Dragon Age: Origins

Timeless

The game directs itself in a manner similar to most recent BioWare games - being similar to many of their previous works is a bit of a running theme. After your induction to the Grey Wardens the game diverges, giving you a set of tasks to accomplish in assorted locations and the freedom to go about them as you wish, getting distracted by the eleven million sidequests along the way. After that's all out the way, the game converges again for a long, spectacular finale that may, or may not, set itself up for further adventures down the line. Origins, remember?

For the most part it's entirely befitting of its grand intentions. The game's dungeons are immense, and its fractured levels easily blend together to create a seamless trek. One quest, where I had to awaken a poisoned Arl, was strung out over so many steps that I ended up completing about half of the game in the process. You get up to all sorts along the way, with combat highlights coming from the massive battles against Dragons (there had to be some) and the pearls of narrative coming out of the many twists each quest tends to throw at you.

A standout moment for me and my Elf Warrior came early in the game after bumping into a demon that had captured the devotion of a child - who I had been specifically tasked to rescue by the girl's father. As I told the demon to begone, that there was no way she was going to get to keep the child, the demon possessed, and consumed, her. Battering it to death was a matter of course, but the anguish of the girl's father struck a nerve that hasn't quite passed - and has kept me careful on my travels ever since.

The variety of the characters and the ingenuity of the situations is what keeps Dragon Age captivating. Your party is manned primarily by Alastair, a fellow Grey Warden with a wry sense of humour, and Morrigan, a sharp witch with an acid tongue - the two characters that initially join your party at the start prove to be stalwart companions for most of the game. The golem Shale, restricted to users who purchase the game new, is the highlight, towering over your party and hulking around with booming footsteps. In reality he's only teensy-tiny golem, with a camp British accent, who loves to jazz his appearance up with flamboyantly coloured crystals and profess his utter disdain for pigeons. If Alastair and Morrigan are to Dragon Age what Carth and Bastila were to Knights of the Old Republic, Shale is its HK-47.

Its ambition, while one of its most enchanting assets, prove to be its occasional undoing. There are simply too many characters and environments for the voice acting and textures not to suffer from time to time. And, despite its considerable virtues elsewhere, Dragon Age has a hard time creating atmosphere out of its staid settings: an elf forest, countless interchangeable caverns, infinite olde human castles - these locations feel worn out before you've even done their quests and ransacked their nooks and crannies for goodies. Dungeons can, and will, spiral out into gargantuan multi-hour quests - they become unsavoury wars of attrition between player and game.

Other areas, though, frisson with creative energies. The subterranean Dwarven city of Orzammar is particularly captivating, and entices players through an underground city fraught with an obsessive adherence to rigid class hierarchies. It's the best area in the game, bar none, and the problem is going back to less interesting locations afterwards.

Dragon Age has a tendency to be a bit of a mixed bag from time to time, but its scope and characters (but not the voice acting) ensure it is forgiven for the occasional atmospheric upset.

I also have to mention that I'm specifically reviewing the PC version here - which has better graphics, allows the game to be played from a top-down perspective and ups the difficulty to further test your finger-clicking prowess. The 360/PS3 version gets by in a pinch, with much of the game the same, but the PC is the best option if it's available.

Still, it's not all perfect in the land of keyboards and mice: the online community features are currently in tatters. Bits of your profile update, other bits don't, pop-ups saying "Unable to Connect to the Dragon Age Servers" ping up during gameplay every now and then, and it sadly comes off as a clumsy, unfinished component of an otherwise technically proficient game. It seems like a poor effort from BioWare, especially when considering that this system is of vast importance to them: it's how users browse, purchase and organise the potentially-lucrative downloadable content.

It has been the best part of a decade in the making, but Dragon Age is a worthy successor to Baldur's Gate II. That, alone, will be all most people need to hear. It is unmistakably a BioWare game, but nobody makes them quite like they do. I can see myself playing it for hundreds of hours.

85%

By Martin Gaston