This review contains spoilers, click expand to view.
DA2 is one game I cannot understand why people defend as being good.
Hawke is a refugee fleeing from the Blight to Kirkwall, a dreadfully dull, ugly, and unchanging (despite time jumps) city. Hawke is a human and has a set family this time around, cutting down roleplaying potential and replay value. Others argue the game is more personal, but it really isn’t. Your mother is one of the blandest characters in the game, your siblings barely show up after Act1, and nothing you do ever makes any sort of real impact. Your personality is defined by your most used dialogue choice (diplomatic, sarcastic, and aggressive).
The main plot is broken up into three parts. Act 1: Getting money for the deep roads expectation. Act 2: Dealing with the Qunari. Act 3: Dealing with the Mages/Templars. While Qunari and Mage/Templar plotlines bleed into the previous acts, each act tries to have an end goal surrounding its focused area. Unfortunately, none of them really get the needed depth or time to become good plots. And the awkward pacing at times weakens the overall story structure. The cast isn’t that great. Most companions have a sort of personality trait that defines their entire character, with very few other traits being explored.
The writing can be laughable at times, despite the fanbase calling it gold. There are moments the make no sense or break established lore. In one instance, you can tell a former slave that “slaves are useful” after getting your own slave in front of him. This would be fine until you can continue to have a relationship with said character. You can even sell him back into slavery, and have another character who hates slavery, approve of it (this could be hypocritical instead of bad writing, depending on the outlook). In another instance, you can refuse to give an item that is completely needed to do a ritual to your companion, only to find out she can do it anyway, despite saying she absolutely needed it. Despite the city being one of the most controlling of mages in the world, you can go the majority of the game as a Mage, which the Templars admit to knowing about, with complete freedom, which is silly. One character might kidnap one of your companions because he thinks you might be against the mages, despite the possibility of you siding with the mages the entire game, something he was often there for. At the end, it is possible for you to save every mage in the Circle, yet the cutscene shows all of them dead, which cases a significant character to go mad and fight you.The mages you encounter are constantly Blood Mages, crazy, or both, which makes trying to build sympathy for them a pain. The final main choice is a complete 180 of this, having you either kill an entire group that didn’t do anything, or defend them. Because that is real hard, morally grey choice.
Gameplay is a mess. You have your traditional three classes to choose from, and an improved talent/spell tree that allows freedom. However, this is dragged down by the awful level design and enemy placement. The levels, in addition to repeating all the time (with poor attempts by BioWare to hide this fact) and being dreadfully ugly much of the time (which kills your enjoyment of going anywhere), are poorly constricted. Enemies (most of which are completely generic and offer little thought to how to counter them) spawn in waves, just appearing from the sky, which completely defeats the purpose of planning ahead for a given encounter. Often times, this coupled with the often tight places where you fight, can leave you having to kill your entire party just to survive. The game can get hard not because of true challenge, but because it has bad design. Even the most exciting quests (not much besides fetch quests are memorable) get dull and tedious.
RPG elements have been removed in various ways. First, Skills are completely gone. Things like Persuasion are now depended on class, personality type, and who you have in your party. Second, dialogue, now being voiced, has much less dialogue options to choose from, and most of them leading to the same end goal. Gone are the days of Origins where you can piss off a companion to where they refuse to talk to you about something. Third, Companion armor is no longer controllable, with each companion having their set look that serves one function. Forth, not all companions have access to the same trees, despite being the same classes (Anders can have Creation but Merril can’t). These last two points limit each companion into a set role, and while you could argue it is to make them more unique, it limits the overall freedom the player has.
Fans often say it tried to be different, which makes it good. But trying and succeeding are not the same. DA2 failed in all of its important ways. This game deserves to be remembered as a complete failure, that hopefully gamers and developers can look at to remember that we deserve better. This game is simply awful.… Expand
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