Dragon Age: Origins

The ideal Role-Playing Game (RPG) can be broken down into a few essential elements - a gripping storyline that grabs you by the nads and drives you onto a journey you can’t help but follow through. Then comes the main course - a game world that helps you cultivate a burning zest for exploration, and the urge to lose yourself in its lucid cocoon. Finally, at the core there’s the need for gameplay that squares its shoulders to cart you through to the very end, while compelling you enough to pave your own experimental path (where character or story progression is concerned). If we’d break down BioWare’s Dragon Age: Origins, it holds its own in each of those areas like a sturdy blade forged by an elven-dwarf halfbreed (an abomination undoubtedly, but also a master sword craftsmen)! Now before I set out on an entirely different high-fantasy tangent littered with atrocious analogies, let me tell you what I loved about Dragon Age: Origins.

To start off, I’ve never been as big a fan of party-based RPGs as that of its hack-n-slash sibling. However, Dragon Age’s incredibly intuitive and customizable party system has me smitten! The ability to pause and queue up commands (