Super solid RPG with a decent story and well made world. The combat is tactical and involving; however, the flow of it just has an off feel to it.

Being able to directly manage your party members through both manual control and highly refined automation is really great to see and play with.

What is ther to say? It's Bioware doing what they do best. If you like their previous games, with quests that start humble and turn epic, characters with shadowy pasts, and places to explore, you'll like this one too. So why the relatively low rating? First, because of the "been there, done that" feeling you get sometimes, exactly due to their reuse of a winning game structure. At times, interacting with another character, you might think "hey, that's pretty much the same as they did in their previous game." Second, because of the annoying way to sell DLC. So there you are moving on your quests and you notice a new NPC has appeared on your camp. You start talking to him and BAM! "ok, you can do this quest if you buy it from the online store. Want to go there now?" Great way to break immersion, guys.

A great game that any rpg fan will love. In my opinion it is better than the second in the series, but both our good. This game lasted me a good 40 hours, so if you want a fun rpg look no further then this game.

Great fantasy RPG with some tedious moments. True successor to Bioware's Baldur's Gate series. A bit more streamlined combat system would make the long fighting sequences less tiresome. Party interaction is top class, including voice acting.

Hm, Dragon Age. It has excellent graphics, and the atmosphere is really something to behold. However, to compare it to Baldur's Gate, as many have done in the past, would be a huge stretch.

Well maybe not huge, but here is what I mean: Baldur's Gate is a top down turn-based strategy game in which you manage healers, mages, fighters, and thieves to battle through dastardly dungeons all to the backdrop of an engrossing story that keeps you moving on, with a heavy side-helping of optional exploration and character advancement.

Dragon Age is a game that immediately gives you the impression of *not* being Baldur's Gate, but then immediately, confusingly, shows itself to *be* Baldur's Gate. The game is often presented from the over-the-shoulder perspective, but after the first few fights, you begin to realize this perspective REALLY is not working at all in your quest to kill bad guys. Pulling back the camera engages a mode similar to a Baldur's Gate lite, where you are much too far from the ground or characters to appreciate the game's stellar visuals and the attention to detail poured into its environments. Immersion dies at this point - you can't even make it out, what began as an eerie trek through a demonic enclave becomes like a zoomed in Google Map. It's not quite the same as being there...

Therefore, you navigate the game in third-person, but you are repeatedly forced to back the camera away to manage your party members and win battles, who despite having a vaunted party member AI control panel (which is much too user-unfriendly, and it is not immediately apparent what various features of the panel actually do), are generally dumb as a box of rocks and two trick ponies to boot. They need your constant attention, which is actually different than other Bioware titles like KotOR and Mass Effect 2. Dragon Age is deceptive in that it at first appears like KotOR or ME2, but then reveals a system that is a tremendous throwback to the Infinity Engine games such as Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale. Nostalgia?

Perhaps it is nostalgia, and I won't debate the game's excellent storytelling, or its fantastic visuals and lovingly-crafted environments. The 'nostalgia,' however, is something that doesn't click with me. While I can go back to play KotOR or Baldur's Gate and enjoy them immensely just like I did the very first time I played, I simply cannot enjoy Dragon Age in the same way as those two classics. With its immersion-breaking combat system, AI that needs babysitting / configuration before they'll do something halfway intelligent, and overly-complex inventory management which sends you shuffling through vast arrays of nonsense items just for the sake of old times...

Dragon Age is a game that has its roots firmly ensconced in the all time greats of the past, but which deliberately made few strides into the future by clinging to dated gameplay mechanics of yesteryear with no improvements made to any of them. I.e. your NPC companions may claim deeper intelligence and reasoning in cutscenes and conversations, but because they were also too stupid to tie their shoes in Baldur's Gate, they must also be so in Dragon Age. Why can you not give them *guidance* instead of outright controlling their every move? Because that's not how it was in Baldur's Gate, obviously.

This game has received a tremendous outpouring of support, however, and if you are the kind of person who loves this sort of game, nothing I say will change that, but while I still replay Planescape: Torment and the Icewind Dale series today, Dragon Age did not grip me and I found it difficult to even progress in. The exciting, sweeping story was bogged down by a fiddly combat system that felt more akin to watching a Hollywood Blockbuster and then leaving several times during the film to play an unrelated, distant board game to keep the heroes from being left to their own devices in times of danger to keep them from rushing stupidly to their gruesome deaths. To me, it worked well in Baldur's Gate which was built around this sort of combat, but it feels out of place in Dragon Age, and it's disappointing. The transition between exploration and combat is jarring and unwelcome and the two do not mesh at all, and combat is not even as enjoyable as it was even in Neverwinter Nights 2, and I'm not entirely sure why other than my overwhelming feeling this game was unsure of where its loyalties lay, in the past, or in the future, and did not fully grasp how to bring the two together.

DA is a good game and other reviewers have pretty much covered the good and bad points already. I would complain about the range of combat. Having an archer or some magic for that matter is pointless because most enemies just rush in. Even with pause and give orders the fights always wind up being very close and it takes away a lot of the tactical feel. That kind of ruins it for me as it's very claustrophobic.

Dragon Age together with Mass Effect are one of the Best games of 2010, although they have very different gameplay and they based in completely different worlds, Bioware managed to pull 2 excellent games from the Roleplay point of view.

The way the characters interact, the different "Origins", the good amount of sidequest, the extra content available as DLCs and the possibility of defeating the game in different ways, assure you at least 2 or 3 playthroughs of Dragon Age, each with at least 40 hours to finish (Maybe less once you start skipping some dialogs and ignoring the sidequests).

The only negative aspect of the game, which is not really a big issue, is the combat mechanics and the AI. It takes some time to get used to it and master, and even then the AI might backstab you a couple of times.

Nevertheless, don't miss the chance to play this game, the story and the graphics are really good, and as all Bioware games, you can export your character and use it to play Dragon Age 2.

There are so many options with games these days. There are bargain bins, online sales, ebay. There's so much stuff coming out so cheaply that I find the biggest concern I have when buying a game is not how much it costs, but how much of my time am I willing to give it. How does THIS game deserve my time more than others. I have around 25 half started games on my PC that I plan on "getting around to". I'm sure plenty of you are in the same boat.

I'm finding more and more than games need to be complete in order to draw me in. Dragon Age is one of those games. Like a great novel or movie, it hooks you immediately when you start playing. The story is immersive. The acting and scripts are exceptional. The character creation is fun, every stat is actually useful, and you'll find each character type extremely rewarding to play, with none of them in particular offering a substantial benefit over another. I had as much fun playing a thief, running around behind the enemies as I did playing a mage, standing back and controlling combat from afar.

The game makes great use of dialog. Some of dialogs are the standard "click on all the options till they stop talking" kind, but many force you to make decisions, which effect not only that NPC's reaction, but also the reaction of your own party members. Choose to kill someone who's committed a crime, and while one of your party thinks you are a strong leader, another disapproves.

There are also many 'moral choice' type of decisions. Most of them present scenarios where both options have both good and bad points, and you have no way of knowing how each will turn out. It really makes you think about your own moral code. The game keeps track of these decisions, and after you complete the game gives you a summary of the outcomes of them.

The tactics is the game are great. As your characters level up, they gain tactics slots, which you can essentially use to teach them how to behave on the battlefield. You can tell your mage for example, what spells to use and when. The number of conditions is very large, ranging from things like casting healing when someones health is below a threshold, to casting a stun spell when you are surrounded by more than 3 enemies. There are plenty of things to try to see what works.

Graphics are solid - not great. There are probably nicer looking games out there in the market, but in general they do a great job. There are some very nice effects and polish, like some of the finishing animations when you kill bad guys (I especially like killing ogres!)

When many games end, I find myself being relieved. "I can FINALLY cross that one off my list". I can honestly say that when I finished Origins, I wanted it to go on. The first thing I did was check for a sequel - which fortunately is underway... This game is a great achievement and will be a classic.

If you liked any of the previous BioWare games like Baldur's Gate or KOTOR series, you would love this game. The characters and the dialogues are great and there's plenty of darkspawn to kill. I would say this is one of the best games in the RPG genre.

A great game, storyline got you interested from the get go and it made every moral decision you were forced to make actually meaningful. The battle system was a bit clumsy, especially given that the AI did occasionally make very dumb decisions. Overall though the game play is good and the storyline is one of the best in video games.