Summary [7.5 out of 10]

Continuing the Grey Wardens’ struggle against the Darkspawn comes  Awakening, the first full expansion for last year’s Dragon Age: Origins. In Awakening you can choose to import your previous character or start up a new generic Grey Warden tasked with rebuilding the order by rehabilitating  Vigil’s Keep near the city of Amaranthine. This is not nearly as simple as all that though as you find the Keep overrun by Darkspawn and the surrounding lands in turmoil. You will have to recruit new companions, navigate dangerous political waters and fight through a sea of new and improved Darkspawn to bring peace to the land and finally get the Grey Wardens back on their feet.

Introduction

Alright so right off the back I need to reiterate what anyone who read my review of the main game already knows: I am in deep love with Dragon Age in an almost disturbing and unhealthy way.  Given this it shouldn’t be surprising that I loved this expansion as well. Looking at the score, one might wonder how I can claim to love it and then score it only above average. As much as I love the game it simply isn’t anything even vaguely resembling perfect. There are problems and it becomes a situation where if you are really invested in the gameplay and the material then you are likely to overlook those problems and have a great time. For someone who is only casually invested in the game the issues might be a deal breaker. I would love to say that this is incredible and mind blowing but it is really just more of something I really like. This will be a recurring theme throughout the review.

The Great

• It Is More Dragon Age: As I mentioned above, I loved the main game. Return to Ostagar was a fun hour of extra play but Awakening is a full on expansion. It has the same general structure of the original where you tackle the three main missions in any order while doing dozens of side-quests and the lead up to the big climactic final mission. You have new companions who are generally interesting and well fleshed out and a level cap increased to 35. If there weren’t story bookends, it would feel like you are still playing Origins. I loved Origins so Awakening is golden. Basically, this is exactly what an expansion is meant to be and you get a lot of new content here.

• Hard Choices: One of the things I loved about Origins was just how gray the choices were. The choices weren’t binary black and white, good and bad options but rather  murky and ambiguous and often involved someone being upset or dead. Awakening continues this tradition with some really difficult choices that had me sitting there staring at the screen trying to figure out how to play it. And while there are no right or wrong answers even the favorable ones are hard to see without careful consideration. This is one of the things that makes the game so interesting and why I keep playing over and over again. It can go so many different ways and just about every choice in the game is of the Sophie variety.

• Politics: Awakenings eschews character romances for political maneuvering which, if you are interested in politics, is a lot of fun and almost makes up for the loss of sexy time. The political intrigue covers everything from land disputes to troop allocation. You have different leaders and interests hounding you to take care of their particular constituencies and the choices you make have a real impact on trade and safety. These decisions you make throughout the game will help you decide what choices to make at the end and add much needed flavor to the whole game. Also, your decisions here determine the out come of the conspiracy against you and how many assassins you have to put down.

The Good

• Depth: As with Origins, the expansion is a very deep experience if you want to put in the time to get to know characters and do the side quests. The wealth of background information is staggering and character interaction, even with the NPCs is more involved and meaningful than in a lot of RPGs. The implications of your decisions also flesh out the depth here as it makes everything that much more meaningful. There really aren’t throwaway decisions here and even the most trivial of quests can have an impact on how the story plays out. Because this is an expansion it is not quite up to the standards of the original as it is shorter and doesn’t have as much time to deal with as much. There are obviously fewer places to go and fewer things to do but for an expansion the depth is very impressive. If you aren’t just interested in blowing through the main quest, there is easily as much offered here as a full retail game.

• Characters: Because the first game spent so much time building up the relationships between you and the characters in your party, hearing that there was a new cast altogether for this outing was kind of disappointing. By and large I really loved the companions in the first game and was bummed not to have them along this time. As it turns out, my disappointment was misplaced. In addition to returning hero Oghren, you meet and recruit five new characters. They are all well balanced and you essentially get two of each class. Two warriors, two rogues and two mages all with different specializations. The new characters seem to be better at what they do than those in the original game…of course it could just be that I have gotten better at assigning talent and skill points than I was in the past. More important than  their combat acumen, their personalities and histories are well fleshed out and interesting. Anders, an apostate mage that you conscript into the Grey Wardens to keep him out of Templar shackles, is something of a proxy for Alistair as he is wise cracking and sarcastic. Anders lacks Alistair’s naive sweetness, however and while he is no fan of authority tends to be a bit less whiny. Also he really loves his kitten Ser Pounce A Lot. Justice, a sword and shield warrior is a spirit from the Fade who has possessed the body of a fallen Warden and is very creepy but also compelling as he tries to relate to humanity and understand the new feelings he is encountering in his new body’s memories. The rogue Nathanial has ties to characters in Origins and, depending on your character’s background, can have real emotional impact on your character and the story. The remaining characters are equally interesting and their in mission banter delivers once again.

• Story: Awakening’s story is not as strong as the story found in Origins but it is still interesting and compelling enough to hook you. It expands the universe and illuminates some of the impact of the first game and culminates in a moral conundrum at end game that makes you feel sort of icky either way you go with it. You add in some twists and turns and you have a decent story.  Again, this game is an expansion and is obviously not as expansive as a full title. The story reflects this and while it doesn’t match Origins it is still good and in many cases more fleshed out and compelling than those found in full titles.

• Length: Obviously with a game like this you get what you put into it. It is entirely possible to blow through this whole thing in about seven to 10 hours but if you are that sort of player then you really aren’t the target audience here. Given that the original game is required to play this, I can’t imagine someone who isn’t interested in the story, characters and side quests actually purchasing this game. If you liked the first one enough to want more in an expansion then you almost have to be in it for the story and depth of play because it sure isn’t for the combat and action. So given that, my first play through clocked in at 22 hours.  Now this was with doing all the side quests except for one (I didn’t want to piss Justice off) and doing a bunch of crafting and tinkering in addition to the main quest, so completion time will vary by how much you decide you want to do. In reference to that time, I died exactly three times in the game. I didn’t spend a lot of time redoing things or trying to grind my way up to a higher level. I imported a level 21 character and ended at level 32.  So, if you want to do everything you are looking at around 22 to 25 hours or so. I have heard the length quoted at 15-20 which is probably a fair average for completion time. Now, if that sounds like it isn’t very long, remind yourself that the single player campaign of Modern Warfare 2 was something like six hours. There is plenty of game here and given the inherent replay value, you are looking at even more length. Pretty impressive for an expansion.

• Replay: Mentioned above, this game follows from Origins with a wealth of choices and options that will keep you running through it again to see what happens when you go the other way. Again, the replay isn’t as high as in the first game but given the replay value of the main title I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t want to keep the party going for each run through. So, in a way, the replay here is just as high. Taken on its own there is still plenty to keep you coming back.

• New Gear: One thing that really annoyed me in Origins was that there was a lot of gear but not a lot of gear that was actually worth a damn. This is not the case in Awakenings. From the weapons and armor that Wade crafts you if you bring him materials to stuff found on dead bodies, the weapons and armor are worth picking up and I felt much more excited to be looting given that there was a ghost of a chance that I might find something good. It isn’t up to Diablo II standards or anything but there is some good gear out there and it makes for some hard choices when choosing which pieces to put on.

• New Specializations, Talents and Skills: Along with the new level cap comes six new specializations and 56 new talents, skills and spells. And they are good too. All of these must have been designed to address class short comings as they really flesh out your options and give you a lot of things that were missing last time around. The Flicker talent in the Rogue line is worth its weight in gold.

• Continuity: Like Mass Effect 2, Awakening allows you to import your previous character and continue his or her story. Certainly the continuity here is not nearly so robust but it is a nice addition anyway. Decisions made in Origins will effect the characters who return for cameos and in some cases what quests they give you.  If you decapitated Wynn on some stairs for being an uppity, preachy bitch, for example, she isn’t going to be around to give you a quest to fetch a mage from the Wending Wood. The ending that you receive will also reflect choices made in the main game and it adds a nice bit of flavor. This is a double edged sword, however, as they could have done a much better job in a lot of ways with this feature. For one, through some questionable hand waving, you can import a character who made the ultimate sacrifice in the first game. There is no explanation given for how you skirted death but it is kind of bullshit as far as I am concerned. The implementation of the continuity in conversations is a little janky too as generally characters don’t act like they remember you or what you might have done in the last game unless you chose the option to mention it in conversation. I suppose it was necessary with limited resources to program in such a way as to accommodate both as easily as possible but it would have been nice to have it be a bit more seamless. As it is, it is a nice addition but with caveats.

• Loyalty Quests: Another carry over from the original game, the companion quests here are a bit truncated but go far in adding depth to the relationship and understanding of where the companion is coming from.  I kind of enjoyed them being less involved than those in Origins. In some cases, the ones there were easy and simple but Sten’s quest was sort of ridiculous and annoying. Nothing like that is found here as they are short and sweet and impactful.

The Bad

• Glitches: Wow are there a lot of glitches here. I am willing to forgive a lot for games I love, particularly when they are just expansions but there is really no excuse for how glitchy this thing is. There are a few that carry over from the first game including your character not being included in Ogre take down animation and the annoying ‘I don’t care that you are pressing the attack button and that I am right next to your target, I am not going to attack.’ Seriously that glitch is like the line worker in Extract who says ‘I’m just going to sit here.’ Watching the battle go by without any contribution from your character is no fun and the combat certainly doesn’t need any help being mediocre. New glitches get in on the fun too. These range from a weird double exposure on some characters during conversations where the character is talking and being animated while a clone stands motionless behind him or her to Anders being dead without the game acknowledging it at all and thinking he still has a sliver of life.  Add in some clipping/being stuck in the scenery moments and you have a really buggy game that needed some more quality testing.

• Lack of Sex/Relationships: You can still build up love and hate with characters but without romances and sex it seems kind of pointless. I can’t think of any of the characters in your party that I would actually want to get with but I really missed the romance angle. Also I am a sucker for goofy, fully clothed Bioware sex scenes. It was one of my favorite aspects of main title and it sucks that it isn’t here in this one. The politics is fun and tries to fill this hole but I really hope that in future expansions/sequels they implement both.

• Oghren Loyalty: This one is a bit specific and nitpicky but if you are going to have a friendship/loyalty meter with a character and you are going bring that character back from a previous game they should really have brought him over with the same level of loyalty he was at previously. I am not sure why I have to try to win Oghren over again but starting him off at halfway and then making it almost impossible not to piss him over regardless of what you say in dialogue is really ridiculous. I had everyone completely loyal and their friendship maxed out but Oghren was barely above the middle point. I don’t get this. We survived a war together and he was maxed out in the main game but in this one I kept worrying about losing his loyalty so much that I just stopped using him. I mean hell I had a character who hates humans completely loyal for godsakes and my friend from the last game is a bubble away from disliking me? Poorly done.

• Graphics: The graphics in Origins were nothing to write home about and they certainly haven’t gotten any better in this iteration. They aren’t necessarily terrible but after playing God of War III and Mass Effect 2 between Origins and this the graphics are just not up to snuff. I didn’t expect a full engine overhaul or anything here given it is an expansion but it would have been nice if they had been cleaned up a bit. A game with this much to offer really deserves to look better. Hopefully the full on sequel will do better.

• Lack of improvement: This ties in with some points above. I don’t expect an expansion to be a major overhaul but they had a chance to fix things here and then let it pass on by. The same glitches and the same flawed combat shouldn’t still be showing up here and it is a disappointment even if it is only an expansion. A lot of this should have been fixed with patches by now anyway let alone in an add-on. Again, hopefully when they go in for a full sequel they will fix a lot of this.

• Difficulty: It really isn’t there. I mentioned above that I died three times in the game and all three times were during boss fights and even then it was just because I wasn’t sure what I was doing as opposed to any real difficulty. The final boss fight found me fighting solo as my three companions when down fast and I managed to single handedly take the boss out. I probably shouldn’t be able to do that. In a way it is nice to carve through the opposition like so much paper but it doesn’t add up to much fun if you are looking for a challenge. Another example of the lack of difficulty is a surprise attack from a high dragon late in the game didn’t equal disaster but rather another notch on my dragon slaying belt. Shouldn’t it be a bigger deal when a huge dragon shows up from out of nowhere? I think it should.

So the game costs $39.99 for either a retail disc or to download and there are a lot of fans unsure if such a hefty price tag is worth it. After all, it is only two Benjamins away from a full priced game. This is a hard question to answer. For me, it is unequivocally yes. I would rather have paid $29.99 but for the money you are getting over 20 hours of new experiences with a high replay value thrown in for good measure. So the answer to the ‘Is it worth it?’ question is that it depends on how invested you are in the world of Dragon Age and how much you want to keep the adventure going. Never once while playing did I ever feel ripped off or that I wasn’t getting my money’s worth. That being said, I bought my copy with trade in credit and only ended up actually handing over $17 in cash. Still, that was credit I could have used toward anything else and I am glad to have spent it on Awakening. So it really comes down to how much you like Dragon Age and how much you want to spend more time in that world. There are some people who will hate it because it didn’t live up to their expectations but for what it is, I think it is very much worth the money. But your mileage may vary and you have to make that decision for yourself.

Conclusion [7.5 out of 10]

For an expansion Awakening really delivers and brings a wealth of good content that will keep you hooked in the world of Dragon Age for quite a bit longer. I loved my time with it and I am very excited for whatever is coming next. Despite that, there are some big issues here which really need to be fixed next time around. In order to get into this this game you are going to have to give a crap about the story and characters, otherwise it will be a miserable experience. For fans of Origins, I highly recommend Awakenings. If you played the first one and didn’t really get into it there is absolutely nothing here that will change your mind.  Also it should be mentioned that if you have a computer that can handle games you should probably go that route for Awakening as many of the combat issues are diminished or nonexistent. If a console is all you’ve got and you loved Origins, you could do much worse with your $40 than playing the console version.