A good solid game that falls somewhat short of it's predecessor
The review is based on playing the XBox360 version.
There is a lot to like here. The story is solid if not as epic as Origins. The characters are good but somewhat darker than Origins. I loved the humorous banter amongst the party while questing in Origins but this time things are a bit more serious and I think the game suffer a bit for it. Combat has been tightened up and is more button mashing than strategy and I would have liked that to have been balanced a bit more in favor of strategy. To be fair though it is entirely possible to micromanage the party its just not necessary except for bossfights. Combat is as always violently gratifying. These are real battles with blood and sweat and there is a real sense of danger whenever you face another fight. The story makes sense and each character fits into it well, but this is not the epic stuff that made Origins however.
The level up interface system have been overhauled and this is one of my biggest gripes. Why fix something that wasn't broke the old everything on one page system with 4 levels for each spell class made sense whereas the new system with each spell tree on one page seems confusing and actually makes it harder to manage.
Graphics are OK as they were in Origins. This game was never about great 3D graphics so i was not dissapointed. The map system however is another area where something was fixed before broken. In Origins there was an overall map and a real sense of traveling from place to place. Here there is a weird graphical background with some Icons but no real sense of moving around a world or even as here a city. please make a proper geographical map next time.
Last a few potential spoilers so don't read unless you have played the game.
SPOILER.
Bioware toyed a bit in awakening with the idea of loosing a character. It undoubtedly adds to the gravitas of the story when a character dies and in Awakening it worked, sort of. Here it also sort of works early on but please why oh why do we have to loose second character almost 10 hours into play ??? If you, as me, have build your party around one particular character/role ( I am not saying who) and have built others in a more supporting role you can get seriously stuck when that character suddenly dies or at least dissapeares from the game. This is bad design and in my case forced me to go back to an earlier save to build another character differently in order to accomodate the loss. Please reconsider this next time.
I would be very sad not to have more Dragon Age games and I pray origins will continue the series. I will certainly buy more but I hope some of the critisism is taken up and analysed in future.
Here's to Dragon Age III :-)