Not worth 60$. Would definitely buy it for 30$. (I of course, bought it for 60$ because I'm a hurp durp)
[spoiler]
I had fun in the game, primarily as a Rogue. I'm starting a run as a Mage right now. Rogue combat was explosive and hair raising, as improper aggro management would very quickly end your life (and your party if you were the main DPS). Mage is more ranged than Rogue, and seems to have a lot more survivability options. Of course once I got the -100% Threat and -100% Threat Generation talent in the Shadow tree, the game became broken. My Rogue could DPS with impunity for 20s, usually killing everything that wasn't a boss (and usually killing that boss with just Assassinate).
My primary issues with the game was the incredibly overused dungeon maps and the nature of the enemy spawn mechanics. There is about, I think, 5 or 7 dungeon maps, which is basically 1 map per area of the game. The maps themselves are large and have different locked doors / spawn points in order to be "variable". They also have fixed spawn points, so you can easily memorize a map to a mission to know where all the stuff is.
The enemy spawn mechanics is what strips out most of the tactical capability of the game. They usually come in waves, and always behind your mages/archers. Thus the notion of having warriors provide a frontal protection is nullified when the next wave come, and they're already on top of your squishies. The best way to protect is basically a brawler warrior with an upgraded Taunt. AoE and bursting the wave down is better than trying to coordinate a barrier.
Those two points arguably wreck the game in a combat sense, which I could agree with.
I really did enjoy the story and its sense of progression in some aspects, however. Hawke's ME2-esque 'badass lawful good', 'smartass chaotic neutral', and 'forcefulass neutral evil' had a colorful variation between themselves. The accumulative moral decision mechanic was particularly interesting to me. In place of a good/bad karma system, what happens is that Hawke's responses build off previous choices in the Act. If you tend to pick saintly Hawke, your good wheel choices tend to produce more sincere dialogue, etc. Very specific dialogue options also open up, depending on the particular instance.
Choices and consequences tended to play out in a sensible way. The time skips between the three acts allowed different trees to shoot up, depending on how many quests I did and what I did in them. Questlines did a good job of reinserting themselves back into your life during the next act, instead of just being there at the very beginning. Some quests in particular were completely off the wall to me, though. A quest I finished in Act 1 came back at Act 3 with no foreshadowing or idea that the consequences of that quest were coming. It was like I'm doing this new quest, oh wait its related to one from act 1? Well, ok. Those were the exception, not the rule though.[/spoiler]
Overall I'd recommend the game in a heart beat at half its current price. At its current price, it doesn't have nearly the polish I'd expect (in large part due to repetitious environments). A city-state like Kirkwall can be a vast place, and even if the themes are similar, each dungeon could have been artistically different. However, as I used to play Diablo 2 and NOX, I'm somewhat used to the repetitious use of the same dungeon.
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Topic: Dragon Age 2 (Read 2388 times)