We all know just how horribly busy this holiday season is going to be for gaming. Starting with next week's "Deus Ex: Human Revolution," it's basically a straight shot of big games being released every single week until the end of November. Not pretty for the wallet or for our free time. It's even more bothersome that, when the holiday season ends, we hit a notoriously dry period for new releases. That slow season typically extends to February, but now we know that we'll at least have an enormous RPG with which to kill a few dozen hours. EA has announced that "Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning" is scheduled for release in the US on February 7, 2012. Europe will get the game three days later.

There's a hook to "Reckoning" that I think has been lost in all of the coverage on the game. Yeah, it's an enormous RPG, helmed by Ken Rolston, the lead designer of "Morrowind" and "Oblivion." Yeah, the world was created by R. A. Salvatore. and Todd McFarlane was in charge of some of the art design. That's not what I wanted to discuss today. I wanted to discuss the game's combat.

The easiest way to describe "Reckoning" is to picture "Oblivion," but picture it as if it was played from a third-person perspective, with a stylized, "World of WarCraft"-esque art design. All that is pretty familiar, but what if, instead of the relatively simple combat and combo system in "Oblivion," you replaced it with the combat of "God of War." Suddenly running into a pack of orcs is a bit more interesting than frantically attempting to circle-strafe. Combat is 360 degrees, flows naturally and feels extremely powerful. It'd be an impressive combat engine for an action game, but the fact that it's in a massive, open-world RPG makes it even more of an accomplishment.

For a new franchise like "Kingdoms of Amalur," the holiday season is a land of death. It's great that EA is holding onto this title, releasing it when the slate of games is much less overwhelming. And, by my math, it'll be around three months after the release of "Skyrim," which is about as long as it usually takes for me to beat one of those games.