Pros!


-The inventory isn’t nearly as messy as DA:O (this is because 90% of what you pick up is “Junk” and gets put in your “Junk” item list so when you go to a vendor you just hit the “Sell Junk” button and it sells it all. So what’s the point of junk? I don’t even have to read the name of each individual thing I’m selling so why not just give me gold instead of having me pick up 4 randomly generated Moth Eaten Scarves? I guess this is actually a con)

-The mountains of crap that gets included for playing DA:O, reading the PA comic, signing up for their newsletter, selling the most Thin Mints isn’t nearly as game breaking as the stuff in DA:O (It wouldn’t matter if it was since you have to actively try to suck to even have one of your characters die on normal difficulty. They make up for this by only giving 1 character a revive spell at the end of his personal skill tree)


-The bosses are all awesome and are a perfect challenge (too bad there’s only been 3)


-Adorable Elf with an Irish Brogue and Blood Magic


-Wizards are pretty awesome now. Maybe a little too awesome? Most battles end in 20 seconds after the adorable elf calls down meteors and consumes the corpses. Rogues are the most fun IMO.

Cons!


-Unlike DA:O where you could go to your little camp at any time and talk to all your guys and just shoot the shit, you’re only allowed to have conversations when the game says you can and throws a little quest arrow on the char’s house (they all live in separate houses across the city and there’s only 1 city and it never changes, more on that later).


-90% of the items you find are actual junk, not just the junk that can only be sold with the junk button. Get used to seeing 5-6 Rings every dungeon with something like +3% Physical Damage, +12 Attack and all named Ring just so you know it’s shit. They added a handy dandy star system where the game actually ranks items based on your level so you don’t even need to read stats anymore, just equip whatever it tells you and go.


-You can’t change your friends’ armor, only their accessories and weapons (except for the dwarf, you can’t take his steampunk crossbow away)


-There’s only 1 city and it never changes. Take Orzimmar or the human city from DA:O and add maybe 50% more and that’s the entire world. The maps themselves are tiny so get used to running across through the same slum-dock-posh square pattern over and over and over. They try to make up for it by adding a Night and Day version of each city sector, but most of the time all that does is maybe add some random enemies to the night version and doubles the places you’ll need to visit to do quests.


-Magical quest arrows aren’t just active, they’re all active simultaneously, though there are a few sidequests where you actually have to do some good old fashioned walking around. It’s just too bad it’ll be in the same 5 places you’ve been in for the past 14 hours.


-There are about 5 dungeons in the world and each is about 6-7 rooms, but they try to mix it up by having you start at different entrances and block off certain doors (to make the dungeon even shorter). Diablo did this better 15 years ago.


-Anders from Awakenings is back, but he’s no longer the fun-loving escape artist arsonist. He’s the scraggly underdog broodmaster with a dark past and a hint of danger. (Maybe this is pro for you? I remember laughing whenver Anders and the dwarf started calling each other names in Awakenings)


-Warriors are boring as hell to play as, do the least amount of damage, and only have 3-4 active skills and then 30 passives.


-Brooding Elf Warrior with a giant sword and beautiful white hair.


-Remember the default faces from the demo? If you kind of liked those but wanted to just alter the hair color or chin then tough shit. You can alter any of the preset faces but that one and the alternate where you have an inexplicable splash of blood across your nose like you painted it there. All of the other presets look like shit and it erases what you’ve done if you go back to look at the face they actually took time to make look good.

Story!


The premise of the game is that you go from rags to riches through a number of chapters while your dwarf buddy tells your story a la Alpha Protocol. So far the pattern is do all the optional sidequests and main quests, be warned that you can’t go back and should finish all the quests, fight through an actually unique dungeon with a cool boss, 3 years pass and you start all over. The idea is that every decision you make affects the story somewhere down the line, but unless I somehow feel the need to play through this all over again, I’ll never know how different things could be. Unlike DA:O where you had a clear goal at the end and were actually working towards defeating the Archdemon, there’s really no overarching story in DA2 other than get rich and follow the arrows.

Combat!


Combat against any enemies other than bosses is entirely just click once, then wait until everything’s dead. If you played the demo then it’s just that over and over for hours against the same enemies (humans, spiders, or undead). Normal enemies will never ever be a threat. Your best best seems to be to roll a rogue or mage and then have a party of tankgirl and then some combination of rogues and mages. Actual bosses will have you dodging attacks, hiding behind pillars, and getting beaten down to 1 character, but they’re so few and far between that you can’t really rely on them to keep your interest. I actually like the new skill system a little better than DA:O, but it’s still heavily flawed with most useful skills being hidden behind totally useless ones or skills being useless unless you sink 2 more upgrade points into them.

Overall:


Wait a year for a steam sale to put out the GOTY edition for $15 or pirate it.

Lurker 13920