Monday, March 21, 2011

Game Review: Dragon Age II


Dragon Age II is a badly phoned in effort with insulting release-date DLC.  The second installment isn't even on the same planet as it's predecessor.  Diluting many aspects that made the original great takes away most of the aspects that makes a good RPG fun.

How about adventure? Level design is copy-pasted over and over again;  There is perhaps a maximum of 10 small maps that you get to explore in entire game and these are recycled for each and every mission.  The deeps roads consists of a single tunnel network that takes around 30 minutes to play through.  In the original it took me at least several hours and it had probably 12 parts all which looked unique. 

How about epic story?  I may have grown bored with the story before anything really interesting happened.  I was crowned 'champion of Kirkwall' for arbitrarily murdering hoards of random enemies on quests assigned by random NPCs.  The storyline seems unfocused at best.  It certainly didn't hold my interest and I'm not hard to please.

How about character interaction?  The voice acting is well done and there is lots of character interaction.  Downside is that most of your NPC buddies are two dimensional whining machines.  In the first Dragon Age I found that I really grew to care for my comrades and tried to keep them out of trouble.  In DA:2, well, I kept secretly hoping that everyone except Varric would be killed off by the Qunari.  But hey you CAN score with many of your teammates but this interaction is shallow and emotionally meaningless as such.


Overall: 5/10 (Bioware averages 9/10)

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