Dragon Age: Origins is probably one of the hardest games I have played in some time, killing me repeatedly.  I have found myself pausing the game every five seconds in battle, pouring over all the options that I could use to combat the enemy.  Also, I have reloaded whole sections of gameplay, due to decisions taking away party members due to decisions I have made in my travels.  And yet with all of these complications, I have found Dragon Age: Origins to be one of the finest games I have played in quite some time.  Bioware has made a throwback, classic RPG title that will have players coming back again and again, to find new ways to play through the game’s multiple paths.

Dragon Age: Origins is a new intellectual property from Bioware, which takes us back to their roots in the Dungeons and Dragons style RPG.  Of course, this time around, Bioware is not constrained by the rigid license from TSR and now Wizards of the Coast.  With that in mind, Bioware takes the world of Dragon Age: Origins into new directions that we are unfamiliar with when it comes to RPG stereotypes.  Dwarves are no longer sound drunk and act bitter.  Instead, the dwarfs’ kingdom is full of political drama, and a strong caste system.  Elves on the other hand, are an oppressed race that is held down in the mires of slavery.  Some elves you encounter are free, but they never seem to fully embrace that concept, because of being held down by all the other races for so long.  Yeah, Dragon Age: Origins is not your normal Tolkien take on the fiction.

Starting up a game in Dragon Age: Origins, gets you to the crux of the title element of the game, the Origins stories.  After you create a character, you also select an origin for your character.  My review character had me playing as a noble warrior, who has come from a rather well to do family.  However, the fantasy was short lived, as we were betrayed by a family friend, and you end up escaping, but not without a price.  The origins stories are well fleshed out, and throughout the game, you will have characters and dialog that reference back to the origin story that you play through.  It was a lot of fun to get a sense of history for your character and how it played into the relationships that you would forge through the game.  Bioware does place a play time on these origin stories at roughly two to three hours, but I can say mine went down in about an hour.  Maybe with more exploration, you can get more out of it, but your results may vary.

Each of the origin stories culminate back into the main storyline at about the same point, where you end up becoming one of the Grey Wardens, protectors of the realm, and the last line of defense against The Blight.  The Blight is the main focus of the story, as it is a plague that is ravaging the land, creating creatures of a despicable nature.  It is pure evil, and your job as a Grey Warden is to find the cause of The Blight, and put an end to it.  Of course, in true Bioware fashion, it is not so cut and dried, as you are backstabbed and turned into an outlaw.  The story is solid, and full of great writing.  Every turn in the plot has you following on the edge of your seat, wondering what might come with your next crucial decision, and yes, the decisions you have to make will not be easy.

Branching paths and dialogs are another Bioware standard tradition, but normally the choices are of a simple nature.  You normally have a good option, an indifferent option and finally the asshole option.  There is no shading between the decisions, and it is easy to tell where each selection will take you down the road.  In Dragon Age: Origins, decisions will never seem so clear and concise.  One of the big decisions I had to make early on was over the possession of a child.  A child from a noble family was born with magical powers, and while being trained, is possessed by a demon.  You fight your way through a tower of enemies to get to the child, and then you have a decision to make.  You can kill the child, but of course, ruining any chance to further your relationships with the noble family.  You can sacrifice someone to send your mage into The Veil, the plane where the demons reside.  Another option is to try and get to the Mage’s tower and try to get the Circle of Mages to help you displace the demon from the boy, but the travel time might end up with you coming back to nothing.  You also have the option to walk away and leave the people to find their own destiny.  Dragon Age: Origins is full of these decisions, constantly pulling at you to find a suitable choice of grey through the story.  When I made my decision in the above scenario, it almost led to one of my characters leaving.  Another found great strength in my resolve to go down a darker path to resolve the situation.  I was wrenched by my decision, and found myself wondering several times, whether I had made the right decision.  This is when I know a game has done its job, because I was constantly re-thinking my decisions, wondering if my path was the right one, and at the end of the day, there is no right path, just the best one for your character.

After wrenching your mind with emotional decisions, Dragon Age: Origins will wrench your sanity with its combat.  To say that the combat is difficult would be a gross understatement.  It is not unusual to walk into three rooms and be swarmed in each by a group of enemies.  At first, I found myself dying over and over, battle after battle, until I realized that Dragon Age: Origins combat system is based around the proper use of battle tactics.  Each character has a complex set of tactics that it will follow while in battle.  You can tell your ranger to fight at range, using special attacks when at a certain health level.  Or you can just use some general sets, like a defensive ranged fighter, or an attacking ranged spellcaster.  The tactics menu is very deep, and allows you to tailor the battle actions of your character down to the minutest detail.  Beginners will find themselves, drowning in the combat options, but if you are willing to stick through the learning curve and follow the battle tips that come up, you will end up finding a combat experience that rewards a well thought out battle plan.

Combat does bring about one humorous event, and that is the blood splatter effect.  Much has been mentioned about the blood splatter that is painted on to your character after a battle.  At first, I got into the blood splatter, as I remembered that each of my characters was carrying weapons that were meant to de-limb someone during the course of battle.  However, after several battles, I felt that my characters looked like something out of a Japanese shock-horror film.  My characters were covered in blood from head to toe, to a ridiculous effect.  It took you out of the cut scenes at times, because you would be staring at all the pints of blood that had been spilled upon your armor.  There is a toggle switch, but it either turns the effect on or off, with no steps in between.  A gore slider would have been preferred, but at the end of the day, I will take over the top gore, rather than none at all.

Visually, Dragon Age: Origins is a great game to look at.  While some have talked about the engine looking old in the tooth, I found it to be very visually appealing.  Character models looked well developed, with each having a lot of great detail.  Also, it was nice to come to the edge of a cliff, and look down to see a sprawling village.  The engine seems to draw inside and outside environments with a high amount of detail.  Sometime there were some weird clipping issues when switching to different views, but nothing that ever took you out of the game experience.  I did find the cursor of all things to be a huge issue during battle.  When in combat, the screen will sometimes be filled with enemies, and during that level of carnage on the screen, I would lose sight of where my cursor was at, because it was rather small.  The voice work was also well done, but there were a few voices that I remembered from previous characters, and that would take me out of the game experience.  I have already come across the Rachni Queen voice, and there are others that have me thinking back to previous games at times.  Don’t mistake familiar voices for bad voice work, as the voice overs are great.  They just tend to be a bit too familiar at times.  I was disappointed with the complete lack of dialog for your character.  You are asked to pick a voice for your character, but it really means nothing, as you never speak a word of dialog.  Instead, Bioware seemed to opt for the statement from a spoken character, and then a list of responses for you to select as your character’s response.  The writing is great, but why not have a voice actor to add voice to the main lead.  It would be far better than the horrible voices you had me pick from that are only used for when I pick up loot, or try to perform an action.

So after working through a quarter of the game, I was presented with the biggest and most egregious mistake that I have ever found in a game.  It totally took me out of the game, and angered me to no end.  There is a point in Dragon Age: Origins, where you are presented with a campsite that will act as your base of operations.  From here you can meet and greet with several characters and a shopkeeper.  There is also a young man that talks to you about a promise that was made to him by another Grey Warden.  You are slowly pulled into his questions, until he asks you for help on his quest.  In your response list, you can accept his quest, but the note next to it presents you with a link to Bioware’s DLC site.  Yes, a DLC quest is presented to you in your camp, and once you click on him, the quest lead is in your guide for eternity, or until you create a new character.  Look, I know there is DLC for your game, and yes, I purchased it, but when you make such an impressive title, to kill the mood by taking you completely out of the experience is a head scratcher.  In the future, one can only hope that Bioware just sends you emails about future DLC, because I can forgive this mistake once, but a continuous stream of characters that will try to sell you content in-game will start to get annoying.

I could try to sum up this review with some sort of pomp and circumstance, but the simple fact is that Dragon Age is one of the best RPG titles I have played since the first Fallout.  It tells a great story, while presenting you with gut wrenching decisions that will never totally feel right.  The combat can be tough to learn, and the marketing of DLC in game is a horrible decision, but Dragon Age: Origins is one of the best games to come out this year.  Dragon Age: Origins gets 4.5 out of 5 Aeropausonauts.
Check out Dragon Age: Origins and other PC reviews at Test Freaks.

Reviewer Note: Aeropause.com was provided a review copy of the title via Bioware and Electronic Arts.