Dragon Age 2 Review

Written 4/3/2011

Note: This review is for the PC version of the game. Screenshot and video taken from my machine.

Back in 2009, Bioware gave us Dragon Age: Origins, an epic dark fantasy with an excellent story, great characters, and solid gameplay. It suffered from the occasional crash, the combat could feel a little bland at times, and the main character had no voice-over work done except for the occasional one-liner. Now, just about a year and a half later, Bioware graces our hard drives with Dragon Age 2. If you thought Origins was mature, get ready because Dragon Age 2 is much darker and the choices much harder.

Visuals and Presentation

Dragon Age 2 takes a slightly more stylized approach to the visuals than Origins. It sacrifices realism slightly in order to achieve a more concept-art result. With that said, the game definitely still feels like Dragon Age despite this. The environments are richly detailed with equally solid characters, textures, weapons, props, and animations. If you’re playing the PC version though, Bioware offers a high-resolution texture pack (which you can grab from FilePlanet here) that makes the game look markedly sharper than without it. You need a pretty beefy machine to run the game with the hi-res texture pack though, with a video card with at least 1GB video RAM and support for DirectX 11. So basically, the hi-res texture pack requires you have a Radeon HD 5870 or better video card. I’m unsure what the Nvidia equivalent is. If you don’t have such a video card, you can run the game in DirectX 9 without the hi-res texture pack no problem.

If I had any complaints about the visuals, it would be that that environments are somewhat limited and repetitive. You’ll spend 90% of your time in the city of Kirkwall, and while it’s not a bad thing, I would have preferred there had been more variety outside the city aside from the three or four small locations available. The same building interiors and caves are also used moderately often, and can grow a little tiresome after some time. Also, I did experience a few steep framerate drops during gameplay, but I would be willing to attribute that to my using the hi-res texture pack. Overall though, the issues present in no way distract the very pretty visual package of Dragon Age 2.

Visuals and Presentation Rating:

Sound

This is a Bioware game, and if they are great at anything aside from excellent stories, it’s excellent sound. Most of the voice-actors that appeared in Origins are back with one notable exclusion, but I won’t spoil which character it is. The new additions are all excellent, and all up to Bioware standards. The best addition is the fact that Hawke, the main character, is now fully voiced-over. I really missed that in Origins, especially after playing both Mass Effect titles. The writing is excellent and well performed, but feels a little more serious than in Origins. It makes the world more believable in my oponion, but it also means the moments of comic relief are fewer and farther between. The music is also great, and feels appropriate to the Dragon Age style. Overall, you simply can’t get much better sound than in a Bioware game, especially when it comes to voice-acting!

Sound Rating:

Gameplay

The gameplay of Dragon Age 2 is where most of the improvements over Origins were made by far. Just like in almost every Bioware game out there, half of the game is focused on having conversations with the people around you and making choices that directly influence your character, the world around you, and at times how the story progresses. The other half of the game is focused on combat and clearing hostile areas.

The conversation system has changed from your choices being selectable in a list, and say exactly what your character is saying, to a choice wheel exactly like that of Mass Effect where the choices represent emotional responses moreso than knowing exactly what will be said. There are usually three responses available in conversations: positive / peaceful, neutral / sarcastic, and negative / aggressive. So when a choice is presented to you, your decision should be based on how you feel about the situation and what’s really going on. I find that to be a much more natural way of doing a choice system than knowing the exact dialog of each choice, as it helps you respond in a much more realistic way. Occasionally, you will be given a fourth choice that allows you to seek a romantic relationship with the character you’re speaking with, but they are completely optional and can all be skipped entirely if you so choose.

Combat in Origins always felt inappropriate to me except for the killing blows, considering the brutality Bioware was trying to achieve. It was slow, methodical, and repetitive. While combat in Dragon Age 2 is still methodical, it’s also much faster and flows more naturally. Each strike is now fast, precise, and deadly. The violence and brutality are raised to 11 with dismembering bodies and explosions everywhere. I think the combat in Dragon Age 2 is what Bioware tried to achieve in Origins but fell short of. If you were to casually glance at the combat, you would think it was an action game. You can still pause the action and issue individual orders to your party for a more tactical style of gameplay; though this is much less necessary than in Origins. You can mostly get by in normal battles by playing like it’s a third-person action game, but the boss battles almost require you to pause the action and issue individual orders. The skills all pack a wallop and are great fun to use, but I found that there were less available to me at the end of the game than there were in Origins. That could have just been how I decided to progress my character though.

Finally, you can no longer give your companion characters different equipment except for their weapons and accessories. Their armor levels with them, but you can find certain items tailored for each character that increases those stats slightly. While some RPG purists will cry foul at this, it definitely makes for less micro-management, and thus more time actually playing the game. If I have any complaints, it would be the fact that the auto-attack range is very easily broken in melee combat, forcing you to right-click the target again to continue your assault. It’s a minor inconvenience, but one worth noting. Overall though, the gameplay in Dragon Age 2 by and far exceeds that of Origins.

Gameplay Rating:

Story

There’s not really much I can say here without giving away some pretty major plot points, so I’ll be a little vague on purpose. You begin the game with your family as a refugee in the city of Kirkwall fleeing from the Blight occurring in Origins. You try and make a new life for you and your family, but destiny has its hand on you, and you become the key influence of events that change the state of the world forever. I know that brief description sounds cliché, but the story goes much much deeper than that, with themes such as unjustified and justified fear, oppression, slavery, religious zealotry, corruption, the occult, and hopeful belief in what’s good and right permeating every facet of the story. Other themes such as sexuality are also explored, as a party member will try and initiate a homosexual relationship with you. As a Christian, I disagree with that, but the beauty of a game like this is that you can choose to turn down such advances. After that first encounter, the game only tries to initiate it once more. If you refuse again, it’s never brought up again.

On another note, each of your companion characters are genuinely interesting, with their own agendas and motivations; some of which are directly contrary to your own. Depending on your choices, you may lose a party member permanently or gain their undying loyalty. How they interact with each other can also develop or tear down their individual relationships, though it has little impact on how they perform in combat together. Overall, my description is a little general I know, but this is one of the most engrossing stories in recent gaming history, and should not be missed by anyone that even remotely cares about story in their games.

Story Rating:

Replay Value

The game took me 42 hours, 40 minutes to complete on the Normal difficulty and completing every side quest I could find except for four. Considering how your class choice directly influences some initial events and how people treat you, I can easily see myself replaying the game as a different class with different choices when I get enough time to do so. The simple fact that you can experiment with different choices in itself is worthy of another playthrough, but the game and story are so amazing that it’ll be hard to put this one down!

Replay Value Rating:

Final Thoughts and Overall Score

You just can’t beat Bioware when it comes to deep and thought provoking stories in games. They have outdone themselves yet again not only in story, but in gameplay, sound, and visuals. If The Old Republic is anywhere near the quality that is presented in Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 2, it very well could be the one MMO to rule them all. In the meantime though, Dragon Age 2 will hold you over most excellently for some time to come!

Dragon Age II Overall Score:

System Requirements

Minimum:
• OS: Windows XP with SP3; Windows Vista with SP2; Windows 7
• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo (or equivalent) running at 1.8 GHz or greater; AMD Athlon 64 X2 (or equivalent) running at 1.8 GHz or greater
• Memory: 1024 MB (1536 MB Vista and Windows 7)
• Hard Disk Space: 7GB
• Video: Radeon HD 2600 Pro 256MB and the NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GS 256MB cards
• Sound: Direct X 9.0c Compatible Sound Card Windows Experience Index: 4.5 

Recommended:
• OS: Intel Core 2 Quad 2.4 GHz Processor or equivalent; AMD Phenom II X3 Triple core 2.8GHz or Equivalent
• Memory: 2Gb (4 GB Vista and Windows 7)
• Video: ATI 3850 512MB or Greater; NVIDIA 8800GTS 512MB or Greater; DirectX 11: ATI 5850 or Greater; NVIDIA 460 or Greater