Dragon Age II Review

Dragon Age: Origins was a massive hit for Bioware back in 2009. It had a large and sprawling story full of twists and turns, plenty of lore about the world and its inhabitants to keep you busy and amongst many other things, a hugely expansive relationship system allowing you to forge friendships and indeed rivalries to shape your party to exactly how you wanted it to be. Since its release, it has managed to cement itself firmly into many gamers top 10 lists. Personally, I adored it. Little more than 18 months have passed and we have a sequel now simply know as Dragon Age II. The winds of change have blown through some aspects of the game but is this for the better?

If you liked playing as say, an Elf or a Dwarf in the previous game then prepare to be a bit disappointed. Dragons age II features a predefined hero known only as Hawke and your choices of race consist of Human, Human or Human, you can however change their gender but the rest of the customisation is just fine tuning the existing model. Think of it as being given a Barbie doll, then several different faces and haircuts to attach to it and that is essentially what you will be doing. Your choices of class hasn't changed however and you can still pick between Mage, Warrior or Rogue.

There is a lot of customisation choice available for you to mold your character into looking the way that you want them too. There are tonnes of facial modifiers as well as a large range of hairdo's and even facial tattoos. If you don't fancy sitting and faffing around with nose height, eyebrow definitions and lip overbites, however, rest assured that there are an adequate selection of predefined faces to choose from also.

Once you have Barbie (or Ken, we're not sexist here) selected and indeed perfected, it's time to venture forth into the great unknown of Thedas.

Dragon Age II tells you the tale of Hawke and his/her rise to the top of the food chain in a city called Kirkwall. Telling this story is Varrick, an old Dwarven friend of Hawke. He is reliving the story as flashbacks, told to a seeker from the religious organisation, the Chantry, who is looking for Hawke, now the champion of Kirkwall and to find out how he/she acquired such a title.

This is where you, the player comes in. Your playthrough spans a decade in the life of Hawke, beginning with you getting to Kirkwall in the first place. You and your family are refugees from a Kingdom called Fereldan, you have run from your hometown and the darkspawn that inhabit it after a failed attempt to wipe them out. The battle of Ostagar was lost, taking down the King with it and was one of the major events at the beginning of the previous game. After fighting valiantly, gaining a friend and suffering a sad loss on the way to freedom, you are surrounded. With no exit likely, things are looking bad for you and your family, until a familiar face appears and saves you. When I say familiar face, I mean it in the sense that you know who this person is, she has had a bit of a makeover however.

To repay this person for saving you, she asks you to deliver a pendant to a colony of Dalish Elves. Once you get there however, you discover that the task is not yet over, after a bit of running around and progressing through the story you end up in the city of Kirkwall, the main hub of the game for the next god knows how many hours.

Within Kirkwall's... walls, and very occasionally outside of them, is where you are going to spend your time with Dragon Age II. Alongside the main storyline there are hundreds of side quests to embark upon, mostly taking place within different parts of the city. The vast majority are pretty repetitive 'go here, kill this' quests which can grow tiresome. A lot of these quests seem to have you go to the same place, kill the same enemies i.e. bandits and thieves, but they do give you a chance to play around with the utterly joyful combat system, something which I will mention later on in this review. The missions do a good job of lengthening an already long game, if you are somebody who likes to complete things to 100%, you are going to be here for a while.

Dragon Age II implements an interesting questing system. When you leave an area you go to a map screen, from here you choose your destination within the city and you teleport there. While this does save a huge amount of walking, I feel it takes the fun of exploration away from the game. Dragon Age: Origins had a similar instant warp system but on occasion you still had to find your own way between cities and locations.

From the map screen you can also choose whether it is day or night, which directly affects which quests you can pick up, where you can enter and whether you can progress through your active quests. Your quests usually differ depending on what time frame they require for completion. For example, night time quests can involve you accessing places that are difficult to enter in broad daylight, night is also when you are going to be bothered the most by enemies. Once the lights go out in Kirkwall, the bad guys crawl out from under their rocks, patrolling the streets for victims and waiting to ambush you from rooftops are two activities these delightful people indulge in. Daytime is a different matter, you get a lot of 'talk to this person, then talk to this person, then find object or person 'X''. It does a good job in varying the questing experience but you never seem to forget that you're still stuck in the same city. Whilst the vistas may differ dependant on time, it is still Kirkwall after all, and has limitations as to how much you can see and do before you've seen it all.

The most entertaining parts of these quests, in my opinion, is the combat system. It has evolved from Dragon Age: Origins system giving you more of a hack and slash experience as opposed to the very tactical almost sim-type fighting of its predecessor. I always found DA: O fights to be a very slow and clunky process, send character over there and fight etc. Like you were directing a battle unit in a sim game, this was a great approach for all you tacticians out there that like to stand back and analyse the battlefield before spilling the opponents guts, but I much prefer the new style.

You are in direct control of Hawke, swapping out between party characters at the touch of a button. Here you can run right in and just attack, X/Square is the button for your standard combo attack, much the same as any hack and slash title such as Devil May Cry or Castlevania: Lords of Shadow. The other face buttons each correspond with an ability slot which are mappable with any of the abilities you have learnt whilst leveling your characters up, pressing left trigger/L2 swaps you to a second bar of three abilities giving you a total of six which are easily used whilst in combat. The remainder can be used but these involve you pausing your game by pressing right trigger/R2 and accessing the radial menu and selecting your spell from there. Letting go of the trigger button takes you back to the action and performs your selected ability. Using health items and other potions is done in exactly the same way.

Combat now flows with a beautiful fluidity enabling you to pull off some very satisfying combos, playing as a Mage I am currently able to land a 3 hit X/Square button combo, along with an ice bolt followed by an area of effect fire spell which when put together, one directly after another, leaves the enemy very dead (hopefully) and me very satisfied. With hundreds of abilities throughout the different classes available to learn via a talent tree system - where you pick a specialty then with each level gained you can unlock an ability, which unlocks the next one available to purchase - combat will never get boring. In my opinion, this is easily the best feature of the game, which is great seeing as there is a lot of fighting to be done!

Throughout your journey, you meet a large number of people, a lot of which you can recruit to join your party, There are some really awesome characters that take a lot of persuading and then there are also some who are coming along for the ride whether you approve or not. You can only choose to have three other people in your party at any one time however. It can be tough figuring out who is best for your party so give everybody a try. My advice to you, however, would be to keep things balanced, whilst a party full of rogues may seem ideal to you, think about the following things: who is going to heal them? Would a ranged party member be beneficial? What about using a Warrior 'tank' to keep the enemies attention on them whilst you chip away at their health? There is of course no right or wrong choices, it is all down to personal preference, but I found having a offensive Mage (me) a healing Mage, Warrior tank and damage Warrior the most effective combo. That second warrior could be substituted for another class easily but I happen to like Aveline and Fenris.

Your chosen party members walk around with you and often spark some amusing conversations between themselves giving them much more individuality, they express their own opinions about specific people and the events they are currently involved with. You can stop and talk with these companions but the character interactions aren't as in depth as they were in DA: O. They seem to be more affected by your actions and responses to people within quests rather than direct contact with them, your relationships changing with each answer.

The same can be said for NPC quest givers, you have a choice of response to questions that characters ask throughout the game, each answers type symbolised by a picture next to it: a comedy mask for something sarcastic or an angry symbol for hostile statements. Each response is now no longer left to our old silent protagonist but fully voiced which adds to the sense of immersion. No longer do you have to stop the flow of conversation to read what you character responds, just press the type of response you would like and listen to Hawke say it.

Although the game seems to have had many changes and improvements, there are also bad aspects. The repetition of quests is one, another is, unlike DA: O, you cannot completely customise your party. Before you could equip any item you found as long as it tallied to their stats needed and their class and was the right type for them to wear. Now you cannot change the basic armour they are wearing, you can however add onto the basic outfit by adding stat based rings and amulets. This is a shame and is irritating as on many occasions I have found a piece of equipment which would be perfect on a certain character, with better stats than they currently have. It's annoying to look into your bags and have them full of equipment with stats my Mage is never going to use ( strength, dexterity etc), but have the requirement of 'Belgamine Hawke' on as your main character is the only one you can change the armor for.

Another disappointing aspect is the graphics. There is nothing wrong as such with them, but they weren't the best looking around when they were used in Dragon Age: Origins and a year and a half later, they still aren't. Things don't seem as fresh and crisp as its predecessor either, something I touched upon in the preview of the game which is sadly still true of the finished product

Dragon Age II as a whole is a great sequel, there is enough in there to feel familiar to players of the original game and all its DLC but Bioware haven't been afraid to change a few things which is nice. Games don't evolve or improve without making a few changes here and there. DA: II offers a lengthy and fun single player experience, but beware it can get a bit repetitive at times. You will soon forget this, however, when you're slicing and dicing your way through everything in your path. A must have game for fans of the series and those wanting a bit of hack and slash action with a deeper game tacked on.