Lightning-fast combat and spectacular spacial moves
Reviewed by windy
Pros:
- strong story
- strong gameplay
- strong voice acting
- strong characterization
Cons:
- Hard to target AoE stuff
- Harder to roleplay with a pre-set character
- The combat has less tactical
Playing Dragon Age 2 on both the PC and the Xbox360, it's determinately to say that Dragon Age 2 isn't a Mass Effect 2-style "strip down the RPG elements and turn it into an action game with RPG touches" endeavor - it's more of "take Dragon Age, and make it a bit better, prettier, and faster."
Dragon Age 2 isn't suddenly an action game with stats - you still issue commands to your party members, and you can still pause during combat (easily done on PC by hitting the spacebar, and using radial menus a la like the previous game) to figure out the situation. The simple act of issuing an attack order usually translated into the directed character sort of lollygagging their way to their target, and then enacting a slow attack animation. Getting a rogue to the proper position for a backstab attack was a pain-and-a-half due to the lack of walking speed.
While the combat in the
role-playing game looks and feels faster thanks to animation tweaks, the main visual change comes from the over-the-top violence. At times, combat resembles a scene out of Kill Bill and Monty Python & The Holy Grail simultaneously. When a rogue uses both of her daggers to chop someone in half, we see a copious spray of blood, flying chunks of viscera, and are left with a pair of freestanding legs. The warrior-specific ability to simply charge in a circle usually results in instantly disemboweling most foes in the area. The way your characters get covered in blood still looks comical, but the amount of sheer bodily carnage that happens during the course of a single battle provides a bit of a better explanation for said appearance now.
It's actually inspired from raid encounters in
World of Warcraft, and adds an additional tactical layer to combat. Lead designer Mike Laidlaw jokes that a player can simply spam the A-button or the right-mouse button on casual difficulty, but on higher difficulties, tricks like these will call for proper use of party grouping and tactics. BioWare co-founder Ray Muzyka teases that the final boss battle is, "unlike anything we've done ourselves, and it will be too obvious if I name it, but when you get to that final battle, you'll know what game we were thinking of when designing that encounter."
Besides the fact that combat looks/feels crazier and faster, there are some other tweaks here and there that make Dragon Age 2 more interesting than its predecessor. The dialogue tree now resembles Mass Effect's, and features an icon that clearly delineates the type of response it is - such as an olive branch for diplomacy, a fist for aggression, and a money bag to indicate bartering for an additional reward. The worldmap not only hosts more locations, but also has a time function - meaning you can use it to travel to the day or night "version" of an area (it seems like a way to have time-specific quests or activities without utilizing a realtime world clock).
The formerly broken archer rogue now feels somewhat overpowered due to how all the bow abilities have a measure of either knockback or crowd control combined with tweaked cooldown timers. Party members not only stay or leave depending on your actions, but can also live or die due to your choices as well (this seems like a more fleshed out or frequent version of the Wrex decision from Mass Effect).
One other example of substantially building on a minor feature from the previous game is how every party member has a specific skilltree. That is, besides the usual rogue/mage/warrior trees, there is a person-specific skill that is dependent on that party member's relationship to you. Additionally, there are new combat abilities unique to that character when you get a high enough Friendship/Rivalry; one example is how Fenris, the lyrium-infused warrior, can learn how to use his condition to fade in-and-out of combat.
Dragon Age 2 may look and feel almost like an action game, but that's more in tweaking animations and making your characters hustle rather than lollygag during combat. It's still a pause-and-play combat game, it still has a lot of places to go and people to talk to, and it still has a detailed skilltree that puts Mass Effect 2's tree to shame. Even the fact that you can actually dodge projectiles, or how boss battles now utilize timing and patterns, makes the combat already feel fresher rather than devolved.
