Dragon Age: Origins - 8/10 - Solid game. Quite difficult, but fun. I'm not sure how I feel on the replay value. I got about 90% through the game the first time, but restarted it after not playing for a long time, so I'm a bit burned out on it right now. That being said, however, it is quite fun.
I'll try not to spoil anything here. The story is interesting, as you are thrown into the world of the order of Grey Wardens defending the land of Ferelden from the darkspawn, and you have to learn about it through the eyes of a new recruit suddenly thrust into a very important role. I think the introduction to the world via the origins system is interesting. You pick your character's race, background, and archetype (warrior, rogue, or mage) and that determines how you will begin the game. This gives you a different experience for the first couple of hours of the game depending on your choices, and it will also affect how people react to you and how events play out later on in the story as well. The characters can be a bit one-dimensional, but they do have some depth to them if you choose to engage them in discussion and participate in their companion-specific quests. The world is somewhat generic fantasy, though with a darker bent, and with some twists I hadn't seen before.
The gameplay has its ups and downs. Battles are played out in real time, characters have auto-attacks and abilities that can be set up in the Tactics system for each character to tell them how to behave in battle. In this way, you can customize each character to do exactly what you want. There are also a few basic types of Tactics setups you can use if you are lazy: Defender, Scrapper, and Archer for melee-type characters; Damager, Supporter, Controller, Debilitator for mages. You can also configure up to 3 custom sets to save. Along with Tactics sets are behaviors, which dictate the overall behavior of the character on the battlefield: Default, Passive, Aggressive, Ranged, Cautious, Defensive. The actual Tactic rules are pretty customizable and can be defined by self, ally, or enemy conditions, and then dictate what actions to take based on that. This makes it a highly customizable system, or a system to dictate basic behavior for your party when you aren't controlling them directly. At any point during the battle you can select a character in your party and tell them what to do, which is a highly likely scenario. The battles can be tough, and despite there being automated actions, they're not likely to be the correct ones. In some ways I feel like it might have benefitted from being turn-based or having some sort of initiative system that allowed you to tell each person what to do in turn, because it can be downright hectic at times. But, beating some of the tough fights is very rewarding because of this. One of the nice things is that you can use the scroll wheel on the mouse to change the view angle of the screen, taking it between a three-quarter view and a behind-the-back view and some stops in between there. The top-down view is nice for directing characters in battle and getting a view of the opponents and allies involved.
There is a relationship system of sorts for interacting with your party members. This includes romance options. Each character has an approval rating, which changes based on your actions in the game, your discussions with them, and whether or not you choose to give them gifts. Gifts are special items labeled as such that can either be sold or given to a party member to boost their rating. Each party member prefers specific types of gifts. There are also plot gifts that can unlock some bits of story or even quests. I felt like this was pretty cool, and I did enjoy getting to know more about the characters.
There were some clunky parts of the game, too. I didn't really like the inventory interface. I especially didn't like how some things that stacked together in the interface still had each item count toward the total number of items you could carry. I understand needing to limit how much you can carry so that you have to make choices about what to bring and what to leave behind, but it was frustrating at times looking through the inventory. The crafting system didn't really add depth to the game in my opinion, it just added to the amount of bullshit I had to carry around with me at all times. You leveled it in the same way as any other skill, and you had to find the recipes in order to make what you want on top of that so it was essentially a pain in the dick and I'd rather just buy what I need or find/steal it. Aside from that, there are also some really annoying bugs such as somehow making Leliana unable to teach me how to be a Bard.
Dragon Age: Origins Witch Hunt - 7/10 - It was a fairly short standalone campaign, with a few new companions to join you in the journey. I can't reveal much without spoilers, but the end was really cryptic and honestly didn't explain much more beyond what happened at the end of the original story so it felt rather pointless. You can import your old character or generate a new one for this campaign.
Dragon Age: Origins Leliana's Song - 9/10 - This was really cool! It is a story of Leliana's life before you meet her and before she joined the Chantry, when she was still an Orelesian bard taking part of the Orlesian nobles' game of intrigue. The story takes place in Denerim, and it has a fun heist movie feel to it.
Dragon Age: Origins Golems of Amgarrak - 8/10 - Another short campaign sends the Warden (you can import your old character or generate a new one) back to the Deep Roads to seek out the abandoned thaig of Amgarrak, which means "Victory" in the Dwarven tongue. As you can imagine, it centers a lot on golem lore and you fight a lot of them as well. It's actually a pretty tough campaign due to the limited party selection (you have no choice, you only get two other characters total). I enjoyed, it however, and it was an interesting tale that was told.
Dragon Age: Origins The Darkspawn Chronicles - 9/10 - This campaign was pretty cool. You play as a darkspawn captain of sorts that can recruit and control darkspawn during the final battle of the original campaign. It is sort of an alternate history, where your character wasn't involved and instead the Wardens are led by Alistair. Fun to play through, for sure.
Dragon Age: Origins Awakening - 8/10 - I think I enjoyed the campaign more but again that might be due to having grown tired of the original one. You get a whole new set of companions (minus one returning character from the original game), without the romance options but still including the approval rating, and personal quests. You play the role of the Grey Warden Commander-General after the Blight, starting out with arriving at Vigil Keep, the new home of the Wardens in the Fereldan arling of Amaranthine. You get to explore all new areas, and investigate why the darkspawn have not fled to the Deep Roads as they did following the slaying of the archedemon leading previous Blights. The story ends up being pretty cool, and the gameplay remains essentially the same with some new talent specializations you can select for your characters. There is also an item you can buy to completely respec any of your characters, which is nice if you want to try different things. Since this is billed as an actual expansion, it is much longer than the DLCs.
Overall, a fun game and DLC and expansion. I had some issues getting it all to work in Windows 7 because the shitty DRM service wouldn't install properly, leaving me unable to access the DLC that I had paid for. I eventually got it working after searching the web for solutions.
