Wulfsten

This is a terrible game. I mostly enjoyed Deus Ex HR, but literally couldn't continue this game after trying to enjoy it for 5 hours. I almost never quit games this early, but this is really a trash experience. In summary: The graphics are mediocre at best. The art design is uninspired and dated. The animations are embarrassingly bad. Everything about the movement feels clunky, from the awkward climbing to the weird floaty sprint, to the unsatisfying and fiddly jumping, to the weird and disorienting one-second blackout before any melee combat takedown. Combat is awful. The enemies kill you within seconds if you don't strictly adhere to cover the whole time, and if you do the game just becomes a mediocre CBS with laughably piddly gun sound effects and uninteresting enemy AI. The story is truly pathetic. There's no real hook, no compelling characters, and the atrocious voice acting strangles an already below-average script. The game is littered with terrible design decisions. Making Bioenergy, the resource which lets you do all the things that are almost fun in the game (e.g. punch through walls, use SmartVision, do melee takedowns) a NON-RENEWABLE resource is a truly bizarre decision, meaning you're constantly walking around with the bare minimum energy, for fear of wasting the few biocells you've managed to buy from vendors (who then run out of them entirely). This essentially locks you into a low-power, low-fun mode for the vast majority of the game. The game seems to be designed to make you have as unpleasant an experience as possible, mostly by presenting you with either a direct route filled with enemies, or an arbitrary route filled with air vents and demolishable walls. I didn't feel satisfied or smart once in the 5 hours I played - it doesn't feel like you're solving a puzzle when by far the easiest solution is always to just tranquilise everyone from a ledge and watch as they stupidly don't understand what's going on. I don't even care about the whole DLC/microtransaction issue. This game is just terrible all on its own.

I'm not sure why Metacritic has played host to this massive tirade against DA2, but I'd like to do my part to rectify that. I don't usually like trying to skew the average with my score, and I'd usually give this game a 9, but I'm going to give it a 10 to try to balance out the hordes of people unthinkingly giving this game a 0. DA2 is a fantastic game that improves massively on its predecessor in the only aspect that really counts: the story and the characters in it. The characters are complex and have lives outside of the protagonist's party, and their relationship to you evolves much more organically. The story is unique, well-told and a huge breath of fresh air compared to the stale sword-and-sorcery, kill the horde of bad guys story in Dragon Age Origins. It's the saga of a family and a city. It has some flaws, namely the reused environments and Isabela's breasts, but overall it's a huge improvement, and we need to see more RPGs like it, that take story and characters more seriously than inventory management and combat pacing.