First and foremost the best thing... Origin stories are really nice. Every single one of them is different and they will make you interested in your main character a his/her fate. As a Bioware and Black Isle game veteran I was instantly involved with the story and hopeful for the rest of it. Sadly after the beginning it really went downhill. Dragon Age is not much of a RPG. You only have few abilities and spells. For you warrior that is actually good, because even few abilities is much better than none, which you often get in other RPGs. Battles have a good pace, but I urge you to switch to "easy", because friendly fire really makes it an annoying experience, where you need to switch to your mage every time you want to cast an AoE spell and run with him around like an idiot to get to the right position. Sadly even playing on easy difficulty fights are not that good. Your party members are always running head on through every possible trap. So you still often need to give orders to each of them. That perhaps does not sound that bad. But with the sheer number of battles in small corridors and maps it is. Why the hell are there so many of them (and all the time another "loading" is involved)? One could also understand why there are so many corridors in a dungeon, but it does not really make any sense in and elven forest, where you are stopped by every little mound or even grass. Someone really did not want to truly hone the world. Often the maps are identical. Sometimes you get a storyline progress in them, on other occasions there is a side quest and sometimes you don not even get a new line in your codex. Quests are sadly also bad. Even during the main storyline. Lothering, Redcliff, Circle Tower (Fade!)m forest of the free elves... All of it is boring. After Lothering you get into the corridors of the Mage Tower and then into in-game lobotomy of Fade. Then comes Redcliff with its simplistic story and characters with little background. There is a Blood Mage (who worked for Loghain) involved and a child with magic powers, who was possessed by a daemon... Seems like a summary, but really not much more happened. And you will deal with it very quickly. Then you can go to the annoying corridors of Brecilian Forest, where you can learn about another blatantly simple story. An elven guy just wanted his revenge on humans for what they have done to his family and... That is kind of all. Again a very primitive story. Fortunately after that it gets better. I liked the "Moria feeling" od Deep Roads and Orzammar. I even liked the Glum like character there. From random darkspawns you switch to nicely animated spiders. Of course their queen was pathetic again. One would expect Shelob kind of creature, but still... Deep roads were nice. Sadly again, there are also many terrible sidequests in the game. Often it involves you going into a minimap location, kill something there, or get five messages to different guys around the world... Only quests for Antivan Crows were perhaps slightly better. But still... Compare it with side quests in Planescape Torment or VtM: Bloodlines. Like when you were searching for the source of a plague in Downtown or visiting the abandoned hospital there... Bioware employees really were out of ideas quickly. Around the Landsmeet the game really picks up the pace and all is good. Of course Landsmeet itself could be a little more epic and more developed, but still it was nice. The same goes for the elven ghetto and all the "doctors" there. Really a nice location and story there, especially if you are of a city elf origin. I also liked Howes castle and Loghains prison. And then the end comes quickly... To conclude. After Orzammar (I did last from the Alliance quests) Dragon Age is a good RPG. But one would also expect better developed companions. They really do not speak that often and they rarely involve themselves in your conversations. Often they lack a real personality or they are just crazy. I mean a guy who kills whole family of a farmer because he lost his sword? But do not worry, you can "fix this" by getting him the sword back. You will feel really safe afterwards, right? It is not that much better with grandma Wynne, creepy Leliana (your personal stalker), Yoshimo-Zevram... Oghren was better though. I liked some of his funny lines. I also liked the dog. Or Morrigan, though relatively quickly she succumbed into silence. But I liked Alistair the most. A character with a nice irony and great dialogues with other companions (especially with Alistair). Give him the golden armor from Return to Ostagar and Duncans shield and he is "the guy". Really Dragon age is not a clever game. And sadly Bioware produce silly games nowadays. If you can live with a worse engine try Neverwinter Nights 2. It is a much better game. All in all I would give Dragon Age 3,5/5. Pros: Graphics, Alistair, Deep Roads, Alienage, nice plate amors, fighter abilities Cons: Silly and often boring game, boring companions, just few spells for your mage, corridors, filler
