I'm glad I finally finished this game. It's as good as everyone says it is. Well written and most of the voice acting was great. Reading the reviews, you love it or hate it. There seems to be no in between with this game, but most of us clearly love it. I've noticed that most people who don't like it seem to have passed judgement too soon. You've gotta get to the meat of the story before much of it makes sense, which is pretty typical for story telling of any kind. Too many people seem to have quit early and gave a bad review because of their own impatience. The rest seem to have completely skipped the story because they seem confused about things. That's also their own fault. You don't have to like the game, but if you don't give it a chance or don't pay attention to it while playing, then your opinion is invalid, I'm sorry to say. The story is a slow burn for the first third of the game. Once it gets going, though, it doesn't stop and sucks you in. But you have to read/listen to everything to understand it. Yes, there are two or three extremely obtuse puzzles in this game, a couple of them are infamous and make it into Top 10 lists all the time. Unfortunately, they all appear in the first hour or two, but they can all be figured out by doing the old Point-and-Click Adventure Game Shuffle. That is, rubbing items together until something happens. Every other puzzle in the game can be figured out pretty easily. Just remember that you can look at items and April will talk about them. These bits of dialog contain most of the information you need to solve things. Yes, the graphics are woefully outdated and it's a turn off to a lot of people, myself included. Over the years there have been a few options ranging from reShade to add anti-aliasing, dgVoodoo to add supersampling. These worked pretty well, but now there's a full HD mod that you can download that used AI neural networks to clean up models, textures, and even the FMV cutscenes. I recommend Googling for it.
This game is pretty solid, overall. But it does have some glaring flaws. It's fun, there is a lot of strategy involved, the gear system is rich and complex, yet not obtuse or hard to understand. This game can't really be compared to anything I'm familiar with. It's not Baulder's Gate, it's not Diablo, it's not a Rogue-like. In fact, all of the levels are prebuilt. There is no procedural generation at play here. The only things randomized are gear drops. Combat is fun. The ability to pause or slow time in order to plan your tactics works. You'll never lose a party member because hectic combat meant you couldn't get to them to keep them alive. If you die, it's entirely your fault. The difficulty is a bit undertuned. I played my first time on Normal (the 3rd of 5 difficulties) and I rolled through everything. My tanks took no damage and still managed to dps as hard as the dedicated dps. The gear/stat system is a treat for those who like to min/max and theorycraft about gear upgrades. I'm sure half of the 53 hours it took me to beat the game was spent sorting through my gear, trying to find what would maximize my characters efficiency at murdering baddies. The biggest weakness of this game is definitely the story. The plot is weird, but it had potential. There was an interesting back and forth going on trying to determine who was the real antagonist. It will keep you guessing. There are some unresolved plot threads involving a secondary NPC which is frustrating. But the biggest frustration was the ending. I feel like the writers were going for an epic, deeply meaningful ending, but it fell flat and felt unfulfilling. Don't expect a payoff once you finish the end cinematic. The writing also suffers from "stealing" from nerdculture. Star Trek, Star Wars, Doctor Who, Warcraft, everything gets ripped off wholesale. There's a line between homage and outright ripoff and there were aspects of the writing on the wrong side of that line. Recommended if you get it half price.
The game starts right off with a fairly creepy sequence, but don't be fooled. This is not a horror nor a creepy game. This is about the end of the creepy factor right there. The puzzles are easy enough, no obtuse "rub items against each other until something works." It's obvious what you should be doing for each puzzle, then it's up to you to solve the. 90% of the items you pick up will have no use, however. Those are for an achievement that does not exist in the GOG version of the game. None of the achievements available on Steam are here, which is a mild shame. That would give the game a reason to be replayed, even if just once. This would pad out the 90 minutes that it took me to complete it. Give or take 15 or 20 minutes depending on how good you are at puzzle solving and how lucky you get at the randomly generated puzzles. Yes, solutions are randomly generated for the majority of the puzzles, but not all of them. In terms of the atmosphere and story, the atmosphere feels about right for much of the game, although it leads you to think a very different thing about the plot of the game, which you are not going to guess until the very end. It's a twist, you see. Not a very good twist. It's not... not exactly bad, it's just out of left field and makes you scratch you head. My final gripe is in how the game handles the ending itself and that once you complete the game, the CREDITS ARE NOT SKIPPABLE! If you tab out of the game, they pause. You must watch them to the end unless you want to use Windows task manager to kill the game process outright. There are also interactables in the final room that you might miss if you click them out of order. One of them will end the game. The others are just there for you to look at and there's no indication which one is the more important item. Last word on this story. Slight spoilers, but probably not. Who is leaving the hand scrawled warning notes? Who is Irene? Why does it matter if she is dead or not? Dead end plot thread.
It's a great tactical combat game. There's very little else going on here. It's great in small bursts, 15 or 20 minutes at a time. Do one or two fights and then put it down. If you play for longer than that the game gets incredibly tedious. It's pretty much the same from start to finish. If you can pick it up on sale then it's a great little game to pass the time while you're waiting on dinner to finish cooking in the oven or before bed or any other time you've got 20 minutes to kill.
To the people complaining that the game feels like it came out a decade ago IT'S BECAUSE IT DID. This game is from 2009. Do some simple reading before posting reviews that just make you look silly.
I played this game from start to finish on Xbox 360 back in 2010/2011. Completely beat it. To this day, I can't tell you anything about the game at all. Nothing. I've completely forgotten anything that happened other than the game being totally generic. I was never impressed by anything that happened. This is the only Dragon Age game I've ever played and it has given me zero reason to ever want to play any of the rest of them. Is it a bad game? I don't think so, otherwise I would have remembered that. However the lack of any recollection other than a feeling of generic-ness speaks volumes, in my opinion. If you're one of the people who considers this one of the all-time greats in the RPG genre then I have to question the depth of your experience in said genre.
Let's start with the good. If you liked Stranger Things or even if you haven't seen it, but still have a nostalgia about the 80s, particularly 80s microcomputers, then you will love the setting the game thrusts you into. If someone told me I would have this much fun playing a text adventure game in 2017 I would not have believed them, but once I started this game up for the first time I couldn't stop until I finished it. The game is set across four different episodes with the fourth being split into several distinct segments that force you to use the knowledge and experience you've gained in the first three to make your way through. The first episode is fully text based adventure, but not quite. Rather than just staring at text and a prompt you take a first person perspective of someone else playing the game with elements around you and outside of the game screen coming into play. Very tense at points where I had to force myself to continue. Some genuine horror happening here. The second episode feels the weakest as it's just a case of "follow the instructions", but it is incredibly intense in the story it weaves, nonetheless. The third episode was a fantastic bit of puzzle solving and critical thinking. The first person interlude where you walk around was jarring after playing this long while not moving and the controls were not quite responsive and it was easy to get stuck on the terrain. I can forgive it these things as this isn't where the core gameplay lies and it's short enough. The fourth and final episode I won't spoil, but it has you revisiting the skills you learned in the first three episodes, but with a twist on each one that really makes you think even further outside the box. I can't say enough good things about this one. The only real negative I have is the length to price ratio. I feel that 2 hours of game for $10 is a bit steep. I got it at 25% off which feels closer to a fair deal, though the game was good enough that I will not complain.
