction quests end without any significant surprises to the degree that even now, a mere week after finishing the game, I can only vaguely recall any of the characters or plotlines I encountered. Big Huge Games and 38 Studios have unique takes on traditional elves, fairies, and gnomes, but they’ve failed to create a compelling hook in the lore that differentiates it from everything else in the fantasy genre.

For all my issues with the storytelling, “Reckoning” more than makes up for it in battle and character growth. The real-time action feels similar to “God of War’s” combo-chaining combat. Some action fans may bemoan the lack of depth with the one-button approach to melee, but the ability to switch to different weapons mid-combo and whip out spells and special abilities on the fly feels fantastic.

The rhythm of combat is broken up with a fun mechanic called fateshifting. Each time you kill an enemy, you fill up a portion of your fate meter, gaining more fate based on how skillfully you mix up your abilities and how long you can keep your combo count rising. When the fate meter is full, you can fateshift to enter a slow-motion massacre where your attack power is greatly increased. At the end of a fateshift, the game asks for some good old-fashioned button-mashing to determine the experience bonus you’ll receive as your character does a brutal, stylish kill.

Each time you level up, you choose whether to devote skill points to mage, warrior or rogue abilities. These choices unlock lightly defined class roles in the form of stat boosts called destinies that can be swapped at any time, freeing you to make any character you want. In a rarity for RPGs, mixing and matching abilities from multiple trees has just as much potential for creating a devastatingly powerful character as focusing on one skill type.

“Reckoning” struggles with its technical performance. Numerous out-of-sync sound cues, framerate hitches, and slow-loading textures plagued my playthrough.

Despite its problems, “Reckoning” is a good game with a lot of stuff worth checking out. But even with all of the talent backing it, it’s just on the edge of being something much greater than it is. For a game that’s all about breaking out of the confines of fate, it’s a shame that so much of the content feels stuck within such narrow conventions.

‘Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning’

8 (out of 10)

PlayStation 3, Xbox 360

Electronic Arts, 38 Studios

ESRB rating: M

TOP 10

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The editors of Game Informer Magazine rank the top 10 downloadable games for February:

1. “Trine 2” (PS3, X360, PC)

2. “Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath HD” (PS3)

3. “Warp” (X360)

4. “Alan Wake’s American Nightmare” (X360)

5. “Gotham City Imposters” (PS3, X360)

6. “NFL Blitz” (PS3, X360)

7. “Gears of War 3: RAAM’s Shadow” (X360)

8. “Halo: Reach — Anniversary Map Pack” (X360)

9. “Sonic CD” (PS3, X360, PC)

10. “All Zombies Must Die!” (PS3, X360, PC)

— McClatchy-Tribune News Service

Weekly download

‘Shank 2’

For: PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360

Also available for: Windows PC

From: Klei Entertainment/EA

ESRB Rating: Mature (blood and gore, drug reference, intense violence, strong language, suggestive themes)

Price: $10

The original “Shank” took a handful of good ingredients from different genres and combined them into one surprisingly focused action game. “Shank 2” doesn’t mess with that approach, providing a second helping of all the first game did right and making adjustments to the few places where it went wrong.

For the uninitiated, “Shank 2” is a violent but cartoony sidescroller in the “Metal Slug” vein, outfitting players with guns and explosives but placing special emphasis on close-quarters combat and providing an abundance of weapons (from knives to shovels to chain saws to wieldable fish) with which to deal damage. The melee combat is, despite the 2-D presentation, somewhat in the “Devil May Cry” vein. Beyond telling a new story, “Shank 2” tempers the first game’s occasionally cheap difficulty, fixes a few unfortunate button-mapping choices, and adds some new moves.

— Billy O’Keefe, McClatchy-Tribune News Service