Dragon Age: Origins

While EA and BioWare were off courting the lowest common denominator with their sex and violence campaign for Dragon Age: Origins, RPG gamers without thumb callouses and an appreciation for a multi-faceted d20 were left holding the pram. Would an old-school RPG like Baldur's Gate even get a nod from its estranged parents with their console love children, or was this going to be Mass Effect in a fantasy skin? In hindsight we should have had more faith. Having met a respectable portion of the team we can imagine that if it were left completely up to them, we'd be rolling dice in a fourth edition D&D rule set licensed game on a mission to de-throne a resurrected Bhaal.

Dragon Age (and we find ourselves almost choking on our words as we say it) is a better game than this. The introduction has all the hallmarks of pre-KOTOR BioWare and even though the deceptively simple character creation system offers a minute fraction of the options that Neverwinter Nights boasted, the knowledge that a mere seven different race-class-caste combinations (not to mention gender) would completely change the way NPCs reacted to us and the course of the game, was cause for us to spend nearly as much time creating our Dwarf commoner.

It's a vanilla start though even for gamers used to console RPGs, as Dragon Age instructs you in the use of the action bar, inventory organisation, the almighty codex (home to many console-style achievements) and other functions that most gamers take for granted. The origin story for our castless Dwarf warrior was useful in colouring his background, but while his fight through to the arena in Orzammar to prove himself to the Grey Wardens sets the pace in many ways, it isn't the grand opening we'd hoped it would be. Perhaps we set the bar too high for the first hour of the game because it snowballed from here: this would be the last and only time Dragon Age disappointed us in the slightest.

The fortress city of Ostagar forms a staging point for the next part of your quest, putting our fledgling group out to work out in the Kokari Wilds and throwing handfuls of Hurlock and Genlock darkspawn at you to play with. For the most part they're dispatched with relative ease, but you get a sense of the tactics needed to tackle large groups of marauding baddies, especially when the odd spellcaster is thrown in. It's with toe-curling pleasure that we found it necessary to resort to the intricate stop-motion combat tactics so reminiscent of BioWare days of yore, pausing the action to select targets, choose activated abilities, spells or items while barely letting the fight run a few seconds onward before tapping the space bar again. In fact, it's almost mandatory to work your way through a battle in this way despite the inclusion of post-battle regenerative health and auto-resurrection, which simply takes the pain out of the fight.

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