Now Playing: Dragon Age 2

I didn’t exactly go into this with high expectations. I’d played the demo prior to release, and that convinced me to avoid it. But spin on a few years and I wanted to kill some time before the Rome 2 release. On sale, Dragon Age 2 was an intriguing proposition. So I figured it was time to give it a shot. I’d thoroughly enjoyed the original Dragon Age: Origins, after all. Perhaps there was still some good to be found here. Perhaps I would be pleasantly surprised. And in some ways, I was. But overall, DA2 is a rather terrible game and a massive step back from the far superior original.

So I think we’d better start with the good stuff. Hawke, the main character, is a wonderfully sarcastic bastard. No matter the situation, he’s got an entire arsenal of snappy replies. I chuckled a lot at his responses. His character is kept fairly consistent across the three core dialogue choices (Good/Neutral/Bad) and all are usually amusing. Without the dry wit of Hawke, I don’t think I could have made it through to the end.

Next up is your companion characters. These are a bit of a mixed bag as you’d expect, but overall, very good. Varric is awesome from start to finish. Merrill was initially irritating, but she quickly grew on me. Aveline was solid, and Fenris was surprisingly good too, despite a rocky start. Anders was fantastic. No, wait. He was mostly terrible and whiny. But it was fantastic when I stabbed him. (Whoops, spoilers!) So yeah, companions, overall, are decent enough, and combined with Hawke, make the game just about tolerable to play.

The story. This is also a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, I liked the concepts behind it and the setting. A more focused story, set in a single area, set across many years as Hawke builds his reputation and wealth in the city of Kirkwall. No ‘end of the world’ nonsense, more odd jobs and such building to an inevitable confrontation that’s simmering throughout the entire game. So it’s interesting in concept, but certainly not in execution. In fact it’s all handled rather horribly unfortunately.

So...good stuff done. That was fast. Now onto the bad stuff. Dragon Age 2 feels like a test build of a game. Like an alpha version that was shipped by mistake. It feels messy and incomplete. It’s biggest flaw relates to its use of environments and levels. Despite being set largely in a single city, that city is bland and boring to explore. It’s empty, ugly, with a lack of detail, charm or character. It’s a series of corridors and boxes with a few prop baskets placed here and there. I’m astounded by how bad it is. You can switch to the city at night, but this just makes it even less populated and…uh, darker. The city also doesn’t change at all over the years that progress.

These problems also apply to the other environments in the game. The opening is a prime example of this – a long, brown, muddy corridor with no detail and blocky hills. To make matters worse, the game recycles the same 3-4 maps for every mission. There’s a single ‘cave’ map for example, which is used for everything from mining tunnels, to slaver hideouts. These maps are designed in a linear, dull fashion, with generic props that enable them to (sort of) fit a variety of potential settings.

As a result they just feel lazy and irritating to fight through for the seventh bloody time. I cannot believe anyone thought this was acceptable. If it only applied to side missions I’d cut it some slack, but no, even primary missions use the same recycled assets over and over again. And given that the game is set in a single location, this lack of attention to detail and level design is shocking.

It also doesn’t help that even though you can warp between areas of this crappy city map, it always deposits you very far from your destination, meaning you have to run through these empty streets all the time, sometimes getting interrupted by magically spawning bandits. (Oh, and just because you reset the mini-map every time I revisit one of these recycled areas, doesn’t make it a ‘new’ location. You can’t fool me like that, DA 2!)

Oh right, combat. Enemies seem to spawn out of thin air (or just ‘jump’ into the action out of nowhere) and half the time the enemy types don’t even make sense for the environments you encounter them in. In the city, thugs may randomly attack you as other NPCs stand and chat in the middle of your bloody battle. Combat works fairly similarly to the original game, but is now far more frenetic and bloody, enemies often exploding into ridiculous showers of gore. I guess it’s better than their bodies magically popping out of existence though, which also happens a lot.

When you reach Kirkwall early in the game you get a choice – to work with a smuggler or a mercenary. I chose smuggler, expecting it to tailor my early missions...oh wait, no. No smuggling! The game advanced forward a year and I missed it all. Yay? Now I’ve got to raise some coin to fund an expedition by doing odd jobs? Fair enough, you think, until you reach the ‘expedition’ and it lasts all of twenty minutes.

Towards the end of this section, one character just dropped dead. Just dropped. It was very awkward and I burst out laughing which is probably not the intended reaction. But there’s a lot of moments like that – where the scenes are edited badly, or dialogue is delivered so flat, and combined with weird timing and bad facial animations it just gets very, very funny during ‘serious’ moments.

At this point I was about ready to stab a fork in my eye and quit, but I played on, thankfully Hawke keeping me entertained because the gameplay certainly wasn’t. Some missions are more interesting than others, but certainly not in how they play out because they all play out exactly the same. Go to A. Go to B. Kill several packs of spawning enemies. Return to A. That may read like the bare bones of quests in any RPG, but in this case I’ve not actually boiled it down at all. That’s really all it is. The bare bones. No depth, no detail, no variety, no interest.

I could go on and on about this, but I think I’d better just try to keep this concise and wrap up: Terrible, generic gear choices. I didn’t bother buying/selling anything because it’s just not worth it. I think I can count on my hands how often I changed gear because such progression is practically non-existent. Barely any companion gear customisation. Just a choice of generic bonus rings. Crafting/enchantment is pointless. Dialogue wheel is a horrible choice compared to the text responses of the original.

So to sum up, Dragon Age 2 is a short, linear, dull and painful experience. It feels, plays and looks unfinished. Play Dragon Age: Origins instead.

3/10