First of all let me welcome you to the first post on unitlost.com!  We are aiming to produce informative and relevant reviews based on our own gaming experiences.  None of our reviews are influenced by anything other than our own thoughts on the games we review.  This way we hope to give real gamers real reviews.

Enough of the introduction, its time to get to work!

To begin with I’m going to be looking at Dragon Age Origins for the PC.  I know its out on the console, but to be quite honest I want nothing to do with them.  I hope you understand.

First of all, have the ‘this is war’ movie.

Dragon Age is made by BioWare you may have heard of them before….if not then where the hell have you been?!  They predominantly produce RPG games for the PC.  Their games include:

• Baldur’s Gate
• Mass Effect
• Neverwinter Nights
• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
• Star Wars: The Old Republic
• Dragon Age Origins

These are basically the ‘best’ games they have produced to date.  So you can see Dragon Age is coming from some pedigree indeed.

Dragon Age is primarily a RPG.  You have character advancement and all of the usual stuff that comes with this genre.  However Dragon Age also blends in a tactical almost RTS style of game play.  Prior to the games release I took it upon myself not to read much into the game, I wanted it to be a surprise, that is sure was.  However I knew the game featured lots of pausing.  Which stops the action in order to give you time to plan your next moves out.  Now this seemed totally ridiculous to me.  Why have the game pause for you to plan out your next moves?  I was starting to pin this onto the consoles and that god awful thing known as a controller having an influence on the way the game was developed.  In reality I couldn’t have been more wrong.

To begin with your basically on your own in the game until you begin to pickup group members.  This is where the game starts to really come to life.  At this point I began to realise why the pausing is needed.  In the PC version you only pause the game to plan your next moves.  Due to the mouse and keyboard you can cast multiple spells in real time.  This cannot be done on the consoles.  As far as I’m aware you have to pause the console versions to select your spells from radial pop up menus.  This is obviously not needed on the PC version as you simply hit hot keys or click on the action bar at the base of the ui.

I’ve been sitting around for a few hours trying to come up with the best way of explaining the game in simple terms.  The best I can do is imagine playing your favorite MMO (that has grouped based combat in a typical tank, healer dps combo).  You know the times when the healer fails to keep the tank up and the group wipes?  Well those times are long gone, in Dragon Age you have complete control of the group and so if you do die, its totally your fault, haha.  You can set party members you have to automated rolls, such as healer or direct damage for example.  I began using these but soon found out nothing beats good old direct intervention.  There’s something massively satisfying about being the healer, dps and tank all at the same time.

The story is so involving, its like that favorite TV show you just have to keep watching and watching!

The character creation is what you would expect from most major RPG/MMO games the standard sliders to customise your look.  There’s nothing particularly great about it, its just what you would expect.

I’ll try not to speak much about the actual storyline when discussing the story aspects of the game.  If I do feel the need to spill some spoiler information out, I’ll let you know before hand so don’t worry!

The story makes this game.  I have never come across a storyline like this before. The sheer quality of the production values are off the scale.  Every character in the game has extensive voice over acting.  There are so many different chat dialogues you can take part in its simply mind blowing.  Almost 80% of every chat situation I found myself in the outcome could have been very different based on the chat choices I made.  This alone makes the game worth playing more than one time through just to see the other ways in which characters can react.  The character you play acts as the main focus of the story and based on decisions you make while playing, it also has a direct impact on the games ending.  Each race and class combo has its own unique ‘origin’.  This is a unique quest line that only that race/class combination can take part in.  This phase introduces you to the game and acts as the tutorial.  Later on in the game you will however come across some of the people involved in your origin quest, how they treat you, depends on how you treated them to begin with.

Sure the story is the typical fantasy world type deal, with Elves, Humans and Dwarfs knocking around all the other mystical creatures you expect in the same world.  But this game feels very different.  The story is so involving, its like that favorite TV show you just have to keep watching and watching!  Also the game being rated 18 does help.  This allows for mature story lines to feature which made a nice change from all the lower rated games and movies out there which should have been much higher rated.  Such is the world we live in that money drives most things, its easy for game developers to drop the rating to a lower age band to increase sales.  just imagine how many sales WoW would have clocked up if it was 18?  I’d bet my worldly worth on it being no where near the 12 million or whatever they have playing.  So hats off to BioWare for producing an adult rated game, in worlds full of killing and violence people are not going to be all nice now are they?

Graphics are good, they are not mind blowing.  But they are good enough to make the game world come to life and your characters really do look like they belong in the world.  Some of the distant textures can look dated and low in quality, but everything that really matters does look good enough to be from 2009.  Theres also a river of blood, so much blood, if there was an award for most blood in a single game, Dragon Age wins hands down.

The only negative I can really think of is the DLC, downloadable content.  Dragon Age has 2 DLC packs at launch.  This unfortunately looks like a blatant attempt to increase the box sales of the game by stripping features the game should have launched with, only to then sell them back for $10 plus.

In conclusion, Dragon Age Origins is the best single player RPG I have ever played.  The game can last anywhere from 40-60 hours depending on how fast you go through the main quest.  The story line is so in depth and well crafted it keeps you hooked and wanting to come back for more time and time again.  When you consider other games in the RPG department include such classic like the Diablo series and the the Elder Scrolls games.  This is no easy thing to accomplish.  If you like RPG’s then you owe it to yourself to play Dragon Age Origins.  It simply is the best RPG of its type ever made, a modern gaming master piece.  Just make sure you get the PC version!

Unit Lost rating 9/10 Must play!