Pause/ Leftclick on spell, Leftclick on Monster/ Unpause ..
Before you start the game there are 3 main races you can create and play in dragon age. Human, Elf and Dwarves and 3 Main classes you can choose from which is Warrior, Mage and Rogue.
STORY
The Grey Wardens (Order of Guardians) are looking for new recruits to fight an ancient evil called the Blight. You will be part of this recruitment no matter what storyline you play and eventually slay the archdemon once and for all. This is a story driven game all the way to the end.
There are 6 origin stories which means you can literally go back and start a new game with another character and another world will open to you. Human noble, mage; Dwarve Noble; etc all have different storylines with all stories merging when you are recruited as a grey warden to figth the Blight.
GAMEPLAY
Right from the origin storyline, the character you choose affects the gameplay and there are also moral choices in the game. In a nutshell you can choose to be nice, bad and sometimes in between. This is a real-time pause/play tactical system which means you can pause the game while in combat and issue commands to your comapanions. Point and click on an ally or an enemy.
During the campaign, you will come across all kinds of characters who you will have to force to join your group and some willingly asking to join. The thing is these characters are not just there for you to use them as you see fit. Some have emotions and some are downright rude. Moral choices come into play here which is executed in a spetacular way. Moral choices are tricky in the sense that some will like you if you do good deed and some will hate you for also doing a good deed, so balancing it out is essentially as these greatly effects some plots in the game. Througout the whole game, you can only choose 3 more companions to join your fight so choose wisely.
Micromanaging this game is fun and can be daunting at first but which you can get use to eventually. What I mean is this: You can issue a command to a mage to heal you or any companion if health is less than 50% and it works well if the mage is not interrupted by an enemy or worse, killed. There are so many spells you can use during micromanagement. Micromanagement can be accessed ingame using the tactics bar on the screen. There is also the quick item bar which allows you to accessed spells, potions, specializations, etc. Old school all the way. You can also pull the camera to a top down view which is cool.
Looting is one of many guilty pleasures in this game and the loots are abundant and varied. You can enchant you tools witht the deadliest poisons, runes and so on for effective slashing of foe. The combat mechanics is strong and life-like. There are so many lores in the game and thankfully you can read them as soon as the pop up in game which is a LOT.
There are different clans in the game which will take so many hours to complete the main clan quest and side quest. I wish this game was an open world because although the game is long, you are still restricted to certain pathways which is not problem at all. The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion was given to us and they told us to go NUTS and I went NUTS
PRESENTATION AND SOUND
The art style of the game is something to stop and look at when playing the game. According to several respectable websites, this game looks better on the PC with high resolution textures and I have to agree. Spells cast by mages come to life with clarity and spectacular image quality. Corridors caves look superb and the ancient landmarks look outstanding with enough lore to blow your mind.
This game needs a beefy system requirements and a good quad core but can also run on low end specs as well as it is a direct X 9 game to boot. With my quadcore AMD system, I get 100 frames per second indoors sometimes which is awesome.
I would recommend playing this game with a 5.1 speaker system and this games makes good use of surround sound. Sound is dynamic in the sense that different enemies have different sounds and different towns have different tunes to them.
Overall, Dragon Age Origins is a monster game having spent 80 hours and only scratching 34% of the game, I feel it was money well spent and recommended for anyone regardless of the platform be it PC, XBox360, PS3 amd MAC. This will blow your mind period and there are downloadable contents on the way.