Widunder

I’ve been playing Bioware’s latest masterpiece for a good while now. My character is level 14 and I have spent around 20-ish hours on the game. So I’ve played a good piece of it all. My biggest question mark about this game is HOW could it get so insanely great review score? At the moment it has 91 on Metacritic, which is brilliant score. They must be very happy with that, especially if you look at the quality of the game and what it, in my opinion, SHOULD HAVE gotten.

Dragon Age Score

My main problem with Dragon Age is the lack of polish of the game in general. Especially art wise. Sure, Bioware has never been a studio of stunning art. But Dragon Age just takes the price. The character models is a joke, the hands are monster-big and the faces makes everyone look like statues. The animation is even worse. First of all, all of the characters shares the same animation set. As in male and female characters. This makes the female characters look like they have a big stone up their bum. Also, ALL of the characters have the exact same identical idle pose in cut-scenes, which is as generic as it can get. When in dialog, the facial animation is a disaster. The only thing that is clearly moving is the lips and the eyebrows just blends between 3-4 positions depending on the current mood of the character.

Default Idle Pose

When it comes to gameplay, there is two things a player does in this game; go through dialogs, and fighting. The dialogs are very well written and interesting. The characters are rich and the story is somewhat compelling. The fighting in the other hand is really awful. It’s your average ultra-generic D&D combat system with the option to pause to give out orders. They did add a strategy-system in which you can “script” your guys for battles, like “if this guy has below 50% health, use potion” or “when close to an enemy use attack X”. It’s a nice touch and you do feel like you can trust the characters somewhat to handle themselves in simpler battles. During a difficult battle however, you really must use the pause-feature.

Anyhoo, the worst thing about the combat, is that they use to waaaay too much. Sometimes you encounter 20+ enemies and when you’ve finally killed them and moves 10m forward you encounter the same amount of the same kind of enemies again. The more I play the game the more I feel like the combat is really just a sort of “traveling” between the dialogs and the next piece of juicy story development.
If I wanted to play a combat heavy RPG I would’ve played a game with an enjoyable and GOOD combat system. Like Diablo for example. Not the same kind of game, but it does have a combat system that is enjoyable to be a part of again and again and again. Dragon Age’s combat system is not.

I don’t know if EA has payed for their awesome score results in reviews, or maybe Dragon Age just is 91/100-good. The strange thing is though that I haven’t talked to anyone (both inside and outside the game industry) that actually thinks Dragon Age deserves this score, or that it is a brilliant game in general. So either we’re all wrong, or the reviews are just pure rubbish.