Difficulty:

Easy

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Mixed reactions"

The Good:
Roughly 20 more hours of the same great gameplay and setting from the original game. The usual excellent voice acting from Bioware games. Interesting new gameplay aspects, spells, talents and skills. A new cast of characters to get to know. Excellent story concept. Plenty of impact of your story choices on the ending you get in the Awakenings epilogue.
The Bad:
Awakenings shows extremely little impact and carry-over of your storyline choices from the first game into the second and is the most buggy Bioware game in years. Recycled sound clips. Poor pacing. Feels a bit like a cash-in title. Rushed story and slightly underdeveloped characters.

As the first true expansion for Bioware's thrilling "Dragon Age Origins" game, the events in "Awakenings" take place immediately after the end of the first game and brings back the same great setting, gameplay, combat and a few NPC favorites (like Master Wade) from the first title.

Before you get too excited about that first sentence, the most glaring and annoying fault of Awakenings is introduced nearly immediately: precious little of your choices from the first game carry over into this expansion.

Indeed, Awakenings is shocking in just how much it feels like a rushed money grab.

As an example of this, prior to the most recent Bioware patch, if you had a love interest from the first game, unless that interest was Alistair then he or she is completely absent and hardly referenced at all in the sequel. In the most recent patch, you are supposed to get a (very) short letter from your beloved from the first game in your inventory (though I did not) explaining their absence.

And this really does set the tone of how Awakenings is a bit of a disappointment, despite being a great game in its own right.

Bioware titles have consistently made their mark as being immersive, story and character driven sagas over the years with personal choices having a tremendous impact on what happens. With just how much Bioware carried over from original Mass Effect into the sequel, fans of the company could legitimately expect that the several dozen hours they spent creating the perfect save game to be imported to the next release in the Dragon Age setting would get a little more respect for their efforts.

They would be mistaken. Unless you played a human noble in the first game, your choices from the first game are largely forgotten.

Building on this theme are some of the new characters that get introduced.

The characters that you have to interact with feel either a bit like copies of the characters from the first title (with Velanna very strongly resembling Morrigan and Anders sounding and acting eerily similar to Alistair…despite being an Apostate mage) or are a little underdeveloped and rushed (Justice and Sigrun). This evidence of recycling shows as well in some of the sound clips. Many people will remember Leliana's exclaiming "brilliant!" after you won an easy battle in the first game. That clip plays in Awakenings as well.

Adding onto some of the feelings of disappointment are a myriad of bugs. While none of them are exactly game breaking, they are fairly persistent and immersion breaking. Whether they are merely annoying, such as gifts being glitched for some characters (like Ohgren) to not give the amount of influence they are supposed to, or downright frustrating such as quests themselves not working quite right (depending on the order you undertake the plot missions some character development missions may not trigger properly) they crop up with regularity.

This is not to say that Awakenings does not have a lot going for it and is worth the reduced ($40) price of admission.

For starters, nearly all your equipment and abilities transfer over. Beyond that, a host of new skills, spells, talents and tactic options are added in to further customize your party. These will come in handy as the game also throws several new types of Darkspawn at you and expands the level cap to 35.

In some cases, these additions are completely incremental, such as the fantastic new "Runecrafting" talent that allows you to create your own new runes similar to creating potions, poisons or traps in the first game. Similarly, adding "armor" runes to the available weapon runes in the first game is a great addition. (Although here, too, there is evidence of a rushed title. Early on you find a "Novice Barrier Rune" that adds additional armor points to any armor it is enchanted with. It's the only Barrier rune in the game and evidence that this was a rune type that got cut at the last minute.)

In other cases, the additions are replacements for skills, spells or talents from the first game that weren't very useful. Warrior, Rogue and Mage classes all get some tweaks that make them more interesting and keep them fresh to experiment around with.

And last but not least, in this game you are the "Warden Commander" and there's some castle management and decision making to do to serve as a nice change of pace, though this too feels rushed, poorly paced out, and is more than a little bit buggy when compared to, for example, the keep building experience from Neverwinter Nights 2.

More important than the new bells and whistles are the new types of enemies and the environments that you will meet them in. Much of the storyline in the expansion revolves around a new type of talking Darkspawn that shows intelligence and organization. These "Awakened" Darkspawn are a great story concept, though like many other things in the game it could have used more fleshing out and just how it will be integrated into the canon of Dragon Age 2 is unclear.


Still, the concept is interesting enough to make for an entertaining hook for players returning to Thedas for another pass. In fact, given that the most memorable villain from the first game wasn't really a Darkspawn at all, this development stands out as one of the very best parts of the game since it gives the Darkspawn some actual personality rather than making it feel like you're battling the equivalent of a very large, very ugly plague of locusts like the Darkspawn were presented as being in the first title.

You will face these enemies in three distinctly new environments that are one of the best, most fully integrated pieces of the expansion. All three of the main new places to visit show an admirable amount of polish and love. Traveling while exploring and fighting within them reminds you a great deal of what you loved so much about the original title and are wonderful additions to the setting lore. In particular, the return to the Deep Roads and one of the lost dwarven cities reveals a piece of backstory that is both touching and sad.

If you're looking for the next great Bioware title, this isn't it. If you're looking for an entertaining and fun return to Thedas for a second pass as a Gray Warden, Awakenings will nicely tide you over until Dragon Age 2.

True Score: 8.2