Dragon Age: Origins – Don’t waste your money.

EA sure has done a great job in getting everyone hyped for Dragon Age, with impressive CG characters and awesome looking combat moves.  However when you strip away the pretty packaging, you might be sadly disappointed with its contents.  Yesterday was the release date, and afterp icking it up I sat down with the hope of a good game to stay up with all night.

Character creation lets you customize your character’s face only, and there are only about 8 different hairstyles that are not exclusive to race, of which there are 3. There are no color wheels to let you make your own colors, anything you can customize is already pre-made. You do not get to customize the body or height of your character.  There are 3 base classes that you can build off of, but not extensively. Skills are unlocked by spending skill points when you level up, but there are not a lot of them and some of them you may not even care about. For example, if you’re a rogue and you want to use dual daggers, you may not care for the bow mastery skills if you plan to not use a bow.

So I start out with my character, the first thing I noticed was my character ran like a stiff board, I feel so sorry that she was born with no joints. My partner elf finds some humans blah blah, I go through about 5 dialog choices before I think eff it, I’ll kill the humans just so I don’t have to read any more. So we do, then we find a mystical cave, in which my partner goes on and on about. Which might be okay but I had no idea what he was talking about, as I obviously didn’t know anything about the story yet. So what can I say… almost 2 hours later I was still trudging through uninteresting dialog, boring battles, useless side quests, I felt like I was playing some Korean MMORPG, masked as a consolde game, by myself. The graphics probably killed it for me though, the stiff animations, the bad textures, the way objects in the distance rendered, the lame water effect, the fact you couldn’t even go in the water, the endless amount of text, the fact your character felt the need to say a line every time you hit the attack button, among many other flaws.
What I expected:

What I got:

Maybe there’s something I’m missing, maybe it gets really good later on, I mean, there has to be a reason it scored so high on all the gaming sites. If I have to play through 2 hours of terrible game play then I don’t really care. If I wanted to read a book, then I wouldn’t be playing a video game. (I’d be playing a visual novel!) Who are you people reviewing games? What are your standards for “Amazing graphics!”? Why aren’t you playing games that involve 20 sided dice right now? Do yourself a favor and save your money for Mass Effect 2, or Modern Warfare 2. In the age of next generation games, this one just goes backwards. (This review was for the 360, some content may or may not apply on other platforms.)