Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening Review

Dragon Age: Origins was biowares long awaited return to a classic style of RPG that, for the longest time, had been abandoned and labelled as

“archaic” or “outdated”.

Even though they fought many throngs of fans clawing at them for more, they understandably wanted to do other things.

The Baldur’s Gate series, wasn’t getting a third game for the PC…

Seven years later In stepped Dragon Age: Origins to fill the void.

I digress though …

Awakening is an expansion pack that follows immediately after the events of the first game, on the road to vigils keep in a region known as Amaranthine, which has been reassigned as the new Grey wardens’ base of operations.

Pretty much dropping you right into the fray, seconds after the game begins, it’s clear that mysterious happenings are afoot… Unfortunately for me though, to avoid any story based spoilers, I’m going to say that the story will please most, if not all, who like WRPG’s and I’ll leave the details there.

As is usually the case with RPG’s, personal decisions play a major role in this game, you’ll come across many decisions that’ll require several minutes of your time for you to simply sit back and think about what your next action will be. Some of the harder decisions, no matter what you choose to do, pretty much scream: “you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t!” Particularly near the end. So even if your intentions were good, you may end up hurting someone you didn’t even think would be affected when arriving at your original conclusion.

This kept me happy and on my toes a lot.

Something common to several of Bioware’s games is the import system, allowing you to bring over your character from the game before it. Strangely though, because of this, as powerful as your character may’ve been in the first game, a core and integral story based question seems to crop up; “How did my character survive permanent death?!”

It all soon becomes apparent that in order for you to continue using some of your cool equipment from the original game; you’ll just have to tell yourself that your character somehow magically survived the final battle of the first game instead of choosing to sacrifice yourself, as was the case for me. This can be quite jarring if you were attached to your character, and for some it will completely break the continuity of your in-game universe. Unfortunately though, even if your character can rise from the dead, certain powerful items are nowhere to be seen. A certain Starfang would’ve been a greatly welcomed addition to my killing arsenal.

On the other hand, weapons aside, Bioware has pre-created a new character that you can choose to start with that reigns in from Orlais (A neighbouring country). With a new back story, it felt strange to be playing with this pre-created character and I quickly restarted the game with my own imported character. The only thing is, even with your own character, you won’t have access to all of your neat equipment and supplies from the first game… Again, just to emphasise my frustration: “Where are you Starfang?”

And as much as that can be jarring, the fighting system hasn’t changed a bit, it’s still just as great as it was before…

The new additions that come with Awakening, help make the fighting system feel minty fresh, with two extra classes(Jobs) per character and new items such as the helpful Draught potions for fatigue, weapon coatings, yet more traps to watch out for, three new abilities including one that enable you to craft your own runes both for your weapons and for your armour.

Everything basically packs in really well and helps balance the fighting system a lot more.

As a side note: It frustrated me to no end that the rune vendor is inside a building, and I had to go back outside once I’d bought some runes to activate a skill for upgrading said runes, and then go back inside for more rune stocks to further upgrade etc… The rune vendor could’ve simply been put outside to make things much easier on my PC’s hardware.

The new characters aren’t generally that interesting to converse with, and since there aren’t any romances of any kind this time around, the in-party character interaction was a bit lacklustre near the beginning of the game… It does improve the further into the game you get, but there’s just not all that much to write home about.

On the other side of this, Oghren makes a great return!

His strange outlook on life, his continual back and forth with Ander (a new character) and the timing of his poor general hygiene seal him in as the comedy value of the party in Awakening. As a testament to this, Oghren remained in my party the entire way through the game, simply to lighten the mood.(The fact I was a mage might’ve had something to do with it too.)

The only other familiar face is Alistair’s and even then he barely even makes a cameo appearance, only to set off again moments after talking to me

Last thoughts:

Overall though, after coming off Mass Effect 2 not all that long ago, and knowing how connected those two games are via its own import system.

I can’t help but feel like I’ve been cheated on a continuation level, as I didn’t hear a single mention of the Landsmeet or the solved Dwarven leadership feud, what happened to the travelling merchant and his annoyingly simple friend?: “Enchantment?”

And the fact that the Joining is conveyed as if it’s more of a daily chore, instead of a very important life threatening event… It just feels kind of sloppy around the edges in those respects.

But at the end of the day once I’d finished the game, all of that stuff had just faded away and I was left thinking back on the characters I’d met and the new places I’d visited. I realised I’d spent 2 hours at least in the codex reading all the new stuff.

And that I’d gone out of my way to finish every single mission.

I’d become enthralled and I’d had fun. And that’s what it comes down to.

Gamplay:	Fast paced all the way through, but everything seemed like it was cut short a little too early all the way through.
Story:	An epic sprawling adventure with several very cool twists. And a fantastic Finale
Graphics:	The general visual quality is on par with the original game.
Value	For £20, this’s totally worth it. Especially since there’s a good 20-25 hours of gameplay in it.
Difficulty:	Difficulty this time around has been dramatically improved over Dragon Age: Origins. Easy is easy and hard is hard.
Score:	8.0

Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening Review, 9.0 out of 10 based on 2 ratings

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