Dragon Age Origins Awakening Review

Written 2/13/2011

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

First off, considering that expansions to games are almost identical visually, audibly, and in gameplay, I will not be writing this review in my typical fashion. It will instead be much more short form. If you would like to know about the visuals, sound, and gameplay of Awakening, I would highly suggest reading my review of Dragon Age Origins.

With that said, I would like to point out that the visuals in Awakening seemed markedly clearer than in Origins. Granted though, I was also running Awakening in a much higher resolution than I did Origins; so that’s likely what made the difference. The new areas of Awakening fit very well into the world Bioware has already crafted, as do the characters. It did seem that the characters paralleled some of the key characters in Origins though. For example, Anders’ personality is strikingly similar to Alistair’s. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s not terribly different either. The new voice-actors are also excellent additions to the cast, keeping the quality up to Bioware standards without any problems. The music is pretty much identical to Origins, but still great nonetheless.

Story-wise, the game feels much more focused, probably because of the fact that Awakening is much shorter than Origins. Spoiler alert! In the same way that you can import your Mass Effect 1 save data into Mass Effect 2, you can import your save data from Origins into Awakening; complete with all of your choices made in Origins. So it’s entirely possible for the story in your playthrough to be quite different from mine depending on your race, class, relationship choices, etc. The unchanging base story takes place after the Grey Warden has slain the Archdemon and ended the Blight. Upon returning to Vigil’s Keep, he learns that the Darkspawn are ambushing the keep at that very moment. After quelling the threat, he finds himself faced with a Darkspawn that can speak and reason; something unheard of to this point. The story then quickly turns into a mission of hunting down and eliminating this new and growing threat, but as always, such things are not always very cut and dry. End of spoiler alert!

Finally, I found the difficulty in Awakening to be much less severe than in Origins; though that’s probably due to the fact that I imported my high-level character from Origins into Awakening. Either way, importing your character from Origins is definitely more enjoyable both in gameplay and story. The gameplay time clocks in at roughly 19 hours if you do most of the side-quests. If you do solely the main plot though, I wouldn’t be surprised if Awakening could be completed in 5-7 hours. Overall, Awakening is more of same from Origins. That’s not a bad thing, but if you disliked Origins or was kind of on the fence about it, you may not like Awakening. If you enjoyed Origins though, definitely pick up Awakening and get ready for Dragon Age 2!

Dragon Age Origins Awakening Overall Score: