Dragon Age: Origins

The Good
The story is very interesting to follow and you meet many creative characters along the way.The story is full of great moments and plot twists and the sidequests are worth doing as well. Also be sure chat with your party every now and then.

The combat is very tactical and sometimes you need to make decisions very quickly. I loved how opening the menu pauses the game, so you can plan out a strategy without dying at the same time.

Ferelden is a very nice place with much variety. It reminds me a bit of World of Warcraft; you have a lot of different areas, each with it's own theme (elven woods, icy mountains, dwarven mines etc.). It's simple, but functional at least.

I like it how you travel between places by picking a location on your map and then warp there, rather then walking all the way. Normally this would make the world feel small, but they fix that by characters constantly mentioning countries and cities you can't visit. It's hard to explain, but it works.

There is a lot of RPG here and that is just a barrel of fun. You get to decide what armor your party has to wear, you can also upgrade that armor and you can also level up all your party members (you have like a dozen of them) and decide what skills they learn. There is a lot of RPG element in here. For newcomers to the genre this might be a little overwhelming though.

The Bad
Sometimes the game was way too unpredictable and tiny conversation options could lead to party-members turning on me or losing a ton of friendship with a character.

The game is unreasonably hard and I can imagine a lot of people will be turned off by that.

The game is not really fun to replay because a lot of parts are very repetitive and you have to go through all the conversations with characters again. This is a bit of a problem because the achievements demand that you play this game almost all the way through a minimum of three times.

The Bottom Line
Despite some massive problems I replayed this game a lot. I really like this game, but at the same time I know that this is more for the hardcore-RPG-fan. Newcomers might want to stay far away from this game or store it away for later because this game is amazingly complex.