Okay so, Dragon Age: Origins was a big, sweeping, classically fantasy charged role playing game with elves and dwarves and all the familiar Tolkienesque trappings. More than anything else it was broad, with plenty of far off places and varying locales for lounge room heroes to go adventuring. Too few RPG games seem to be building big worlds these days.

Then along comes Dragon Age II. Strutting its stuff and winning hearts and minds with some great gameplay and slick looks. But it takes a big step to the left of the expectation of what an RPG should be.

Interesting made up fact: 45% of adventure heroes are killed while correcting their heroic opening pose

Rather than following on from the tale told in Dragon Age: Origins the game moves its timing and location in another direction. Your character, Hawke, along with your family, is a refugee from the Blight that has devastated your home. After several harsh months at sea you and the other boat people try to claim amnesty in the corrupt city of Kirkwall where most of the game takes place. The story is actually laid out by one of your party members, the dwarf Varric, who doesn’t claim to be a very reliable narrator, as he’s interrogated by a Seeker for the religious order known as the Chantry. The fact the entire story is told be flashback means that for the early parts of the game there’s a bit of jumping around and, ‘several years pass’, scenarios which feel a little sloppy but are quickly forgotten as you get into the meat of the game.

Much like Commander Shepherd from Mass Effect, the character of Hawke can be customised in appearance and gender. Class choices are a warrior, rogue or mage. It’s possible to import your save game from Dragon Age Origins but this has little impact on the game beyond a few different dialogue options. This stripped down character option compared to Dragon Age: Origins which had six different origin stories across three race/class combinations, feels like a step back. Dragon Age 2 has a short opening section, a little more than the demo that sets things up in Kirkwall.

After exchaning WD40 spray downs the armoured warriors clashed

The games high points are its excellent production values and controls. The game looks great and character animations and facial expressions are on par with Mass Effect 2. However the increased goriness of the game, with you and your party getting splattered with ample amounts of blood, comes across as silly rather than edgy. The blood splatters don’t seem to bother you or your team mates, never pausing to even wipe their faces, and the blood just disappears after a short time. Voice acting is top notch and little of the dialogue falls flat or comes across as corny; no easy feat in a fantasy game. It adds a lot to the characters who make up the world of Dragon Age II and gives them real vitality. My personal favourite was the street wise dwarf Varric who has an endearing Han Solo like swagger; actually with his crossbow he’s more like Solo and Chewbacca combined. This might be down to the fact Varric is the least messed up of your party. Rather than a band of brave warriors your team is usually made up of a neurotic, half mad wrecks with more issues than my comic collection (I have a lot of comics, or as the removal guy said, 'who the hell spends their money on all this'). Varric is refreshing in that he doesn't seem half on the edge of a nervous breakdown compared to your other party members. It's greater to have deep multi faceted characters, but it's nice to balance them out with some cheerful ones here and there.

Your player character Hawke has plenty of his (or her, ok I’m going to go with the male pronouns from here on because my character was a dude) own spoken dialogue. The dialogue wheel from Mass Effect makes its Dragon Age debut, complete with a colour coded symbol to identify if your response is diplomatic, witty or aggressive. The new dialogue system easily trumps the old Origins one.

Bit of baking soda and some water and that'll dab right out

The controls for actual combat have been tailored with a console controller in mind and streamlined to be more functional and easy to use on the run. It’s still possible, and often very necessary, to pause your game and reassign roles to your party members to avoid getting wiped out. While it’s easy to cruise through fights early in the game without much strategy, it’s not long before you need to develop particular talents for party members to keep your group alive. It’s fair enough to grumble that the streamlining of the controls is pandering to the console crowd, because there’s no doubt about that. But transitioning from Dragon Age Origin’s control scheme, which wasn’t very controller friendly, to something that hasn’t sacrificed much in the way of gameplay overall makes the game a lot more user friendly.

Yeah! Well your momma so fat... oh, hello Mrs Johnson, I didn't see you come in

The game is naturally quest based and while the individual quests are consistently good, with plenty of interesting multi part stories to draw you away from your main objective, you retread the same areas quite a lot. It won’t take long for you to know Kirkwall like the back of your hand, and at times it will feel about that size as well. It’s a similar complaint I had with Mass Effect 2 and it’s swapping out of the cumbersome driving sections with the dull as a Jennifer Aniston movie planet scanning sections. Yes the driving sections had controls that were complete ass and very often you spent time just trying to get over a hill, but they added a sense of exploration and adventure seeking that felt lacking in the second game. It seems that the mandate at Bioware is to create role playing games that focus on a specific story line and giving players only a little elbow room to explore. Worse still, the same areas are reused for different encounters with certain passages blocked to give a false impression of difference. Unfortunately the environments are so lushly designed and have so much detail its not hard to notice that the slavers hidden camp, the dragon den and abandoned mine are all the exact same area. New quests are found by almost tripping over people while heading to an objective so that it’s unlikely a player will have a different experience compared to another player. Call me a cranky old man, but that’s missing the point on why geeks like me grew up loving RPG’s.

Don't be a lady baby, just be a baby lady, awww yeah, that's me by the way

The difference wasn’t as jarring in the Mass Effect games as you were hopping between planets in space. But from Dragon Age Origins to Dragon Age II it feels like a radical departure, especially when it cuts the average play time between the two games by what feels like a reasonable margin. It’s not difficulty to figure out why these decisions have been made. Mass Effect has done very well for itself and expanded into a full franchise with toys, comics and spin off casual games. It’s not surprising that they want to steer Dragon Age onto similar fame and acclaim to those beyond the D20 rolling crowd. Business wise it makes good sense, but as an RPG diehard it feels a little tragic to me; I want to wander, I want to put my foot out my in-game front door and keep walking and see mountains (mountains Gandalf!) and monsters and magic; and maybe come back and find that kid snatched by a troll or that lost relic or whatever later on.

The overly hot pirate girl Isabella might have balanced my party a bit better as well, but I went right past the quest to recruit her by accident on my first playthrough, d'oh

For those of you reading this after skipping ahead to see how many stars I gave this game you might be muttering, ‘what the whoopee?”, whoopee being my curse word substitute today. It might sound crazy, but for all there is to complain about Bioware’s choices with Dragon Age II, it’s still a good game; hell, it’s a great game. While the locations get repetitive there’s enough going on to keep most gamers interested. The game just doesn’t feel like it was made with fans in mind. It might have been different if it had been a spin off title, Dragon Age: The Champion of Kirkwall or Dragon Age: Hawke’s Journey or something similar. But Dragon Age II? Fans of the first game won’t be so quick to embrace it as an equal to the original. But everyone else, particularly fans of Mass Effect, will find in Dragon Age II a fantasy epic with plenty of action and magic to keep them glued to their screen till the final credits.