Be-ware of bioware, they think your dumb!
The epic'ness of "Ferelden" is about to be re-lived in this sequel? ? - False!
___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ STORY ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___
This game starts off in Lothering, thats the same village that got all busted up by darkspawn early in Dragon age: Origins, Family of "Hawke" try to flee the invasion of Ferelden/Lothering and by a little help from the "witch of the wilds" they along with "Aveline" emigrate to a distant land, here they need to seek roof and food outside the refugee camp, but being overwhelmed by fugitives the city just cannot hold more people and the Hawke's family and Aveline is refused to come into the city.
Gamlen is Hawke's uncle, he can only offer them one way into the city, Hawke and his/hers sister need to work for a mercenary to get the coin need'ed to bribe their way into the city.
When Hawke manage to come inside the city walls he quickly understand that fugitives is probably the least of problems the city have.
___ ___ ___ ___ ___ Gameplay ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___
The First in the series Dragon age was a typical RPG strategy game, all the customization you could imagine in weapons, spells, armor, enchantment's and the special evolution of a character was all at your hands, and the core of it all was your god-like view from above to tactical route the game as you wanted.
These brilliant factors from the first game is simply blown away, but the sequel still isn't broken just a lot different from the predecessor, the game has another paste to it and evolve much faster, you don't have to wait 8'th levels until you can add points to the spell's/abilities you like.
The "top view" I really don't understand why they would it take away, it was one of the most important features of DA:O because it gave you the chance to look at the battle from a perspective that allowed you to think tactical, obviously they don't like you getting to tactical...
There something missing tho, you can feel it when you play this game, even tho the core mechanics of the game works well it's not directed towards RPG fans but the broad mass of players, they should have left many customization factors to you as the player, it essentially take away a good chunk of what was the greatness of Dragon age: Origins.
___ ___ ___ ___ Visual and sound ___ ___ ___ ___
The Visual is a good step ahead from the first one, there are much more details in the image and the textures look better, with the "high resolution texture pack" the game looks like it should: newer and more esthetically enhanced.
There is a performance issue with the game, dx11 don't work quite as it should, a later patch might straiten that out, but knowing bioware I'm not going to hold my breath for serious patch difference.
The sound is great for most, turning the music down and the voice up is probably the first you'll want to do, voice tends to be drowned down by the music from times to times.
A odd sound bug occurred late almost in the end of the game, all the voice sounded as they were speaking inside a can.
The game still sounds and look great even tho it has minor flaws.
___ ___ ___ ___ ___ Conclution ___ ___ ___ ___ ___
Bugs... a whole swarm of bugs really plague this game, to me this is very typical from Bioware, i don't know how some of these bugs ever reached the final build, because you'll be backtracking your saves so you can finish ceartian important missions. Really?, how fun is it when one of your partymembers visit your home and want's to speak but you wont get the triggering things you can say so the whole game becomes broken?
*...loads an erlier save to check if the game was broken already one hour of playtime ago... ...the awnser is: YES... ...load another save one an a half hour of playtime ago, there you have it, the game wasnt broken at this point...*
In the end you need to read on the net to solve some bug's and
some just can't be fixed no matter what you do, i had to skip many missions because the triggering points never occurred.
This sort of bugs should NEVER be released in a final build, sure the game is fun but who want to play the same things all over again?
I remember when I were in for Mass Effect 2, another sequel also made by bioware.
In the case of MSE2 i remember they pulled many important things out from the game, not destroyed the game but they essentially dumbed it down so partly retarded 5year kid would love the game too, from what i can see looking at my MSE2 DVD case it's rated "18+" why in the earth would they dumb the game down for five year olds?
This is sadly true about Biowares sequel for Dragon age 2 also, they put many important bits from the original game away witch worked very well, the customization and the diversity just isn't the same in Dragon age 2 as in it's predecessor.
The game is fun but honestly it has many faults and Bioware decided to fix some stuff that wasn't broken, if only Bioware would have taken that time to fix the problems this could have been the epic sequel to Origins, instead it only became the other game in the series.
If you like the way Bioware treated MSE2 you'll like this game too, i can say I very much enjoyed the game but it's still not the adventure Origins put you in.