Dragon Age: Origins Review

Controls and Graphics

Aesthetically, Dragon Age: Origins is quite simply a mixed bag – mainly for the same reasons as the macro-level plot feels a bit tired; we’ve seen this a hundred times before and there’s very little that’s truly interesting about men in full-body armour accompanied by women who only protect their nipples. Yes, Morgan – we’re looking at you.

While it’s perhaps a bit egregious to keep comparing Dragon Age to Mass Effect the fact is that the two have a lot in common from both a thematic and mechanical point of view. One of the things we like most about Mass Effect though was the look and feel of the world; the way it felt like a Heinlein space opera, which was a fresh way to tackle the setting. Dragon Age doesn’t have influences which are nearly as unique.

Instead, Dragon Age is mostly filled with predictable and uninspiring location designs – brown houses, grey cities, swamps a-plenty – which it seems Bioware has attempted to spice up by throwing a more immature approach to violence and romance than it is usually known for. There are brothels to visit and a ‘persistent gore’ has blood-soaked adventurers calmly explaining themselves to NPCs, while brutal finishing moves occasionally come into play.


None of this is really bad though, but it definitely doesn’t feel like it fits together very snugly. On the one hand, Bioware has created an interesting selection of characters and a plot that, while trope-filled and predictable, keeps the action moving surely and swiftly through some well-written dialogues. At the same time though, the characters that deliver these lines stand as stiff and unconvincing as scarecrows while draped with entrails and occasionally veering off into the over-dramatic or over-sexed.

Dragon Age doesn’t control as smoothly as it could do either, though it’s hard to pinpoint exactly why. It’s true that there are elements of the interface which are bizarrely unwieldy – especially the combined journal/codex/bestiary which is built on a numbered grid system – but the bulk of the game is perfectly manageable. Dragon Age: Origins can be controlled either with WASD or mouse and the view is (on the PC, where you aren’t tied to a third person view) managed with the scroll wheel.


Partly, on the PC, it seems to be the fact that the camera isn’t fantastic and that the keyboard and cursor act independently. We may as well say frankly that if you want to play as an archer in Dragon Age then you’re going to definitely need to play in the third person view. Ranged weapons often have tremendous range and can shoot across great expanses, but the isometric view robs you of this advantage by focusing the camera down and removing control.

As we seem to keep explaining though; it’s not that the controls are bad and Dragon Age is still very much a game that you can just pick up and play if you’re familiar with RPGs – it’s just that something feels a little... off. The customisable toolbars and helpful spell-guides don’t remove that.

No matter how you feel about the presentation though, there’s no denying that Dragon Age looks fantastic from a purely objective and graphical point of view. The characters are finely detailed, the world is large and the multi-platform release hasn’t hampered any of the graphical options at all. There are plenty of luxurious particle effects and the flame effects in particular can be quite breathtaking – especially when the violence level has been pushed up to 11 and combat always ends with an unsettling amount of blood being spilled.