Dragon Age II- Demo

Well, everyone seems to be playing Dragon Age, but alas, I am a starving actor/bookkeeper and buying new games for $50-60 is pretty much not an option for me.  Thankfully, BioWare recognizes the value of a demo and so out of curiousity I downloaded it and thought it'd be interesting to not just talk about the game itself but about demos in general and what makes a good demo.


I've never played Dragon Age: Origins, although I plan to now.  At the time that it came out, my poor computer was on it's last legs (RIP Old Clunky 2001-2009), and even when I replaced it my video card was to Dragon Age what my tubby housecat is to a cheetah.  Normally I won't start the sequel of a game before the original nor will I usually touch anything with complicated combat.  But I decided to give it a shot since so many of my friends raved about it.  So does it make a good demo?  Heck yes it does!

In Dragon Age 2 you play as Hawke (last name from what I'm told, you get to choose the first name in the full version of the game), who's fleeing with his/her family after their entire kingdom has pretty much been decimated by Sauron/Undead/evil overlord's forces.  Of course the demo will only give you a piece of the story.  It basically just involves "It might be a good idea to get out of the barren wasteland our country has become" and finishes with "Let's help out this pirate chick".

I haven't actually played a demo in quite a while.  When I used to, they were usually 10-15 minute affairs that ended fairly quickly and usually were restricted to adventure games or a fighter game.  But now with games becoming more of a financial investment game companies have kind of smartened up and the demos I've played recently have given me a good 2 hours of gameplay at a time.  It makes sense given that the average time for the full game is 30-40 hours of gameplay.  Dragon Age II definately delivered.

The demo let's you choose from the three classes (warrior, rogue, or mage) but it doesn't let you customize the characters too much which I was okay with because hey, it's a demo.  You can still choose to be male or female though this doesn't ever change the story or the way the other characters treat you, love interest or otherwise.  This can lead to some amusing scenes, at least where pirate chicks are involved.

The best thing that this game has going for it, at least from what I've played, is the pause button.  Oh, what a glorious feature that is.  A lot of my problems with attempting to play WoW or even something like Super Smash brothers is my inability to process the big flashing colours and chaos fast enough to determine what on earth I have to do.  I love playing RPG's, but I've often found that the sheer number of options for fighting pretty much paralyzes me with stress and I end up button mashing my way to the grave.

The pause feature let's you survey what is going on at  that moment and it let's you take a few moments to plan out and even select orders for your characters to do once you unpause.  This made the game so much easier and so much more enjoyable than other games I've played simply because I was able to stop, breathe and think about what to do.  The best part about this though is that eventually I became less and less dependent on pausing the game.  Being able to take the time to really look at how the game worked let me beat that learning curve a bit faster and soon I was fighting like the best of them.

When I first played the demo, I selected the warrior.  I love magic, I'd love to use magic, but a warrior kind of has that "just keep hitting it till it dies" element that is very helpful to an inexperienced soul like myself.  I tried out the rogue just because I kind of freakin' loved disappearing in lightning flashes only to reappear behind an enemy to smite him good.  The mage is of course primarily used for magic and while it's cool to see freakin' fireballs and lightning bolts reign down on your enemies, it also means you're a bit weaker physically and I was sort of running around like a scared mouse at one point just trying to keep out of reach of the enemies.

Voice acting is also excellent and the story is intriguing, although from what I've heard it actually is less superior than the original.  What I really, REALLY like about the game is that your party and your storyline change according to the decisions you make.  And it's not a "good vs. evil" type of decision either, it just determines who are your friends, your lovers, your enemies and how they might interact with you later.  This is probably the most fun part of the game for me.  Oftentimes during the demo I was left guessing what on earth I did to make someone like me less.

A good demo gives you enough of a taste to want more, and Dragon Age II achieved that and thensome.  It gave me enough gameplay and story to claw at the screen for more, but also held back enough to leave me curious to wonder what else there is.  Not only do I want to eventually buy this game, but I also want to check out the original.  I can't wait to see what else there is..so...you know....if anyone can lend me the original...I would send you good karma.  Check out the demo if you have an hour or two, if I had fun in combat, then it's definately a good game!