Dragon Age II is the sequel to one of my favorite games Dragon Age: Origins. Developed by Bioware and Published by Electronic Arts. (If you haven’t read my review of Dragon Age: Origins, read that before this)

This story is a bit of a branch off from the first one. In the first one the small town of Lothering was destroyed by the darkspawn. In this game you play as Hawke (your last name), who escaped from Lothering with their family. Depending on who you choose, a certain person in your family will die before you get to where you are going, Kirkwall. Kirkwall is the city that your mother is from, and when you get there you realize that mother isn’t rich because uncle gambled the money away. Now you have to work your way up

One of the issues I sometimes had with this game was that they gave the main character a voice, and sometimes with the way I created the character the voice that they gave them just didn’t match at all. In the last game the player was silent but you could pick between around 6 or 7 voice styles for what the character would say when you clicked on things. If they had put a fully voiced character with a few different voice choices, this game would have been a lot less annoying.

There’s is a lot of side-questing in this game, because you have to make the money to do just about anything, and if you don’t level up you will die. But the most annoying thing in this game was the fact that almost all of the sidequests happened in the same cave, from different entrances. I was so sick of doing anything by the time that it was done.

Sometimes the story was hard to follow, first you’re just trying to become someone, and then you are trying to keep peace between the city and the Qun (Big hulking people with horns and stern faces) (Also a culture scarily similar to Communism, couldn’t have been an accident), to trying to keep peace between mages and templars (They never get a long, human religion regulates mages with templars because they fear them). The story is cut between these hard to follow stories in three different acts, with a year between each act.

This game has a clear defined choice, and I do not like that. You have three different choices when you respond or talk, you could be good, you could be bad, or you could be witty. I don’t like that, I feel like I am not in control. There are still questions to ask, and the one response that could lead to a romance but other than that the only way to continue the conversation it choose your moral choice.

Overall the game could have been better, the only thing that had me coming back were the interesting characters, but a lot of things about this game are very cringe-worthy.