Dragon Age 2 demo

It took me bloody ages to get into Dragon Age 1 but I did grow to love the great hulking dungeon crawling beast that it was. However, when I heard that Bioware were going to make the same sort of leap they made with Mass Effect 2 from Mass Effect 1, my little heart jumped for joy.

It really seems to have worked as well. I've tried out being a mage, rogue and warrior and your character jumps about like nobodies business. Gone are the days where a mage would stand stock still, emiting a variety of coloured lights from their staff. Now there is some proper animation and it adds a real sense of energy to the game.

There is one major problem with this, though. Because your character moves so much whilst attacking, it's quite hard to consistantly click on enemies. Often I was hammering my mouse button in the best traditions of Dragon Age 1 and half the time found myself moving across the map because my avatar had decided to do a flip which had shifted the camera angle and thus the mouse pointer a few cruicial pixels to the left.

This has, however, been countered by the inclusion of a "target and attack nearest enemy" button (R by default). I have no idea if this was in ther first game or not, there was no real need for it, but its inclusion in Dragon Age 2 is a welcome one. Yes, it is the equivilant of sticking the game in automatic but no-one's forcing you to use it and it does help you maintain some sense of order in the game.

The controversial redesign is good and bad. The new darkspawn look... well they look okay I suppose. I'll get used to them. New Flemmeth, on the other hand, has changed from a pretty standard crazy old woman into a quasi-deamon figure with wierd hair-horn things. On the one hand, some of the subtlty has gone. On the other hand, she looks utterly badarse so it's forgivable.

Overall, it was a good demo and it made me wish there wasn't a two week gap between it's release and the release of the full game. At least I have Dawn of War Retribution to tide me over.