Dragon Age: Origins review
It’s not often that you see fully fledged single player RPGs, especially great ones, ones that bring back old memories of Diablo, Baldur’s Gate and Dungeon Siege. It’s safe to say, as you probably know, Dragon Age: Origins brings back those memories. It’s a deep and satisfying RPG that should rock the world out of RPG fans, but it’s not without flaws.
Dragon Age, quite correctly referred to as the spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate, is set in the fictional realm of Ferelden, where your character is part of a massive battle between demons that rise from under the ground and plan to take over the lands (what else are they gonna do?), and everyone else — which of course, includes you. You’ll start off by creating your character, pick between human, elf or dwarf, and pick a class: warrior, mage, or rogue. You can customize your character down to the smallest details, and each of the races has a different story, and can change the game quite a lot, depending on just which race and class you pick.
Gameplay wise, with this being an RPG with immense details, you’ll be spending a lot of your time micro managing, and during combat, you’ll often find your self hitting the pause button, asses the situation, give out orders, and get back to combat. This is mainly because things happen so fast, and there’s so much to control and manage, it’s very difficult to stay on top playing through the ordeal in real time. You’ll also have to manage your party of warriors, and your decisions of course will impact the way they behave towards you. Make a few too bad calls against them, and you’ll be having a mutiny in no time. On the other hand, if you call the good shots and treat them well, they’ll reward you by giving you side quests and teaching you new abilities.
The game is massive and has content that’ll keep you busy for over 100 hours — yep, it’s that big. While the main campaign lasts around a third of that time, there’s plenty more side quests and stuff to explore. However, as noted before, you’ll be spending a lot of that time micro managing, waiting through hours and hours of cut scenes and generally running around. Those aren’t bad things, but there are times where you’ll be far between action. If you’re not into micro managing, you might want to look elsewhere, as it’s a big part of Dragon Age, and the better you are at it, the better the outcome, and the more rewarding the game is.
Technically, the game looks great (we tested the PC version, supposedly the visuals are a bit worse on consoles) — it’s no Crysis by any means, but the visuals are good enough to immerse you into the world, which is always the main point of having “great graphics”. The sound and audio and top notch, there’s hours upon hours of spoken dialogue, and the score suits the game well. Overall, it’s a no brainer for RPG fans, and the rest of folks — except those who hate micro managing — will have a lot in for them by checking out Dragon Age. If you’re thinking of getting the console version or the PC version: get the PC version, it’s clearly better in almost every sense.
The Good:
Very deep
Lots of stuff to do
Runs smooth
The Bad:
AI issues
Action get get overwhelming at times
A few technical glitches
Overall score: 8/10