Colorful and flashy masterpiece of full joy and addiction!
It's a full package! Let's break this review into sections.
Graphics
As much as people BlTCH about it, the graphic is simply enchanting! It's no Witcher 2 on ultra high specs, but it's cartoony graphic style is amazing. It's colorful and pretty, playing on max resolution with maxed up specs is more that great. Characters look great, equipment is well designed. The further you go, the better the level design and graphics become.
Only downside are facial expressions. NPCs seem freshly out from botox treatment, no facial expressions, no eyebrow movements, eyes just blink, mouth synchronization is a bit lame too. But this game excels in so many ways I simply don't see that as a problem.
I don't know how graphics look on consoles, not sure if it's a bit worse, but I wouldn't be surprised, considering consoles became too weak for today full specs.
Controls
Not sure how console versions play, control-wise, but they work pretty well on PC. They're customizable to the maximum. I've completely changed the controls from the default settings. They respond perfectly. Nothing more to say about them!
Battle
Battle in KOAR is simply enjoyable! It's fast, flashy and addictive. Nine weapon types, each type has a set of combos and special attacks. Three classes (Warrior, Mage and Ranger/Assassin), each with a set of moves, spells and skills of their own, you can mix them as you like. This game is insanely long, but even after 100+ hours, battle is still fun (You can't say that for Skyrim)
On normal difficulty, game is just fine, but once you start blacksmithing your own gear and weapons it becomes a bit easy, so you can just switch it up on hard, like I did.
Character creation and customization
This is a part where KOAR fails a bit. You can chose between 4 races and each race has 5 faces. ONLY! You can't change them much, or at all. You can add facial hair and change hairstyle, skin and eyes color, add tattoos and piercings. That's ALL! Considering the fact you watch your characters face in every conversation, you'd wish to make him/her the way you really want, but you can't. Luckily, preset faces aren't too ugly so I've get over this minor fail.
There are hundreds and hundreds of equipment pieces. You constantly change your character's gear. Best looking equipment are the ones coming in sets. Great designs.
Downside: You level up faster than equipment does... equipment levels are always 10-15 and even 20 levels below your own. Currently I'm lvl 33 and enemies drop lvl 15 max, vendors are even worse. Maybe I level up too fast.
Sound
I LOVE how this game sounds! Spells, hits, slashes, explosions! The battle sounds give so much more joy to the battle itself.
Music is also good. It creates the mood perfectly. It either pump up more adrenaline into the battle, or simply makes your exploration enjoyable, or makes inns and taverns fun to be at.
Voice acting is decent. Even after 80+ hours of game-play (at this point) I still haven't met any annoying character with squeaky voice, or some with retarded voice. It's a shame your character is mute, though.
Game-play
Putting all together, game-play is amazing and addictive. The game has hundreds of quests. Some are simple as kill and fetch, but since battle is so fun, it shouldn't bother anyone. Story-wise, it's nothing revolutionary... maybe a bit lame, but, personally, I don't play this game for the story. Besides, I haven't seen a good story in a video game ever since psx games back in the 90's. If you want good stories, read books!
Lengthwise... I find it to be too long. Game is just so huge. It's not really necessary to do every quest and discover everything, but it's fun to do so here.
The replay value is surprisingly high. Playing as a different class again is a must, since game-play and tactics vary a lot from class to class. But if you get tired of one class during the game-play, you can just fateweave yourself and distribute ability and skill points in another class tree. So you can play as a whole new class with the same character.
Level design
Outdoors look amazing. Each zone is different. There are 5 big zones, divided in 8-9 to 5 smaller sections. Each zone has it's own setting (forests, hills and meadows, deserts and badlands and so on)... But each section of a zone is a bit different from another. Example. First zone it's a forest. Divided to 8 smaller sections. Each section is a different kind of a forest. One is all autumn-y and pretty, one is dark, gloomy and covered with spiderwebs, one is swampy, one is full of ruins... and so on and on...
Towns look great. Each town is different, they fit well to the zone they belong to.
Bad things: Indoors doesn't vary much. Most houses look alike or the same from the inside. Most caves follow the same design, most dungeons and castles are the same... ruins too. Luckily they're pretty short. You run through most of them in less than 5 minutes, only those related to the main quest are a bit longer, but they also vary in design. And best thing of all, they're all, either, circle shaped or have an exit at the end of it. So you almost never have to back-track the whole dungeon to get out.
Bugs
As most games, this one isn't an exception when it comes to bugs. Luckily, they're not as frequent as in some games. And never game-play breaking. Occasionally a dead enemy might end up levitating in midair, mostly stuck at the three or a rock with a foot or something like that. Camera can sometimes goof up and position itself BELOW the ground, disabling you to see your character whole (just legs) or at all. Luckily this happens very rare and only at the end of the battles, so you just have to wait a second or two for battle music to stop and for your character to return to non-hostile state.
Also, some quests MIGHT be bugged, I've encountered three of such in my 100+ hours game-play. I've managed to finish all three, just not in a way they were meant to be finished. Oddly enough, with my other character, neither of those three were bugged.
There is also a glitch, which if you use, you can gain millions of gold in first few hours of game. I'm not going to exploit it, it's cheating. Besides, you don't really need much gold in the game, best items are found or crafted, never bought.
Tips
Don't sell equipment, ALWAYS salvage it for crafting pieces. It might seem at the beginning you need gold, but you actually don't, not much at least. Salvage all, even equipment that falls under the class you don't play as.
For gold gaining, sagecraft the weapon gems that suck HP while attacking. And sell them for a lot of gold. You don't need gems at the beginning, or at least within first 30 hours of playing. You get equipment with sockets rare, but you get rare and unique gear quite often.
Personally, best skills to pick are: Blacksmithing, sagecrafting, detect hidden and persuasion. I suggest you plan on building those to the max. Alchemy is also good, but it's not necessary to build to the max to enjoy the greatness of the potions.
Lockpicking is useless, since you can easily lockpick very hard locks with no skill at all. Same with dispelling. Mercantile is useless because you don't need that much gold, besides, if you sell gems like I've advised, you'll have a lot of gold, too much gold.
Overall
This is a must play game for every RPG fan and action game fan. It has it's downsides, but they fall into oblivion because upsides are so big and great. Because of it's length, I don't recommend it as a rental choice. Either borrow it from a friend or buy it.
The reason I started to play it on PC, instead of xbox is because people talked about mods for a game, before it got out. And I love mods. I was a bit disappointed when I've bought a game and there were no mods at all and probably never will be. But, oh well. Instead of playing it on 37" TV, I play it on 27" monitor.
So, how to grade this great game? After some thought, I can't give it 10, so let's calculate. - 0.1 point for bugs - 0.1 point for lack of mods - 0.1 point for repetition of dungeon design - 0.1 point for repetition of some quests design - 0.1 point for unsatisfying character creation - 0.1 point for expressionless NPCs - 0.1 point for lame story and unnecessary overall length
So, final math... 9.3
Since Gamespot's grade system goes to round and #,5 numbers, I grade this game 9.5 because I love it
I hope it helps!