First let me say that I was skeptical about how good Dragon Age II was going to be. There was a lot of hate reviews on websites and Bioware forums, and after watching a few videos it looked like a really boring game. After playing through quite a lot of the game I can say without a doubt that the hateful reviews found on many websites seem quite suspect to me. I also realized that it probably does look boring to watch someone else play it rather than actually play it yourself.
Now to the review.
Dragon Age II is not as good as Dragon Age: Origins in my opinion. The second installment in the series starts off really slowly, the first year of the game felt like a complete grind to me, the characters weren't that interesting and there were so many quests I had to complete that I felt like quitting altogether after several hours of playing. However, once the first year ends, the story picks up and the members of your party stop being annoying and turn into likeable and well-defined characters. There are many different paths you can take in pretty much any conversation, but at times when you choose something from the dialogue wheel you don't really say what you mean to say. I found that in a lot of the chats between party members that I laughed out loud, the diversity of the characters in the game make their backstories more interesting and Hawke's ability to influence the future of these characters also gives the game a unique feel to it. There are some questions that are never really answered at the start of the game (why Hawke and his sister went to Ostagar for instance) but after awhile you just forget about it. The combat in the game is buggy, not being able to click exactly where you want to go, but overall it is fun, tactical, and challenging. The new addition to Dragon Age 2 in combat is mainly the "boss" enemies which like in many arcade games have patterns you must figure out to defeat them, but they are for the most part easy to figure out or overcome by copius use of potions. Other than the bugs in the game that will eventually be fixed by patches, the only real complaint about this game is that the environments in the game look horrible. Kirkwall could use some livening up in the colour department, and there are SO MANY re-used/overused areas of the game that it sometimes feels like an old episode of He-Man.
My rating: 8/10 (mostly lowered because of combat bugs/environment graphics)
Revised Rating: 4/10 (I had not finished the game yet at the point of writing the above review)
The ending makes absolutely no sense at all, especially in my playthrough of the game. In the end I had the support of everyone, even parts of the templars but it still went down the same way. Despite any of the decisions in "major quests" I'd made with certain characters involved with changing the ending it still did not end differently. I thought at times there were different options to explore in parts of the story, but nothing changed no matter what I said or did.
Now to the review.
Dragon Age II is not as good as Dragon Age: Origins in my opinion. The second installment in the series starts off really slowly, the first year of the game felt like a complete grind to me, the characters weren't that interesting and there were so many quests I had to complete that I felt like quitting altogether after several hours of playing. However, once the first year ends, the story picks up and the members of your party stop being annoying and turn into likeable and well-defined characters. There are many different paths you can take in pretty much any conversation, but at times when you choose something from the dialogue wheel you don't really say what you mean to say. I found that in a lot of the chats between party members that I laughed out loud, the diversity of the characters in the game make their backstories more interesting and Hawke's ability to influence the future of these characters also gives the game a unique feel to it. There are some questions that are never really answered at the start of the game (why Hawke and his sister went to Ostagar for instance) but after awhile you just forget about it. The combat in the game is buggy, not being able to click exactly where you want to go, but overall it is fun, tactical, and challenging. The new addition to Dragon Age 2 in combat is mainly the "boss" enemies which like in many arcade games have patterns you must figure out to defeat them, but they are for the most part easy to figure out or overcome by copius use of potions. Other than the bugs in the game that will eventually be fixed by patches, the only real complaint about this game is that the environments in the game look horrible. Kirkwall could use some livening up in the colour department, and there are SO MANY re-used/overused areas of the game that it sometimes feels like an old episode of He-Man.
My rating: 8/10 (mostly lowered because of combat bugs/environment graphics)
Revised Rating: 4/10 (I had not finished the game yet at the point of writing the above review)
The ending makes absolutely no sense at all, especially in my playthrough of the game. In the end I had the support of everyone, even parts of the templars but it still went down the same way. Despite any of the decisions in "major quests" I'd made with certain characters involved with changing the ending it still did not end differently. I thought at times there were different options to explore in parts of the story, but nothing changed no matter what I said or did.
