Eavg148

If you want to see how a company cashes in on a hot property by churning out a terrible sequel, then look no further then DRAGON AGE 2. The first dragon age was a classic for the ages, and this game is a classic for the dumpster. I knew withing the first 20 minutes playing this game that something had gone horribly wrong! For example the first time i used a "shield bash" attack, the enemy literally exploded and his arms and legs and head fell off. I can not begin to explain hwo humoursly stupid it looked and how horrified i was. Not horrified by the ultra violence, but horrified by how gosh darned stupid it was. Maybe i shouldnt have played the orignal DRAGON AGE ORIGINS from beginning to end the week before DA2 was released, because it really showed how far the game had sunk. I will make this review a bit shorter by saying the characters, story, equipment, enviroment, and for some reason even the graphics seemed to take a step or two in the wrong direction. If the first game had never existed, then this game would have been OK and thats about it. It plays just like every other console action-rpg out there today and that the problem right there. Dragon age origins was designed to be a PC GAME that got ported to consoles, and the Dragon age 2 is a CONSOLE GAME that was ported to the pc. Thats it in a nutshell. The two games were designed and made for two different groups of people and those two groups of people will see this game in two totally different ways.

This game is going to appeal to a very select group of people ALOT, but in general will leave many disappointed. The subtitle "a role-playing wargame" should let you know right off the bat that this game is different. Its not just a mashup of an RPG and RTS its really a combination of 4 different games. First portion of the game you come across is the TURN BASED grand strategy section of the game. Here you will hire and manage armies. Move generals and their said armies to various places to various bad things to other peoples armies and castles. Here time will progress through 4 seasons including winter where your armies must hunker down for the cold. This part of the game is done well enough to get the job done, and the graphics are good enough. The UI itself can be a tad complicated but thats to be expected in a game like this. So if your the kind of person that absolutely refuses to read the instruction manual, and will try to hurry through the tutorials, then this game is not for you. The second part of the game, which is accessed via the main map, is the TEXT BASED (and yes i mean text based) questing system. These quests are vital to the game and not only progress you through the game but gets you good loot and new heroes for your armies. An old school gamer like me felt right at home with this questing system, but younger gamers with an aversion to reading are not going to like this, so the game therefore isnt for them either. The third part this ambitious mashup is the ROLE-PLAYING section of the title. While the questing system is of course part of the role-playing, what im talking about here is the characters of the game. You the have leveling, loot, equipment and special abilities (some magical) that you would find in any basic RPG. There are different classes of heroes available and each has very diffferent powers which is a good thing. Dont skimp on the magic in the game because you will quickly find your heroes make or break your chances on the battlefield. Which brings us to the fourth part of the game, the RTS battles. Theirs definitely a wide selection of units in the game including giants to ghosts to axemen and archers. Most of the melee units though dont seem to be all that different from each other, but you will notice the different between missle units and melee in a big way. Even though in a later patch they toned it down a bit, archers in the game are second only to magic users. Archers do huge amounts of damage and if not countered very quickly the battles can be very lopsided. But myself personally, i found the RTS side of the fights to be my cup of tea. They may seem hard at first but once you get the idea of how all the units perform, you will get the hang of it quickly. An important thing to note, is the scale of the these battles. While a large number of people compare this game to the TOTAL WAR series, its not allways a fair comparison. Total war games deal with huge armies fighting it out nation to nation. King arthur deals with much smaller regional kings fighting what amount to a succesion war for the kingship. The battles here are more along the lines of hundreds of troops per side, not thousands like in the total war games. This helps in one way to make you feel more connected to each unit you have, and since they level up like the heroes do, this can be a fun difference from total war. The company itself has gone alone way since its release add new features and campaigns via dlc and to rebalance the game to be more fun. I loved everything about this game and would have given it a 8.5 or 9 until this year. What happened? Simply put, they broke it. Bugwise i mean. Fixing the game for other people somehow made it crash before or after battles about 50% of the time (usually after a long hard won battle, which is VERY annoying). I never had problems with the game before the latest expansions and patches and now its unplayable. Being from a small company, you expect the tech support to be from bad to no existant. They have chosen to be non existant. They have yet to respond to my emails and instead rely on forums in which people not related to their company in anyway give nonsense advice and this bug seemingly has no fix or work around. BUT... not everyone gets this bug (honestly it seems to be happening most to people with 64 bit windows) and this game is pretty cheap right now. While this game has alot of different parts, that certainly wont appeal to everyone, its still worthwhile as long you dont get unlucky enough to be amongst those while game ending crashes.