Dragon Age: Origins Reviews
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Spiderweb's Jeff Vogel gives us his perspective (thanks, RPGWatch):
Attempts at having role-playing in computer games are frequently and justifiably mocked for giving facile choices between "Angelically Good" and "Absolutely Evil". When you find a hungry puppy, you can either crush it with a cinderblock or buy it a house of its own. There is no middle ground. And yes, Dragon Age has some of that.
But what impressed me is the number of situations where there are a lot of options, none of them are very good, and you just have to muddle through. For example, in one part of Dragon Age, a young, magically skilled boy has been taken over by a demon. He's been merrily trashing the countryside. It's a crappy situation, and you have to help them out of it. You can off the boy. Or let the mother sacrifice herself to enable you to challenge the demon. Or travel to the wizards' tower to maybe get a way to expel the demon, losing valuable time. And, should you challenge the demon, you can kill it or, in return for one of several lavish rewards, let it stay in the kid, hidden.
While Middle East Gamers goes with a standard critique and a score of 9/10:
The game also packs in many hours of gameplay. Expect to play about 70-80 hours before finishing the game. The fact that you have so many characters to choose from and the fact that your choices in the dialogue tree affect the outcome of the game, means that you can play the game over a few times and try things a different way.
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Overall, this is easily the best RPG game we have played all year. We love the characters, the storyline and the sheer length of gameplay. Buy this game now!
