Dragon Age: Origins

What can I say? There is something about Dragon Age that just.. isn’t doing it for me. The weird thing is, I’m not sure why. When I have some spare time, I just didn’t feel like loading it up. The times I did force myself to play it, I was mostly having fun. It is really odd to me. The only thing I think it could be is the combat, as I did find it a little tedious at times, but I really do enjoy the story (as with all Bioware games) and want to play through it. The other thing is, other than the weekends, I’ll only ever have a spare few hours max at a time, and I think it is the sort of game you really need to just spend hours getting into, and you kind of lose the flow over shorter play sessions. So, yeah, I failed. I ended up sinking about 25 hours into overall, which maybe got me a quarter of the way through the game. I’m going to save it now, for Easter, or even Summer.. we’ll see.

Some thoughts on what I played though. The dialogue is amazing, as is most if not all of the voice acting. So far I haven’t run into anyone who I’ve specifically thought was poorly acted. The actual writing behind it also seems to be very crisp.. everything you would expect from Bioware really; they didn’t let up. The entire story I don’t really want to comment on though, as I’ve only done a very small part of it, but so far it is the reason I want to keep playing. Finally the combat is solid, if not a little tedious. I was playing on hard difficulty (which seems a little silly if the main reason I want to play it is for story…) and most of the time it was just the right amount of challenge. The kind of challenge where I had to think about nearly every fight, and a few mistakes would cost me. And because I’m terrible at remembering to auto-save, this normally sent me back 5 fights, and when they are all challenging it got a little monotonous. But well, that’s just my fault really. And you can change the difficulty at any point, so if I didn’t have such a high sense of pride I could just turn it down to easy to blast through the same fights. One more thing, graphically this game is pretty impressive. With all settings on max the environments look pretty impressive, spell effects are great. Character models and animation are a little lacking, but nothing too serious. So, that’s my one paragraph review of Dragon Age: Origins.

Torchlight

Okay, so I didn’t manage to complete Torchlight either. I did get a good portion of the way through it though, and I am going to try and complete it tonight, but wanted to write this close to the schedule I promised. I got to floor 35 of the 50 the main dungeon has to offer, while doing other little side-quest dungeons in between.

First off, this is coming from some one who has only ever played 30 minutes of Diablo 2, so I won’t be making any comparisons to that, and just judging the game on it’s own merits. For those that haven’t heard of it, you are missing out. Brought to you by a fair few of the guys that worked on Diablo 1 and 2, and the company that brought you Hellgate: London and the never released Mythos, this “budget title” is a great game full of character. It consists of 50 levels of dungeon crawling, a choice of 3 different characters with 3 skill trees a piece. Quests and side dungeons thrown in as well, with many loots to collect and with other things such as gems, enchanting and fishing this game has a lot to offer.

The gameplay is Diablo. There is no denying that at all. Click to move. Click on something to attack it, hold the click to keep attacking it. Right click to use an ability on it. The style on the other hand is where it differs. It has a great variation of environments that change every 5 or so floors, and personally it was one of the big things that kept me playing. I couldn’t wait to complete the next few levels to see what the next art style they would use. They start of with “the cave” and “the jungle” but then go through some quite unique areas. The areas are half randomly generated. As in, they have designed some large pieces, and then they are randomly generated together. In my opinion this is the best of both worlds. A nicely designed area, but still not the same dungeon over and over again when you replay it.

One complaint that most people make is the lack of multiplayer. Now, as I never played Diablo to any great extent, I haven’t really noticed a lack of this. I never thought that this would be especially better if I was playing it with some one, and would urge you to still play this game if that is keeping you from buying it. Also, Runic have said that they are turning the game into an MMO, and started work on it as soon as the game had shipped. They have also stated that it would take them around a year to do this. So, buy it now, play it, then just keep it safe for the future.

So, that’s week 1 done already. Or I am counting it as done. Don’t judge me. Anyways, this week is Mass Effect 2. I can barely contain my fluids over this game. First one was definitely one of my favourite games of all time. I just love everything about the story and the characters, and from what I’ve seen this is more of that, with improved combat… cannot wait. It was posted today, so should come on Thursday. Will be a push to complete by Monday, but every morsel of spare time will go to this game.

Spen