Dragon Age 2 Review

I did a trade in yesterday and picked up Dragon Age 2. It was between this and Fight Night and I thought the guys in the office would rather play this in their spare time.

Here's a very quick review.

For context: I have played and really liked Mass Effect 2 but never played Dragon Age 1. I was a huge Final Fantasy Fan on the PS1 and I'm a fan of the Assassins Creed series. This is my gaming creds.

What I liked

- I bought it for $28 with the trade in

- It has Dragons in it (well I've killed one large one in the first 9 hrs)

- It hasn't crashed on me

- It's fun to totally smash big groups of people and the battle mechanics are enjoyable.

What I didn't like
- The graphics are ho hum. Made worse by the lack of detail in the environments. You play games like Uncharted 2 which poke you in the eye with awesome and then you get this which feels blocky, boring and generic.

- The voice acting is fucking terrible. In IGN's review they said it was "one of the hall marks of a Bio Ware game is that the voice acting is great". These are the same people who think the Transformers gave a moving performance. The voices either lack any emotion are cliché and ruin the experience. It's like everyone has aspergers syndrome. But that's being kind. They have "Keanu Reeves Syndrome"

If anyone disagrees then go play with your dog in your house and tell me that the simple acting task of "say something nice to your dog" is a complete fail for the main voice actor (male)

- To make the voices worse there is a lot of boring ass talking. I've started to skip all of it. Yay for B button. I realised I listened to all of Assassins Creeds story points but 5% of these.
Bu... Th.... Is.... wh..... That's all I hear now as there is just too much junk talk to pad this game out.

- The missions are boring! Assassins Creed 2 and Brotherhood had so many mission types you really felt like you were on an adventure. FPS break things up by letting you drive a tank of fly in a robot suit. Final Fantasy gave us little mini games but Dragon Age 2 gives you the same shit over and over. Just bigger enemies. I'm 9 hrs in (speedy 9 hrs as I skipped most of the dialogue) and all I've done is attack and collect. A band of kick ass delivery guys picking up shit from one area and giving it to some random NPC for 50 silver coins. We need a run fast button as 25% of the game is walking around to the next story point.

What's worse is all the levels look the same. IGN said this and I thought "that's because they are looking for it, it can't be that bad" but it is. It's a copy and paste job and get any level designer from Bio Ware drunk and they will tell you. "Oh yeah I dialled that fucker in for shizzle" (note Bio Ware people swear and use hip hop references when drunk)

The more I think about it the more I don't like the game. My hopes were too high and I think Mass Effect with it's sci-fi story had much more latitude to do interesting things with the story and the mission types.