krkbomb

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For $5 this game is an absolute steal. It comes with two other (very similar) games also. Old-school JRPG fans should find this to be a novel take on the genre. If you are not into JRPG then this may be a bit weird. The writing is freaking HILARIOUS, although at one point in the plot near the end I became utterly lost. Won't spoil anything but there was some kind of twist that I still don't comprehend what happened or why. Gameplay-wise, compared to other JRPGs this is especially slow. EVERY fight, even minor ones, seemed to involve tons of build up. Unlike other games, you don't start with a big pool of MP you then use to cast spells. Instead, you start with 0 MP (by default), and earn 1 MP at each round start. So basically you have to save up MP if you want to cast big spells. Interesting system, but it severely slows the early game (beginning of battles I mean) in favor of REALLY INCREDIBLY over-powering you in the end-game (end of each battle). By the time all your preparations in the early game pay off, the fight becomes completely trivial and dull. Nevertheless, this game is still better than most modern RPG's in my opinion. For the price, I would not pass this up.

It wasn't terrible. Neither was it very good. The "simultaneous turn-based" gameplay makes absolutely no sense. I cannot imagine the clusterF*** that is in multiplayer. Pick one or the other, please. The interface is clean and good-looking, but cumbersome to use for repetitive tasks. Also some very weird design choices, like severely penalizing expansion... Isn't expansion the POINT of these games? 0.o No campaign to speak of (yet?). Complete fail for me personally. I'm sure a lot of bored 4X addicts will be interested for two hours before some flaw pisses them off.

I'm not really sure what happened here but this is not a Mass Effect game... Mass Effect games had smartly written stories and let you make decisions. This game is not that AT ALL. It does have some nice music, though not as good as ME2. I will give 3 points for that.

Give this a zero because it installed DRM. I did not think Steam would even allow DRM so I am very disappointed. Even if Valve doesn't give me a refund I will never play this. I will just consider the money lost for the sake of a learning: I learned never to do business with Ubicrap.

The storylines and the very low difficulty make this game a blast to play while leveling up, but once you hit 50, there is nothing much to do. Most of the endgame PvE is broken, and the PvP has a horrendous grind and is just poorly designed and dull. I would recommend it as a single-player game, to play through some characters to see the storylines, but once you hit cap you should either roll an alt or cancel your subscription.

When compared broadly to other video games, DA2 is far above average. But when you compare it to other Bioware games, or to Dragon Age: Origins, one of Bioware's best, this game is far below anything else in the lineup. The combat is rendered meaningless by long cooldowns on essential spells, poor mana-efficiency, and ridiculously high respawn rates, making hack-and-slash builds the only real option (and you can forget about healing). The respawn rates are the breaking point here, because it ruins virtually every other aspect of the gameplay, because why put any effort into killing things if a million more are going to spawn when they die? The RPG elements are equally meaningless. The decision to automatically move items to the "vendor trash" bin in your inventory only highlights that you really aren't making any decisions, you're just playing a game on rails. Throughout the game it is painfully obvious that some items are intended for you while others are useless. About the only thing you have to recognize is whether or not an item fits your class, and usually this is done for you by making it impossible to equip another class's gear. The look of the game is pretty, but too cartoonish to be taken seriously, and the texture resolution is appalling. The environments are boring and repetitive (MOST areas in the game were literally recycled assets). The general aesthetic is just ridiculous: a blend of "DARKER AND EDGIER ZOMG" and japanophilic anime-envy. The worst problem with this game is that, unlike previous BioWare games, the player is provided with no real choice and is instead placed on rails through a storyline that really is not all that compelling. Cutscenes continually interrupt the story, only to force you to watch two people sitting in a room and talking about nothing in particular, while the main story meanders around with no real goal or purpose for your character. The "light/dark" or "paragon/renegade" system or whatever is meaningless to the story as well. Instead, your dialogue choices determine what tone of voice you will use to say EXACTLY THE SAME THING and take EXACTLY THE SAME ACTION. Your choices range from sarcastic to dry to caustic. And that's a bit of a stretch since all your choices are basically the same blend of these three. Without spoiling anything, the ending is actually a pretty good piece of story-telling, but the problem is, since you have absolutely no control over you character's speech or actions, this ending will either be: completely satisfactory (yay, FINALLY something interesting happened) or UTTERLY TERRIBLE (why did I even bother playing this?)... depending upon what you were trying to do. They would have been better served to simply discard the dialogue and alignment systems altogether and let the player experience the story in the way BioWare clearly intended. Overall, the game was generally playable but usually unpleasant throughout, and while the ending was somewhat interesting, it also left complete disappointment at the game's overall shortcomings, and guaranteed that I would never play this game or any other Dragon Age game again. I would write off BioWare entirely after this, but instead I think the ideas they were working with in DA2 were promising, just poorly executed and a bad fit for the Dragon Age franchise. Mass Effect 2 is a good example of similar ideas with better execution in a franchise better suited to those concepts. Here's hoping that they find their way again for ME3 and their Star Wars MMO.