Dragon Age 2 is one of those games released carrying the burden of high expectations and predefined conceptions, both based on the standards setting success of the previous installment, Dragon Age: Origins. With the RPG genre being probably the most reluctant in the face of evolution, the new Dragon Age was met by the gaming community with mixed feelings, many claiming that the game doesn’t meet the nowadays RPG quota, while others fell instantly in love with what the game has to offer. Everyone is entitled to a personal opinion, but these opinions can be influenced by factors ranging from previous gaming or game developing experience to one’s personal favorite color, so in the end they might not have much value in deciding if a game is good or bad.

The events in Dragon Age 2 are set in the time after the end of the Blight, when the Gray Warden which stood against the Darkspawn is already a legendary figure and the newly emerged hero is struggling to make a name for himself/herself. You go by the name Hawke and during the Blight you managed to flee Lothering, ground zero of the whole invasion, and together with your family sought refuge in the city of Kirkwall. The adventures that follow span over ten years during which your character, who can be a mage, a rogue or a warrior, evolves from a simple refugee turned into a slave to a fully fledged champion. The story has little depth and strikes one too many familiar chords, but the writing behind it and the voice acting supporting it are simply amazing and manage to hide many of the otherwise obvious flaws.

The game wastes no time with boring and lengthy tutorials and in fact, five minutes into the game, it grabs you by the collar, throws you in the middle of a swarm of bloodthirsty Darkspawns, with weapons as effective as a fork and a frying pan, and basically says “Deal with it!” And you do, because otherwise the story won’t progress. And it’s fun because just in a matter of minutes you went from deciding if your character should have long hair, short hair or no hair at all, to more important decisions, such as healing a party member or yourself, focus firing on the tank’s target or going all out AOE, cutting an enemy to pieces or burning him alive, and so on. The trick which involves showing the player a sneak preview of what the game has to offer once it unfolds has been used countless times before, but it’s never going to grow old. The abrupt introduction spikes your interest and serves the game well, but not all of your fights will have this epic feeling to them. Those that will however, aren’t limited to the main story line so the incentive to explore, the get into trouble, to… role play, is certainly there.

Dragon Age 2 comes with a huge set of side-quests supported by their own mini-stories. So if the main plot isn’t strong enough to keep you hooked or if it simply becomes a bit tedious at some point, you can always break away from it and follow one of the many quests that branch out all around it. Completing them comes with rewards ranging from a fair amount of coins to the possibility of enlisting a new party member. The vast majority of these quests will be originating or will be in some way connected to Kirkwall, making the city look like an unfortunate merge between Sodom and Gomorrah and everything inside their walls. The sad part is that from a game design perspective it makes the city look like hub, where you go to pick up/drop off quests, buy/sell equipment and have a drink in between, and like any game with a hub, the universe around it seems to shrink and appears to be smaller than that of a game without a hub, even if the first has a more diversified location package than the second.

With so many quest objectives to follow, you will be constantly leaving and returning to Kirkwall, but the whole traveling sequence is in fact nothing more than a loading screen with a basic animation on a loop. Since these loading choke points occur at every ~10 minutes, the game’s flow suffers greatly because of them. I would have accepted the need of lengthy loading screens when the setting you are traveling to is diametrically different than the one you are leaving behind, like when traveling from an urban area to a zone with lush vegetation. But Dragon Age 2 straps one to your every travel decision, even when you are not leaving an area, but simply waiting for the day/night to come. I was prone to enjoying many of Dragon Age 2 side-adventures, but the loading screen fragmentation managed to squeeze the fun out of most of them.

With so much loading choking up your gameplay, you would expect a dazzling variety of locations, rewarding through both high quality level design and inspiring graphics. The reality could not be further from the truth: Dragon Age 2 is a game that strongly believes in recycling. The dungeons you will be visiting while side-questing are based on only a few level design models. Trying to hide the obvious, the developers probably thought that changing the entry point and blocking one path or another with the help of a hideously barricaded door will trick the players into believing the zone they are visiting is a completely new one. I’m sorry to tell you, but the disguises are so ridiculous that a blind monkey could see right through them. Graphically these locations have been put together following the same “don’t worry, they won’t notice” idea, and the similarities between them are so obvious that it’s easy and fair to say that Dragon Age 2 comes in fact with only five settings: city, house, outdoors, cave and one related to the main plot which I won’t name as I might spoil the game for you.

Almost every location you will visit in Dragon Age 2 will have at least one group of enemies patiently waiting to separate your head from the rest of your body, so fights aren’t in short supply and once you see combat, you will understand why. This is one of the best features the game has to offer and it would have been a shame not to exploit it dry. Everything about combat is just as it’s supposed to be. Spells and abilities are rewarding both from a graphic and a gameplay effect perspective, agro distribution and classes function just as you would expect them to in a role playing game and the whole bloody experience is breathtakingly fun.

Your party members – you can have maximum three companions following your main character around – will fight beautifully as long as you take the time to define their behavior patterns through the Tactics System and try to cover as many combat situations as you can imagine. This system was present in the previous Dragon Age and I personally resented it because it seemed bulky and rough, especially when compared to similar systems used in other games (see: Final Fantasy XII). But it has now been polished and made more accessible in Dragon Age 2, and working with it is no longer frustrating. However, no matter how good you are at predicting fights and strategically preparing for them, you will encounter situations where one character or another should break the pattern and do something different to save the fight. For this you can pause the game and issue direct, specific orders to each and every party member. Depending on the chosen difficulty level, this can happen several times during a fight or a couple of times during a walkthrough and unfortunately this means that a high difficulty level will inevitably lead to more fragmented and less enjoyable combat scenarios. The differences between Dragon Age 2 difficulty levels are significant and I urge you to heed this warning or you will be spending hours to get through the first couple fights aka the game’s tutorial.

Your companions are much more valuable than you would expect and their roles are much more significant than just combat support. Depending on the chosen party, quests might have different solutions and depending on the chosen solution, your characters will react differently. So bringing a character with rigid moral values into a party of slithering rogues might not be such a good idea and you might end up disappointing one or the other. The support characters’ reaction to your main character’s decisions has quite a lot of depth, influencing the way these characters will react in combat situations, but also how they react towards you from a social perspective. Always choosing the righteous path while one of your rogues is around will eventually turn that rogue into a rival instead of a friend so be careful when building your party and try to match each task with the right one. You can have a romantic relationship with any party member, regardless of gender, just don’t try have one with all of them – I tried and surprisingly it didn’t work out so good. Social interactions with party members have their benefits, such as passive stat bonuses, so keep in mind that a bit of in-house role-playing goes a long way.

Finally there is one more thing to gain from playing around with your party build: the comical effect of putting together characters that have almost nothing in common and letting them debate their differences. If you played Dragon Age: Origins then you are no stranger to the funny dialogs between Alistair and Morrigan. Dragon Age 2 updates the recipe and now the comments you will hear behind you while roaming on the streets of Kirkwall or searching a cave for the big bad blood mage will always bring a smile to your face regardless of who you have in the party. Still, nothing better than a compulsive liar hotshot-wannabe dwarf rogue to bring out the best (or worst) in people, and luckily he’ll join your party soon after you reach Kirkwall.

Every sound related element present in Dragon Age 2 is masterfully done. The voice acting is superb, the music fits, and the combat sounds enhance the already addictive experience. Unfortunately I can’t say the same thing about the graphics: Kirkwall looks great in afternoon light, but after a while it gets boring to see the same dusty surfaces in the same weather; some sceneries will leave you gawping when you first see them, but since you’ll revisit them on a regular basis they’ll end up making you yawn; your companions look nice, but their costumes hardly ever change so their simple presence in your field of view tends to annoy you after a while; blood stains on the armor of the characters appearing in cut-scenes after a fight seems to fit, but after a few fights you start to wonder why the blood looks two weeks old and why the splatters look more like a crust. The list of flows could continue, but generally speaking if you take a quick glance at what the game has to offer from a graphics perspective, you can declare yourself pleased, but the more time you spend analyzing it the more you realize that what you got in the first few minutes of gameplay is all the game has to offer, and that’s simply not enough.

Dragon Age 2 was one of the most highly anticipated RPGs in gaming history, and record sales in the first weeks after launch come to sustain this theory. After the wild success of Dragon Age: Origins everyone thought it was safe to assume that Dragon Age 2 will follow in the gigantic footsteps of its predecessor and deliver an unprecedented RPG experience.  Bitter disappointment followed the game’s release and clenched fists were raised in anger. But now that the dust began to settle let’s at least be fair and admit that the expectations we all had for this game were extremely hard to match. Dragon Age 2 is not a bad game, on the contrary: it’s an RPG everyone should at least try – I personally found it to be quite addictive. However, its main flaw is that it isn’t in any way better than Dragon Age: Origins and that pretty much defeats the purpose of a sequel.

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