Review: Dragon Age Origins

While not a stunning visual game Dragon Age Origins is full of the most basic and classic features of the tabletop geek days of my youth playing D&D with my friends. You have your basic races and classes and nothing more. Character design is very limited and boring with dials that make minor changes that you'll never see anyway from the back of your characters head.

Throughout the game you have given many many choices of what to say and how to interact with NPCs. Most of these boil down to: good, indifferent, and asshole. Sadly despite the options, most of the npcs react in the exact the same no matter the choice made. Very few times did I find myself pissing off the populus while being an ass to everyone I met. I was still hero to even the people I just insulted and threated moments before.

The combat is basic. You select an enemy, click the button, and off they go to battle. You can perform stronger special attacks but when your team mates join you most of the time the enemies don't even stand long enough that you end up wasteing the special. You can alter your teams AI so they react in specific ways in combat, but they work so well on their own with premade setups that you won't even notice the feature. DAO also allows you to switch party members in combat to take control over someone else while your main character runs off to follow the AI which makes your style of play seem weak and inefficiant. Most of the switching will only be to heal your party since despite the clever fighting AI, your party is retarded when it comes to not dying.

The abilities you can gain outside of combat are some of the most useless abilities ever made in a single game. Sure you can make poisons and set up elaborate traps to cause ample amounts of damage to enemies before they can even reach you. However even on the games highest difficulty setting these will be a giant waste of time and energy on your part when you can charge in and massicure the lot in a third of the time. Stealing ranks highest in the useless catagory. You can rob every man, woman, and child (I mean that too, it's not a phrase in this game, you can really rob every man, woman, and child) but the payoff is so small and no one reacts to the theft.

The game has an amasing story. For a while... After one area or two you begin to feel the repeditive and predictable nature of the game coming out. The oddest thing about the games massive flaws, is the fact that you want to keep playing anyway for hours on end, ignoreing the many graphic glitches and repeditiveness. It is like the afor mentioned D&D games of old. You were bored hours ago but you just keep playing in hopes of something amasing an memerable will happen. When your dreams of glory are dashed on the rocks like so many others before it, we keep playing anyway like a retarded gerbil in a wheel.

Overall Rating: 6/10