Dragon Age II

In most cases I want my video games to do something very different than a book or a movie. The problem is that as much as I love a good story video game stories are generally not every good. They become overly complex far too quickly and it becomes even more frustrating because you want to be in control of a video game story, but in most cases they also have a very specific story that they want to tell and will force you down that path. Dragon Age II does have some of those problems but overall I enjoyed not only the combat of Dragon Age II but the story as well.

Your primary character can be a mage, warrior or rogue. This character will eventually gather together a group of other characters as well and like in most Bioware games they run the gambit of morality. The difference is that this game is generally not as black and white as many other games. In addition you are not in full control of every event which means that the decisions you make are important to you and those around you, but the major events of the game still happen. There is a bit of railroading, but it does feel like you are making real decisions and ones that are not always simply black and white.  The people who are doing bad things are often driven into it or have other good reasons while people who are might be doing the right thing often doing it for bad reasons. This leaves you to make decisions that are not always easy.

Most of the story is set in a single city. This is unique from most fantasy which is often about travel. This makes this a story more about characters than the events. In fact many of the quests in the game are not about the ‘main’ mission at all. Instead, you simply go to people you already know and find out what is happening. Many of those people being the characters that fight with you.  This helps explain many of the fights in the game and makes the characters far more interesting as well because you experience their stories rather than simply hearing them.

The game play itself is pretty simple. You have up to four people with your group and fight in real time. You can take control of any of them at any time easily but if you do not control them they fight based on tactics. As they level up they gain skills and spells in generally pretty generic ways. In fact there is almost nothing really special about the combat it simply works, but in large part that doesn’t really matter.

I personally would not recommend anyone buy this game.  The fact that they want you to sign in to play it is frustrating and I don’t think that the game would really be all that replayable simply because the combat gets a bit old by the end of the game and the story is interesting, but not good enough to make me want to play through it again. My suggestion is to rent this on a long weekend because it is a very interesting story, but it is not worth buying.