1. I'm giving you my opinion. Whatever I say about this game is simply what I feel about it - to really know if the game is worth your time and money, you'll simply have to try it.
2. That being said, if I'm going to give a numbered rating (as much as I'm not a huge fan of them) it will be on a real 1-10 scale. On that scale, a game that I enjoy a distinctly average amount will be rated a 5. This is not an exam, and a 5/10 is still a perfectly valid grade. 10/10 does not mean the game is perfect, because no game is perfect. It does, however, mean that I enjoyed it much more than most other games.
GAMEPLAY AND MECHANICS
Dragon Age: Origins was a game with excellent writing, a strong enough setting, and well-developed characters (with the exclusion of certain intensely stereotypical dwarves). Where it fell flat for me was in combat. You found yourself in a world of ancient magic, fantastic races, and incredible destiny, only to learn that for budget purposes all of your allies and enemies were being choreographed by the same people who make History Channel reenactments. Your men would shuffle listlessly to where you told them to go after a significant pause to perform a sequence of maybe three canned attack animations to which the enemy would only slightly react to, if they reacted at all. The occasional treat was a fairly over-the-top finishing animation that would have both your character and his victim choreographed together for a gravity-defying decapitation or whatnot, much like the (somehow much better-looking) combat was in Knights of the Old Republic. All that has really been done is making an already over-the-top fantasy series a bit more over-the-top to avoid those strange conflicts. The result is still-tactical combat that plays like butter during those short intervals when you are not issuing orders.
People saw the trailers for Dragon Age II and feared that their game was becoming Dynasty Warriors. What has actually happened is that your men do not amble any longer – they appear to have realized that their lives are at stake and that they had better get around to bashing some demons right goddamn now. If you think tactical depth has been lost, consider playing on a higher difficulty. I’m playing on Normal and actually having something of an easier time than I did in Origins, but honestly, Origins’s difficulty was so bipolar that that statement means almost nothing. Classes’ roles have been expanded somewhat – Rogues get some area of effect attacks and move about the field very quickly (meaning they’re not completely useless as combatants anymore), Warriors’ function as tanks has been implemented far more visibly, and Mages have ceased to be the one truly best class by millions of miles as their specializations are not completely broken anymore.
Threat level is far more necessary to manage than before, and I’ve seen enemies come after mages who are lobbing fireballs far more often than I ever saw in Origins. Something else I loved was that with the more action-oriented (but still tactical!) combat, two handed weapon users tend to hit more than one enemy with the arc of their attacks, where in the first game they were locked into battle with only one enemy at a time. It creates a feeling of everyone actually occupying the same space. Cross-class combos take advantage of enemy status effects that Origins fiddled around with only slightly – they’ve also finally implemented conditions in the tactics for being frozen/brittle over the far less specific “immobile”. Speaking of tactics, don’t worry about not having enough slots! Your characters now get more than enough slots automatically, because honestly any combatant with an IQ over 68 would be able to remember how to do more than 8 things to do in battle without additional “tactical” training. So, no need to worry. The tactical aspects of combat have not been stripped out of the game, although honestly when “Cone of Cold on everything” was the best tactic in the first, was there really anywhere they could have gone but up? (A bit of an exaggeration, yes, but a fair one.)
