Character Specializations & improvement:

The game Awakenings adds further development for characters through new gear, skills and most prominently specializations along with an increase to the level cap (it is now thirty five) your character may specialize once more with one of two new talents trees for each class. Many of the new specializations and skills go towards “fixing” the imbalance of Origins, by the end of the game each class should be equally as devastating and effective. For instance Rouges can either specialize as Legionnaire or shadow the former adds more health and abilities that allow you to go ‘invernable’ for a time while the latter adds more stealthy back stab type abilities. Every skill tree from the original game now contains four new abilities on top of the new specializations. The problem with the new character development options is that they simply make you too powerful, much of the difficulty from Origins is now gone (on normal difficulty – my party was only wiped out once). While feeling ultra powerful was fun I missed the challenge of the original game.

Technically the game holds to the same standards as its predecessor; environments are huge, varied and gorgeous and the sound design is amazing. Character models can still seem stiff though the new ones are fantastic. The game’s stability is much improved upon as well and it only crashed on me once though it was during the final boss battle (Grrr). Overall, Awakenings is definitely worth playing for fans of Dragon Age, it continues the story and adds ten to twenty hours of quality gameplay.

Dragon Age Complete Addition is one of the best values in gaming since the Orange box, you can pick it up for about forty bucks and it contains over a hundred and fifty re playable hours of some of the best gameplay money can buy. It is the definitive fantast roleplaying game and the standard by which future RPG’s will be judged.

STORY: 10
Absolutely fantastic, engaging and deep.

VISUALS: 8.5 – Stunning though a little rough around the edges, the PC version is far superior to the console.

GAMEPLAY: 8.5
Deep and thought provoking, nearly perfect.

SOUND: 9
Some hammy voice acting holds back an otherwise mind-blowing experience

LASTING APPEAL: 9.5
Extremely re playable and varied.

OVERALL: 9.5

Max Romano