At the beginning of this month Bioware released its latest fantasy RPG for both PC and consoles, and ever since then it’s been raining roses, praises and applause. But is it really that good or are we again witnessing the power of EA’s marketing’s machine combined with the strength of the hypnotized masses? We’ve invested a few days of gameplay into it to find that out for you.

The character customization section that you will need to go through at the beginning of the game is decent enough and there is a pretty good variety of elements you can mix together in attempting to create something to suit your tastes. But don’t expect it to be extraordinary, because it’s far from it: you can create something… humanoid, but don’t try to create a character that looks, walks and talks just like you because you’ll be wasting your time. In this section you will also need to pick your race, class, your background story and adjust some of your stats. The available classes are the same old boring ones: you can choose to be a warrior, a mage or a rogue. Pay close attention to your options here because they will heavily influence your gameplay style and once you click the play button there will be no turning back, no adjustments to be made. Each class has 4 available specializations that can be unlocked as you advance through the game, but they will only enhance your original features and not turn your character into a cocktail of abilities. So if you are hoping for a stealthy mage or a plate wearing rogue, I’m sorry to say: you won’t find them in Dragon Age.

Depending on your choices, the beginning of the story will be different, but the game plot is as simple as they come: the big bad evil threatens the world with total destruction and a handful of heroes rally under your banner (if you ask nicely) in the attempt to stop what seems to be, in everyone else’s opinion, inevitable. But to unfold this entire one-phrase-plot and dive into the main flow of events takes at least a couple of hours of gameplay, especially if your choice of game difficulty tends to a bit spectacular. Once you’re done with that you’ll be facing over one hundred hours of action if you hope to reach the end, so it’s safe to say that the entire game’s lifespan doesn’t come short of impressive – unfortunately, the story that was meant to support it, does. It’s not bad, not bad at all, but it doesn’t live up to the task of fully supporting an epic adventure. At one point you are given information on a need to know basis and the next second you’re overloaded with it. The “story teller” seems to forget for hours that your character exists and when it remembers he apologizes with cutscenes. And if you add to its list of flaws the fact that it smells highly familiar to a whole bunch of other stories, you’ll understand why I consider it to be mediocre.

But stories and cutscenes are not that important, especially if you have a gameplay system that is entertaining enough to keep a player hooked for hours. Dragon Age does have such a system: not perfect, but addictive. During combat you will be able to choose a normal, real time flow of events, in which your characters will perform actions based on a predefined set of instructions or you can choose to use tactical pause, issue specific commands for all the members of your party and then unpause the game and let them perform those actions. Both come with significant downsides. For the first option, you will soon realize that the set of predefined tactical commands are not sufficient to deal all the combat situations you encounter, no matter how skilled at setting those up you may prove to be, so eventually tactical pause becomes necessary if survival is your goal. When that happens you will notice that the both skills’ cast times and cool-downs on one side, and HP/MP pools on the other, are so small that you will constantly need to intervene in order to keep your party organized and, more important, alive. This leads to constant mashing of the pause key, combat flow fragmentation and a general feeling of turn based action. The combat system based on an “if->then” list of predefined actions is not a bad idea, it’s just poorly implemented, and if you compare it with the one in FF XII you will see exactly why. Still, turned based combat is not necessarily bad. What’s bad is the fact that it’s forced upon the player due to poor design and implementation of a combat system that could have worked reasonably well in real time. Sure, this could be patched, but I doubt they will go through all the trouble.

The games outer layer – graphics and sounds – leaves no room for complaints: the environment is slick and polished, the characters and armors are highly detailed, and the soundtrack and sound effects are decent and nonintrusive. Spells and abilities could have used a bit more makeup, but that may be considered a matter of taste. You may not find many scenes of paralyzing beauty, but at least you can rest assured that those of poor quality are inexistent. So overall, the game looks and sounds good.

As always, at the end, there is only one question that needs answering: does the game deliver? Yes, it does. It’s a very good one, with a lengthy lifespan, acceptable story, good gameplay and nice graphics. But I wouldn’t go as far as to call it outstanding, impressive, state of the art, or a 5star game as many others did. No, it’s not a life changing experience. No, I wouldn’t lift babies towards the sun to thank the gods for it, I wouldn’t stand in line for it and no, I’m not dying to find out if they are working on a sequel to it. But if you are looking for decent entertainment, I can assure you that Dragon Age is a good investment of both your money and your time.