Dragon Age II

I spent almost the entire day engrossed with this game, which I took from Deren the night before. And boy do I love this game! Dragon Age 2 is a Role-Playing game(RPG) that reminds me of those online games like Cabal Online and World of Warcraft, but this game is offline/single-player.

The storyline is pretty nice, but it takes a while to get the idea of what is going on in the game since it is a follow up to the first Dragon Age game. There will be a lot of new terms and races that makes new players like me feel lost, but you should understand everything more or less as you play on.

The gameplay, I feel, resembles that of WoW. Your team of 4 will fight random swarms of enemies, and you have your number keys on your keyboard denoting abilities you can wield and use. The enemies are not so simple that you can just spam the attack button on them. You need to position your team for minimum damage taken and maximum efficiency. Too many times have I got my team slaughtered due to no planning. The gameplay is not hard to pick up, but it will take a bit of time to get use to carrying out your strategies in the middle of fights. It kind of reminds me of the game Brother In Arms, where you will pause halfway to plan your strategy.

Another big reason why I love this game is character customization. This game allows you to customize your character's gender, looks, and class(mage,warrior,rogue). I nearly chose the warrior class, because I felt lazy to cast spells. A warrior is all about high health and high damage. But then I didn't want my character running around in some huge armor, so I decided to play as rogue class.

One good thing about this RPG is the interactions you make with the other characters in-game. What you say will affect your relationship with your teammates, or may even determine the future plots further down in the game. I've only started today, so I wouldn't know much. I like the "freedom of speech" where you don't just keep pressing one button and see this fixed conversation go on. The conversations are rather interesting and you tend to learn what's going on in the world there through these chats.

You can choose to change the difficulty while in-game if you think that the enemies are too hard. I did change my difficulty once from "normal" to "casual", because at that time I did not realize the importance of tactics and simply sent my team to it's death.

Customizing the skills that your character learns is rather diversified too. There is no specific skills you must learn, no fixed order to learn them, nothing. It's your character, it's your say.

There are a lot of quests to do, that are secondary or sub plots. Really helps to make sure the game doesn't get completed too fast.

The graphics are rather good. Not fantastic, but good. The environments are rather detailed...well, the natural environment doesn't have much detailing to do, right? But the town itself is just remarkable.I've no complaints in that department.

And yes, there is blood. And sex. Well, the latter if you can develop romance between your character and that other character. That's what I've heard. I've not actually done any flirting yet to other characters.

If there was anything I would complain about, is the fact that there are spiders as enemies. I really, really hate spiders, and the ones in the game are so realistic looking I try not to look at the screen when I engage those critters. Another thing is potions. You usually can afford to buy a whole load of potions before you head out on missions in other games, but in here, you have to use your potions wisely. Or, get a healer.

So this is how I feel of the game after playing it for one whole day. And I doubt I'm even halfway through game completion. I like how you have the freedom to do things your way, and where the storyline is not fixed but rather fluid and dependent on the choices you make and the things you say. You can even customize the little thumbnail size portrait of your character which appears at the side of your screen. This game is definitely a good way to kill time!