Dragon Age Review

Ted Puffer's Review: 2 stars

Dragon Age is a pretty standard RPG with elements familiar to the genre. So much so that I'm not going to write a lot about the characters or the world they inhabit. Although the programmers and writers have tried to add some new elements to the formula, the majority of the story and creatures that inhabit the world of Dragon Age are cookie cutter placeholders and can be easily imagined by anyone who has read Lord of the Rings, or better yet, seen the movie. Notice I said 'movie' singular. Watching the trilogy isn't a necessary prerequisite for understanding Dragon Age.
Dragon Age allows you to create your own character which means two things. You get to add some basic stats to bump up an ability, and create the look of the character.
Stats, no biggie. Nothing new.
Look of the character, now that was actually impressive. Your character starts out looking like a typical WoW character. Handsome or pretty, depending on if your male or female. Slender for elves, more heavyset for dwarfs. But here is where it gets interesting. You can modify each physical characteristic of your avatars face, hair, skin tone and tattoos. There are plenty of other games that allowed this (Conan for example), but I had better results making a unique looking character in Dragon Age. Each change is small. You can make the character's eyes slightly larger or smaller, slightly wide spaced or a bit close together. Each change on it's own isn't that great, but there is such a range of small tweaks to the physical appearance of the character that you can end up with a unique looking player in no time.
These changes are limited to your characters head. Keep this in mind. You really aren't able to make your character smaller or taller, slender or built like a brick shithouse. It just isn't possible. But you can give him dozens of different eyebrows, so that counts for something.
That being said, the meat of the game should be in story and experience, not necessarily in just how wild you can make your avatar. And here is where the game lost it for me.
The story is linear. VERY linear. You are able to make choices throughout the game as you progress from one place to another, but you can't really drastically alter the events that unfold. You can play as a knight or a knave in behavior and choices, but you're still going to end up saving a certain town, rescuing certain people or agreeing to undertake missions whether you want to or not.
So I stopped playing.
I had a similar problem with Neverwinter Nights, but to a much less degree. For Dragon Age, there is just so much gold and experience you can gain as you go along. Lets say that you want to spend a gaming session getting nothing but gold, or beefing up your XP. That's not really possible. Once you clear a band of thieves out of a forest, the forest stays peaceful. Once you've grabbed every bit of loot that isn't nailed down in town, there just isn't any more to be had.
NWN had the same problem, but you weren't as aware of it and they hid it better. Or maybe the voice acting was better so you were more engaged in the world. I couldn't help noticing that Dragon Age is out for the XBOX and PS systems, and the game play shows. Everything can be done with a few clicks. Yes, you do have hundreds of weapons and suits of armor to choose from and plenty of spells and combat tactics to have your characters perform, but you don't really need them. Once you get a pretty good combat strategy, or decent weapon you can settle into a click-fight-click-loot routine which isn't rewarding at all.
Meh.