Dragon Age: Origins Review

Dragon Age: Origins Review

This is the PS3 version and I don't know how the other platforms play. I read a lot of reviews about Dragon Age, before I bought it. I checked out many promonent gaming sites, as well as oppinions of people I knew. Very few people had much to complain about, so I bought the game and started playing. The very first thing I noticed was that the voice acting was well done. The opening movie was quite well done, both visually and audibly. The next thing I noticed was that there is an option for there to be subtitles or not. I liked this feature quite a bit.

The very first thing you have a choice in, player-wise, is your gender. After choosing if you want to be a male or female you get to choose your race, Human, Elf, or Dwarf. They all have pros and cons but don't play any differently, or look too differant. Dwarves are of course quite a bit shorter and broader but not other obvious distictions. Elves look like short slim humans with pointy ears. I will explain more about the pros and cons in the walkthrough.

After choosing your race, you then choose your class, Warrior, Rogue, or Mage. These don't have any effect on your looks but have consiquence with your backstory, as well as how they play. I will explain what each class does and their consiquences in the walkthrough.

The final choice in this section of your customization is your backstory. While there are six to choose from, by the time you make your choices of Race and Class there may only be one or two to choose from. I found this a very good design, as I'm prone to sit and contemplate something like that for 20 minutes, if there are too many options. This also gives Dragon Age a very large amount of replayability. Because while human charecters may react to a human one way, there is a large amount of racism towards elves and so you will have differant dialogue options when you're an elf than when you're a human. All of this leads to days and weeks sitting in from of your TV playing this game trying to find all of the differant options.


The character customization is really, very well done. There is an impressive selection of preset facial features, such as beard and hair styles, as well as colers and you can even decide to have differant stubble patterns. All this leads to a huge amount of veriants for how your player will look. A nice touch on the facial construction, are the tattoos. You can choose from about 10 tattoos. I liked this little touch.

The first bit of play that you experance is just you making choices. These choices don't really effect the game but it's a good preview of the dialogue setup. Very quickly you are given a small mission to do to get you aquanted with the movements and camera controls. Thise soon leads to combat controls. These are all very straightforward and it's hard to get confused. Especially if you've played RPGs before. The combat controls are a bit differant than anything that I had ever played, but easy nontheless.

Within your first five minutes you'll get your first glimps at something that will become a huge part of the game; Grey Wardens. These ass kicking knights in shining (grey) armor are half of the driving force of the story. They are a group of men and women of all races who joined together to fight your main enemy: The Darkspawn. Darkspawn are a horde of demon-esque monsters that you will continuosly be fighting throughout the game.

All of this, taken together, gives you a very well told story within the first half hour of play.

I really liked both the movement and battle controles. The camera got on my nerves at times since it wants to look the way you're walking and walking in a new direction moves the camera as well. This just means you have to hold the camera in place if you don't want to look ahead of you.

I experanced quite a few instances of the game dropping frames but usually it only happens when you move to a new area and it usually only happens twice every time you go there. Most of the movements flow together. The background is usually pretty bland with mostly tan and brown houses and such, but given the story and the medieval theme of the game, this color scheme works well.

The music is epic and well selected. Changing from upbeat adventuring music, to fast paced battle music when an enemy is in range, is not only fun to listen to, but helpful if you don't see them before they see you.

The story is very well designed and, while a tad shallow at times (such as the Circle of Magi mission) it's quite enjoyable. Something that did bother me was that, in the beginning of the game, the racism towards elves is very noticeable, this racism is all but forgotten towards the end. This doesn't take away from the overall game, it's just a small snag.

I give this game a 9.8 out of 10.


If you have any suggestions please comment and I will adress it. Thanks for reading through my horrible spelling.