Dragon Age: Origins

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Dragon Age is big. Really big. Over fifty hours big, and that's if you skip tons of side quests. Then your eye creeps over to the suffix: Origins. BioWare's latest unashamed fantasy epic, which once again pits you against impossible odds to decide the fate of the entire world, is - sales and reception permitting, I imagine - the equivalent of dipping your foot in the pool to test the waters.

BioWare might have officially ended their relationship with the Dungeons & Dragons ruleset, but much has been made of the game's status as the spiritual successor to the venerable Baldur's Gate series. That's no bad thing: the traditional fantasy RPG, the non-MMO kind, has been largely out-of-focus since 2006's Oblivion, replaced by an endless flood of Modern Duties and Gears of Halo's. I'd say it's about time for a new country jaunt over rolling green hills and mottled grey caves.

It's unashamedly BioWare, right down to the multiple dialog options and embarrassing sexy bits where you hope to God nobody walks in the room. In creating their own set of gameplay rules (let's ignore that they're quite similar to D&D), they've also been able to meticulously control the fashioning of their own world. At first glance it's a traditional droll fantasy setting: Darkspawn (read: Orcs) are trying to kill everyone; Humans rule the world in giant castles; Elves don't like humans; Dwarves don't actively dislike anyone, but most of them would rather not mix with the likes of anybody else if they can avoid it, thank you very much. Nobody likes mages. And there are loads of trees and forests and hills and dungeons and quests.

Your character starts, after dropping numbers into stats and deciding whether to have a moustache or be a lady, in their own origin story, which nicely sets the scene with rolling camera shots, casual storytelling and the exchange of pleasantries. This is the game showing you everyday life for your character, and each option - you choose your background, such a Noble Human or City Elf - has their own, dropping you into the world via, perhaps, a situation in an oppressed elf settlement where a human noble is coming to collect and rape your wife-to-be, or as a noble human about to get booted out of his own castle by mutinous subjects. There are six origin stories in total, each of them set in vastly different locations and spanning a couple of hours: you could complete Mass Effect in the time it takes to do all of them, and you wouldn't have even scratched the surface of Dragon Age.

Past the initial bits, where it looks like it could be a holiday brochure for a JRR Tolkien theme park - full of sweeping landscape shots and tales of a humanity united against evil - the reality isn't quite as neat and tidy. BioWare's latest fantasy world is a morally murky place, where evil has a habit of always coming back and somebody seems to end up getting hurt no matter how hard you try to save everyone. It's consequences from your choices aren't even quite as obvious as they have been in the past: jump right in with pure heroic vitriol and you'll quickly see innocents dropping like flies as you cut a path through evil. But, hey, that's all part of the game - you can't make an omelette, and all that.

It's daunting. It's all so very, very big. And bloody. Gaunt dabs of viscera dot the world map to indicate your travels. Pools of blood flow from the undersides of fallen foes. Sliced arteries, perforated organs and crushed skulls spray blood over your party, and crimson flecks stick to your skin and clothing for a while, even during cut-scenes. BioWare are clearly going for the 'medieval weapons were horrid and brutal' approach.

But nothing sums the tone of the game up better than the Grey Wardens. Their name immediately strikes as odd: grey, as an adjective, is rarely a good thing to be. They're supposed to be a band of crusaders, who battle away at the Darkspawn hordes regardless of the cost - but there only appears to be, at the start of the game, two of them in the whole of Ferelden. Their determination to kill the Darkspawn is unshakable, but their strength comes from ingesting the cursed blood of their foes and, like a university Rugby team, their initiation ceremony - which your character is eventually dragged into - kills off more potential members than it recruits. There's a reason they're not called the White Knights, even the heroes aren't valiant goody two-shoes, and only a handful of Ferelden's citizens believe them about the severity of the Darkspawn blight in the first place. It's a mean world.

The cruel environment is the perfect partner to the vindictive difficulty levels, too. I'm a fairly big fan of the Baldur's Gate series, but I often found myself in a pickle on Normal difficulty, where death is inevitable and tends to arrives suddenly. The bosses, especially, prove a nuisance, and most of them have such insane amounts of strength and physical defence that melee fighters are only useful as perfunctory meatshields. It's learnable, of course, but it took me about thirty hours before I felt anywhere near comfortable with the tricks of the game. Pro tip: get a healer.