Its been nearly 400 years since the last blight and the Grey Wardens are few in numbers because no one believes that another blight is coming and they think it is just legend. You however soon find out that the Archdemon will be here in a very short time. You are recruited at a young age by one of the Grey Wardens who has been around for a long time and seen many battles.

The first hour or so of the game can take place in several locations and have several different stories. This portion of the game is your origin story. You can be a man, elf, or dwarf and then you have a background as a warrior, mage, or rogue. Warriors are damage dealers, rogues are the stealthy type and can pick locks, and mages are, well, mages. I could go on for hours describing this aspect of the game but you get the idea that you have a ton of choices in the very beginning and as the game moves on, the choices keep piling up.

It is not quite the “60-80 hour minimum” game that everyone promised but it is still very long by today’s standards. I got through it in about 40-50 hrs I think. I haven’t checked my hr counter in a while but it was somewhere around 38 the last time I looked.

Overall the game is very well done in my opinion. It offers everything an RPG fan could want. You’ve got loot gathering, magic, a small amount of weapon customization and a crapload of well written and acted dialogue. Speaking of dialogue, don’t buy this game if you don’t like reading or listening to people talk because you will be doing a LOT of that during your time with this game.

Gameplay is solid for the most part but there are things that frustrate me about it. The collision detection in this game is a little too touchy. I was always getting stuck on other characters or dead bodies while in combat and if they enemy you are attacking happens to move just a little bit, your character must also readjust. Once you take the swing though, it hits the enemy no matter how far away you are from them. This might sound like a good idea but it works the other way also. Say you are fighting a huge ogre and he goes to take a swing at you so you move out of his way so you don’t get hit, well you still get hit even if you are 20 feet from him. I’m starting to realize as I’m writing this that this review is going to sound very negative but I really loved the game.

Dialogue is one of the huge draws of RPGs but in this game it takes it to a whole new level. I guess I should be accustomed to it with games like Mass Effect and Fallout but it was getting tiring by the end of the game. Through the dialogue options though you can make the story your own and the choices you make do have real consequences or benefits at times. Other times, you think you are making a choice that will change the outcome but it doesn’t. In those instances it usually boils down to “do you want to fight this person now or wait through 20 minutes of dialogue and then fight them.” There are game altering choices though and unlike most RPGs, your party members are not set in stone and you don’t necessarily have to get all of them. One of the characters you actually wont get unless you are able to persuade someone to let them out of jail. Everything you do in the game also has an impact on how your party members feel about you and if they disapprove of you too much, they will leave(note: I did not have anyone leave because I was good for the most part but I know they can leave). It was funny in one part where you have a choice to fight your way out or negotiate and I chose negotiate. Well, one of my more aggressive part members took a huge disliking to that because I chose to negotiate. Also, you can ask your party members to leave if you want to but again, I never did. On the flipside, the more that a certain character likes you, the more it helps you out in that they get bonuses to things like attack, defense, magic power and so on.

Now to the obvious flaws and dislikes of the game. I ran into several glitches that in my opinion are not something that should be there. Numerous times the game glitched right after a battle and I would have to do it over again. It seems the game does not like you advancing too quickly. On a couple occasions I had to actually fight the same boss twice because I talked to a certain character before the game registered the battle as being over and they initiated it again. I was locked in a room once for the same reason and had to reload my last save. The one nice feature is that you can save anytime, anywhere except in battle and I highly recommend it because you never know what you are going to run into. Another is that if you advance the dialogue too quickly, the game wont recognize that the dialogue occurred and wont give you the item you were supposed to get. My dog went looking for treats one time and I read the dialogue and got the items. Soon after, I realized I missed something so I reloaded my last save. The next time, I just rushed through the dialogue but the items did not show up. That is the easiest example to explain but there were many other times that things like that happened. Sometimes, it affected the quest I was trying to complete and I couldn’t complete the quest.

I would recommend this game to RPG lovers but only to people who don’t mind a lot, and I mean a LOT, of dialogue(read: Teetocks, stay away). Like was previously stated, you cant always rush through it either so its almost like they are forcing the game to be longer than it needs to be. It was very rich and well done dialogue but by the end I found myself not wanting to listen to anymore. The story is one of the best I’ve seen in a long time and you do make choices that actually affect the endgame. Something I havent seen in a while. mass Effect was different in that the choices you made only affected the next ten minutes of gameplay but they didnt really present themselves later in the game. Dragon Age, however, takes the choices you make and integrates them into future dialogue sessions with other characters.

One last thing, as much as I hate to admit it, I actually had to change the difficulty to casual for the final battle.  After dying ten times in a row and not being able to do anything about it, I just gave up and changed it to casual.  I had been playing the rest of the game on normal but I had to change it for my sanity’s sake.  I was so close to the end of the game but I couldn’t get there because they made it so insanely hard.

Tags: Reviews