The game’s setting is intriguing and unlike any other MMOG on the market. The American Southwest is the last known cradle of civilization after natural disasters and nuclear war devastate the planet, and it’s here that you’ll struggle against the mutated beasts and lawless brigands that threaten what’s left of humanity. You and other players are clones–able to regenerate in a LifeNet pod after each death. After a brief tutorial that introduces you to combat and interface basics, you find yourself in the middle of a meager desert town with only the barest essentials to help you scrape by. And it will take you a long time before you feel like you’re doing anything but scraping by. Fallen Earth is a harsh mistress. You spend your first hours trying to get your bearings, seeking help from your fellow players, and slowly determining how you are going to earn enough gambling chips (that is, money) to endure. It might take hours before you as much gain your first level or even find a way to buy a weapon or armor effective enough to protect you should you venture away from the cold comfort of your starting village.

You won’t ever tame the dusty brown Arizona wastelands, but you will eventually become part of its ecology. Scavenging is important and inescapable, so as you make your way further into the desert, you’ll find more and more resource nodes waiting to be plundered. You collect such minerals as coal, lead, and copper; forage for mushrooms, grain, and varied edibles; and stockpile scrap iron, glass, and rubber found in decrepit vehicles and mounds of rubbish. You can purchase necessary items as well, but it’s more cost effective–and often necessary–to find it yourself. In turn, you can use these resources to craft essentially any usable object found in Fallen Earth. Depending on your proclivities, you can fashion shivs and lawnmower blades to use in melee combat; pistols and crossbows if you prefer to keep your enemies at a distance; armor of all sorts, from jackets to boots; and all kinds of auxiliary items, from ammo and acid to ATV engines and horse feed.

If you enjoy the complicated economies of games like EVE and Pirates of the Burning Sea, Fallen Earth will scratch that same itch. Crafting is simple and painless: As long as you have the knowledge and items necessary, you can craft items anywhere (though the process is quicker in specific crafting labs). It takes some items minutes, hours, even days to complete, though like in EVE, crafting continues without further input once started–even if you are offline. Nor are you stuck with a particular discipline. As long as you obtain the book that teaches you the knowledge and level the crafting discipline high enough, you can make anything or everything. What you don’t use, you can sell to a merchant or put up for auction, though because armor and weapons degrade over time, you may want to keep backups handy (though you can also mend those items with the right repair kit).

Like with crafting, you aren’t forced into a single combat class. You can activate a template to help guide you toward a specific role, but there are no actual classes. You can mix and match to your heart’s content, spending the advancements points you earn in any way you like. But whether you stick with pistols, rifles, or melee, you won’t find Fallen Earth’s combat very compelling. At least it strives for something different, eschewing the enemy auto-locking of other MMOGs and going for a pseudo real-time system that simulates a first- or third-person shooter. But whether you go for ranged combat or keep your foes close, combat is clumsy and lacks a sense of impact. When using melee weapons, battles are a mess of odd, jittery animations (particularly if you dual-wield) and flailing limbs made more awkward by weak sound effects. The imprecise targeting reticles of early ranged weapons like crossbows and zipguns make shooting equally inelegant. Better weapons lead to better combat later on, but even then, skirmishes are messy and unrewarding. Not even special abilities and mutations (Fallen Earth’s version of magic) can energize the action; they don’t look dramatic and, therefore, aren’t that fun to use.

Combat isn’t the source of all of Fallen Earth’s shortcomings, though it does showcase some of the game’s more bizarre behaviors. Enemies run toward you and position themselves in odd ways once combat is initiated rather than just run at you straight on, and they follow you for unusually long distances if giving you chase, even if they are many levels below you. If you defeat a human enemy, its rag doll might fly 20 feet into the air and flip cartwheels before landing. And these are among the less egregious technical and design flaws. At one point, we fell through the floor at a mission waypoint, which initiated an inescapable loop of falling and respawning; extricating ourselves required the assistance of a game master. (Similar requests are common in the in-game help channel.) Missions don’t always update right away or may not update at all, and your active mission display will reset to another mission if you die or log out. Game performance takes a huge dive in populated areas; you’ll see enemies and other players teleport around due to occasional but annoying lag spikes; and crashes, while less frequent than they were at the game’s launch, are still common enough to be frustrating. There’s just an unfortunate amount of technical clutter standing between you and your enjoyment.

Yet while the clutter hinders the fun, it doesn’t demolish it. Quests are extremely well written, so while most of them are kill-this, collect-that tropes, they give superb context to your actions. You’ll meet a grieving husband who has created a family of pitiable human shells in trying to clone his dead wife. Rival gangs play off each other as they vie for regional dominance. Fungal blights threaten the precious few crops sustaining the nearby town. Mission dialogue is mature but not gratuitously so, and the circumstances they describe seem authentic given the cruelties of the postapocalypse. Quest-giver Carrie Pennington sends you on a simple mission to kill humpbacked monstrosities, but when she tells you the town has taken up a collection to pay for your services, her desperation rings true. With each mission you take, this horrific vision of the future takes on added poignancy, and once you reach a high enough level to choose a faction (and reap faction-specific mission rewards), the tension mounts as you discover the ideological differences that divide them.

Of course, you won’t always be alone when you tackle these missions. You’ll need to grab a few buddies for the team-oriented missions like infiltrating a decrepit prison or exterminating a giant scorpion, though you can spend most of your time as a lone ranger. Unfortunately, Fallen Earth doesn’t offer any of the helpful grouping tools you might take for granted in other recent MMOGs. You can’t search for open groups or sort through different clans that might be recruiting. Instead, you’ll need to do things the old-fashioned way: By seeking help in the regional chat channel and hoping for the best. You’ll definitely want to be in a supportive clan or have the help of friends if you want to hazard the game’s free-for-all player-versus-player areas: The resources you’ll find there are valuable, but even in these hushed badlands, you can’t always play the solitary hero.

But alone or with a friend, Fallen Earth’s missions do a good job of sending you across the entire map to take on new quests and learn new crafting disciplines. You’ll spend a lot of time traveling, so you should obtain a horse or ATV at your earliest opportunity. Travel can take you across lands fertile with resources, from cacti to lead nodes, which is a good thing considering your reliance on crafting supplies. Other times, the landscape is striking in its emptiness, barren of both creatures to fight and trash reserves to search. The stark environs add a lot to the atmosphere, but boredom can set in when you spend 10 minutes galloping to your destination. The occasional tedium is compounded once you’ve collected large numbers of raw materials and your crafting plans are in full swing. Inventory space is limited and cannot be expanded. Thus, you either make too-frequent (and often lengthy) trips back to the city to stuff excess necessities in a vault and sell the chaff or sort out the loot to salvage what is most helpful and leave the rest behind.

The lonely treks would be easier to embrace if the world were easier to look at, but Fallen Earth is not an attractive game. There are notable sights: hovering overpasses, a small village dotted with multicolored umbrellas, and an abandoned amusement park. But the technology doesn’t do these visual touches justice. Textures are bland, lighting is weak, and graphical glitches (such as limbs disappearing from character models) are common. Without textural detail or slick animations to compensate, the fascinating world eventually turns into a humdrum sea of brown and bronze. One aspect of the production stands out, however: the excellent soundtrack. The strums of a guitar give one town a decidedly Wild West feel, while discordant strings raise tension levels in another. The music is both atmospheric and unobtrusive, sometimes enhancing the bleakness while at other times easing the solitude.

Fallen Earth has its pleasures, particularly once you reach its second major region and discover the wealth of content factional missions provide. Taking long trips across the wastes, scavenging for valuable resources, and enduring the slow pace of early leveling, however, makes it so that it will take a while before you see Fallen Earth at its most enjoyable. Even then, it’s hard to escape the clumsy combat, notable bugs, and general user unfriendliness. Obviously, this is not a virtual world for everyone. But if you’re willing to endure the flaws and occasional heartaches, you might become attached to Fallen Earth in spite of it all. There is a bright gem in here, but all the debris makes it tough to see the glow.

Most of the plot of Armored Princess is a straightforward extension of the original King’s Bounty. The demons that you fought as the champion of the fantasy realm Endoria are back for round two, and only the armored princess of the title stands in their way. Princess Amelie is the hero you play as here, a maid in mail who winds up being sent to the alternate reality of Teana on a hunt for her mentor, the knight Bill Gilbert, and eight magical stones that can save the world. This basically turns into an tropical getaway because Teana is kind of a Caribbean world divided into a succession of fairly small islands, each with distinct personalities. One is full of pirates, for instance, another loaded with barbarians, and so on. This adds an energetic atmosphere to the new game and breaks up your adventure into easily digestible chunks. This structure also bluntly lets you know how you’re doing because you can tell pretty much immediately whether or not you have enough levels under your belt to take on an island. Running into a bunch of invincible barbarians on a new island is a pretty good cue that you should kick your sailboat into reverse. New islands generally have to be accessed with maps that must be taken from tough enemies, too, which also keeps you from getting ahead of yourself for the most part.

Plot and basic structure are identical to that in both its predecessor and tons of other Heroes of Might & Magic-inspired sagas. You guide Amelie across intricate maps of fairly traditional fantasy lands (enemies generally come with claws, swords, and shields, although you do run into the odd robot) with a horde of units in tow that serve as shock troops for battles. Whenever you take on some bad guys, these grunts do the fighting for you, although you give them their marching orders on turn-based hexagonal battlefields. Amelie starts off as a first-level wuss of a paladin, mage, or warrior (your choice) that can recruit only basic bowmen, clerics, and pitchfork-wielding peasants into her army. But with time, levels, and increases in her leadership stat, she will be able to field troops like giant snakes, giant spiders, ancient bears, sneaky buccaneers, creepy vampires, and many other D&D refugees. The goal is, of course, to explore the nooks and crannies of the islands, as well as slay evildoers and monsters. You’ll also solve quests; buff Amelie by leveling up and tweaking her many might, mind, or magic abilities via an extensive skill tree; and progress to the final showdown. One significant addition is a pet dragon that levels up and has special abilities that can be used in combat. The beast’s role isn’t well defined, though, so it seems less like a traveling buddy than a way to cast extra spells during battles.

So there are no stop-the-presses moments here. The only real difference between the first King’s Bounty and its follow-up is how quickly the difficulty scales up. Armored Princess assumes that you have played the original, which means that it gets right to the point. Battles turn tough as soon as you reach the second island, forcing you to really learn the ins and outs of the game’s hero skill progression tree, as well as how to best recruit and employ troops in battle. You will have a rough time of it here unless you have either played the first game or have some previous experience with strategy RPGs. Still, it’s not an unfair progression. The difficulty increases quickly but not suddenly. If you’re paying attention at all, you won’t get caught by impossible opposition. It’s not as if you go directly from whomping spiders and pirates to getting scorched by invincible demons. And even when you’re in tough against serious opposition, the incredibly detailed maps provide entertainment all on their own. Exploration is even more of an entertaining diversion than combat because your speed on horseback allows you to gallop away from impossible-to-defeat baddies and even occasionally snipe a big reward or reach a castle where you can recruit powerful units without fighting. Maps have goodies crammed into every nook and cranny, including buried chests full of gold, magical doodads, and the mystic runes that power Amelie’s skills. Quests can be found all over the place, and they are typically offered up along with reams of colorful text that develop Amelie’s personality and build up Teana as a real place through the collection of oddballs handing out these jobs. You can safely skip all this verbiage, of course, but taking the time to read it all is rewarding if you’re seriously into role playing.

With all that said, Armored Princess feels dated at times. The graphics engine is really showing its age now but the art style is more cartoony than realistic, so the game can get away with broad caricatures, chunky monster models, and whiz-bang spell effects. These consist of fireworks and cheesy animations like spooky faces indicating units being scared. Islands and battle arenas are stocked with lots of added details as well, including cobwebby corners and overgrown graveyards. But there are also some performance issues here, most notably how you get stuck on scenery when guiding Amelie around the islands. Clicking on inaccessible areas–which is easy to do because the islands are veritable mazes of narrow paths and greenery–causes her to simply stop and wait for a new order. This is both annoying and life threatening because these inopportune pauses can get you caught by pursuing enemies. Audio is also archaic. Unit sound effects in battle are almost nonexistent and never memorable even when you can hear them. Music is also a generic blat of horns that you’ll forget moments after shutting down the game.

Even though it may be a slave to its genre, King’s Bounty: Armored Princess is still an impressive representation of the modern strategy RPG. Story, exploration, combat, and character development come together in a great, addictive game that will keep you hooked for many, many hours.

In the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series’ third installment, you play as Ukrainian security agent Alexander Degtyarev. A number of military helicopters have crashed in the region devastated by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster–known as The Zone–and you’re sent to investigate. Call of Pripyat tries a bit harder than its predecessors in the storytelling department; the camera pans around your character in cutscenes, the writing is more straightforward, and the climax ties back to Shadow of Chernobyl, the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game. The plot gets a bit interesting in the final few hours as you find out more about what’s going on in Pripyat, the abandoned city closest to the nuclear plant. Unfortunately, there’s little to get you invested before that, and the awkward scripted scenes don’t communicate a sense of drama as much as they highlight the aging visuals. A few characters, such as an alcoholic technician who will upgrade your weapons only after you give him enough vodka, are interesting or entertaining enough to make you care about their fates. But for the most part, you’ll care only about surviving–and thriving–in such bleak, lawless environs.

And what environs they are. Shacks dot the grassy landscapes, cracks open in the earth’s crust, and the famed Pripyat Ferris wheel looms beyond a barbed-wire fence. Storms rage across the skies, and frightening radioactive emissions spread across The Zone, threatening the small pockets of human life that populate it. You encounter groups of bandits fending off mutant attacks or huddled around a fire, camped near a radioactive anomaly. This is a tense, unpredictable, and sometimes scary place where the next step could invite danger or bring respite. You get some forewarning of some attacks, such as the frenzied barking of mutated dogs before a pack of them descend upon you. But other times, the darkness hides a shocking surprise, like a new enemy to the series called the burer. These misshapen dwarves are like mutant poltergeists, flinging objects at you and even telekinetically yanking your weapon out of your hands. A sinister encounter with one of these creatures in the center of Pripyat near the end of the game is one of several nail-biting highlights.

Another highlight is a nighttime ambush of another newly introduced beast called the chimera. Night is wholly black in Call of Pripyat, not the dim facsimile that so many other games provide. Not knowing when this terrible beast might bear down upon you in this blackness makes this just one of many petrifying sequences, though even most mundane encounters will have you sweating bullets. Call of Pripyat is not an easy game, so you need to aim well, know your weapons’ strengths and weaknesses, and conserve ammo. Human opponents put up a tough fight, so running in guns blazing is a quick ticket to the afterlife. There are times when the AI’s ultraproficiency seems a little too obvious. Human enemies facing away from you have the uncanny ability to notice when you peek out a window behind them and are remarkably good shots in the dead of night, even without night vision scopes equipped. But despite a bit of cheating, Call of Pripyat rarely feels unfair. It features none of Clear Sky’s lame choke points and mission design issues, and the economy and weapon upgrade systems have been tweaked in sensible ways. So while you’ll still make use of the quicksave and quickload keys, you never feel like the game devolves into frustrating save-game attrition.

These aren’t the only improvements Call of Pripyat makes over its precursors. This is by far the most stable S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game out of the box; we didn’t experience a single crash or corrupted save file, and the graphics engine performs better than ever (if not quite perfectly), even when you turn on the new DirectX 11-specific options. This update doesn’t thrust the game into the forefront of cutting-edge visuals, but while low-resolution textures and clumsy animations may betray the engine’s age, carefully crafted environments and all sorts of atmospheric touches make this a case in which art trumps technology. Other welcome improvements include flexible hotkeys,along with important gameplay additions, from preventative medications to the ability to roam The Zone freely once you’ve finished the story.

Outside of the main story, there are plenty of side quests to pursue. You’ll eliminate bloodsucker nests, search for a fabled corner of paradise, and, as before, hunt for incredibly valuable artifacts hidden in the midst of various anomalies. Gathering artifacts is as tense and exciting as it ever was, requiring you to venture into a deadly anomaly that may pick you up into the air and throw you around, burn your skin to a crisp, or zap you with jolts of electricity. All the while, you must follow your detector’s signal to pinpoint the artifact’s location. The search is frantic, and the risk is high, which makes success oh-so-sweet. All these tasks are wrapped into a free-form package, allowing you to explore The Zone under your own terms. In fact, the vague instructions you receive from some mission providers require you to thoroughly explore every nook and cranny, from abandoned schoolhouses to derelict fuel stations. Don’t expect a specific mission waypoint with every job you undertake. This is frustrating if you let it be, but it’s an authentic part of Call of Pripyat’s bleakness. The Zone does not allow you to tame it without a struggle.

The game isn’t always so open ended, and some story missions funnel you through a few extended, linear sequences, though Call of Pripyat falters slightly here. The game spends a lot of time setting up Pripyat as home to unspeakable dangers, and a protracted journey through a long, dark series of tunnels is so nerve-racking that the reward for the effort–the city of Pripyat–is a bit of a letdown. There are fewer opportunities for boundless exploration here, fewer surprises to discover–and no typical vendors, which might lead to some unavoidable travel back to the game’s two other major regions. Thankfully, this is when the story missions start to get more interesting, moving from mundane to there’s-something-freaky-going-on-here territory.

Call of Pripyat’s multiplayer options, just like those of its predecessors, are routine and slightly clumsy, because the game’s shooting mechanics don’t work so beautifully when isolated from the context that makes them successful. But it’s the chilly ambience and lifelike ecology that should lure you to the newest S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game, not the ordinary online play. Well-constructed environments and superb sound design make The Zone as cheerless and ominous as ever. But it’s also rich with resources, begging you to cultivate its secrets and withstand the hostilities. Series fans and newcomers alike should don their protective gear and journey forth.

There’s a bit more room to stretch out in the Coalition’s Grand Campaign, which lets players pick from one of four (only four?) powers in opposition to Napoleon. The world is a bit more open here, so things are more likely to develop in unexpected ways. It’s true that the overall conflict and alliances are a bit stiff, but there’s definitely more replayability here than there is in the other three campaigns. Even more replay appeal is sure to be unlocked once the modders start to open up the minor nations. Our only real complaint about the design here is that the victory conditions can sometimes bring the Coalition members into direct conflict with each other, which seems to go against the spirit of the game somewhat. I don’t want to have to turn on an ally just because they happen to have captured an objective I needed in order to win.

As you expand, you’ll find that the campaign AI is still a bit passive in some areas. The main obstacles to your expansion aren’t the armies and generals of your enemy, but rather by the increasing upkeep costs of fielding large enough armies to maintain your momentum and by the need to keep garrisons in your rear to subdue unrest in recently conquered regions. These are important matters to be sure, and Napoleon himself was enthusiastically dedicated to matters of logistics, so it suits the game historically. Developing a sufficient support system for your armies and keeping what you’ve won is every bit as important as battlefield heroism, but it still makes for a less thrilling game when your municipal concerns begin to outweigh the military. Though they heighten the realism somewhat, the attrition and supply rules are another small drain on your forces but most players won’t find them to be too distracting.

The full campaign options from Empire have been preserved in the Grand Campain, so players will still be improving settlements, researching technology and conducting diplomacy under the same guidelines as before. Though there are a few new tricks here, like the return of the little movies that help put the campaigns into context, the biggest improvement to the campaign is the option play in multiplayer.

One of the obstacles to multiplayer in empire building games is the time it takes while waiting for another player to finish their turn. Civilization IV made some great strides in this area by giving players something to do between the end of one turn and the beginning of the next and Napoleon follows suit by allowing you to make policy changes and issue build orders even after you’ve clicked the end turn button. When empires get a bit large, it can still take a while for players to get everything squared away but it’s still a small price to pay for the challenge of playing a human opponent.

Since waiting out during another player’s tactical battles would be particularly obnoxious, Napoleon gives players the chance to take control of the enemy in the other player’s battle. It can create a bit of a moral crisis if you’re trying to play cooperatively, but it’s a wonderful way to stick it to your opponent every chance you get. The whole scheme plays out very well but we were a bit distressed to find that the game simply ends if a player drops out. We’d much rather have had the option to continue, or at least save the game.

The tactical battles are still some of the most amazing we’ve ever seen in any game. The cavalry charges, cannon strikes and wheeling formations just look brilliant. The range of environments and atmospheric effects add a lot of variety to the experience, which is good because the actual range of units you’ll be using is thinner than most other games in the series. The subtly stylized graphics create a much more powerful impression this time around but may not be to everyone’s tastes. Napoleon seems to run quite a bit better than Empire, but then again, I’ve also upgraded to a better computer. Framerate can still be a problem in the driving snow with cannon fire bursting all around, but the visuals run fairly well when you consider the quality of the image.

In terms of AI, the tactical battles are challenging but still exhibit a few of the pathfinding and judgment problems seen in Empire. Trying to lead large groups of units in a coherent formation is still sometimes a bit awkward. Units still try to cross from one flank to the other if you try to resize or reface the line. It’s only a minor frustration in single player, where you can pause the game to get things repositioned, but it can be very aggravating in multiplayer. On the plus side, units don’t seem to go into melee mode on their own as often anymore.

Dragon Age’s plot, which deals with the impending invasion of a horde of demonic creatures called the darkspawn, isn’t where the story’s biggest surprises lie. The shocks, the joys, and the disappointments spring from the repartee among a number of remarkable characters; they lurk within books of lore and stories of martyrs; and they burst forth during spine-tingling moments when you must choose from a selection of difficult choices that affect the tale’s direction–and the way your associates interact with you. Ferelden is a colorful and fascinating kingdom that takes enough cues from well-known fantasy tropes to be familiar, but bends enough conventions to feel original. Dragon Age features dwarves, but their caste-based society and the social paragons that rise above it twist the norms enough to keep you intrigued. Mages remain under the constant watch of templars, a restriction that doesn’t sit well with those who view such policing as virtual slavery. The role of religion in human circles is of particular note. Chantries provide refuge to those worshiping the all-powerful Maker, and chanters recite the holy word near their houses of prayer. But lest this world sound too serious, don’t despair: One such disciple slides food references into her chant, and a few dwarves warn you not to fall into the sky. Small, humorous touches like this are plentiful. Even if you aren’t the literary sort, Dragon Age may inspire you to read every note, every character bio, and every creature description, thanks to the richness of the world and the consistency with which it’s presented.

You’ll learn even more from the companions who join you, and you’ll grow to care about them on your quest for glory. There’s Morrigan, the cynical apostate mage bound to your cause for reasons that become clear only late in the journey; Sten, the strong, silent type who isn’t so quick to reveal his innermost thoughts; and Zevran, a darkly mischievous would-be assassin with a wild streak and a playful disregard for the law. There are others too, including Alistair, a wisecracking, vaguely insecure member of the Grey Wardens, an elite group of champions that recruits you early on. Great dialogue and fantastic voice acting make these characters leap off the screen as if they were real friends, and the way they interact with one another feels authentic. Morrigan and Alistair banter about the role of templars in the lives of mages, and the sweetly devout Leliana tries to communicate with your trusty canine cohort in some amusing exchanges. You may even develop a romance (or two) before all is said and done. The course of love isn’t always a smooth one, though it can be a bit steamy, in a PG-13 sort of way.

Relationships must be nurtured; in the world of Dragon Age, love doesn’t develop at first sight. Rather, you must improve your standings with available party members by giving them gifts and fulfilling quests in ways that please them. Doing so opens more dialogue options and may even reward you with unexpected gifts beyond the private pleasures of your tent. Your personal relationships aren’t all you need to worry about when facing a difficult decision, however. On significant quests, you’ll encounter complex choices that force you to weigh the risks against the rewards, even as you try to stay true to your own vision of your character. Are werewolves heartless killers, or is there a method to their madness? Should you wholeheartedly embrace a political candidate, or will some unexpected information have you playing double agent–or just killing the opposition? Such open-ended quests have become staples in many similar RPGs, but few make these decisions feel so momentous. The anxiety that results when you encounter important choices is a result of superb writing and character development: When you care about your destiny, decisions have more weight.

Even Dragon Age’s initial moments present important decisions that affect how your adventure plays out. You’ll customize your own avatar’s look from a variety of presets, but more importantly, you’ll choose a race and class. The choices may seem initially limited, but your options eventually expand. Later, you can choose up to two subclasses once you reach the necessary level requirements, and there are a few different means of unlocking additional skill trees. Your initial race and class choices don’t just determine the kinds of skills and spells you will have access to, however; they influence how the first few hours of the game progress. You will experience one of six different “origin stories” that follow the events that lead you to the elite Grey Wardens. Every origin story leads to the same place, but that doesn’t mean you leave these events behind for good. Characters you met early on will cross your path again, and crucial moments of your origin story will continue to haunt you. The varied origin stories not only provide plenty of replay value, but allow you to see familiar characters from a different angle. A prisoner you meet within a dank dungeon may not have much impact on you if you are playing as a Dalish elf, but if you play as a human mage, this encounter is a bittersweet reunion.

You aren’t a lone adventurer, however. You can take up to three companions along with you, and eventually you will meet more willing (or unwilling, as the case may be) darkspawn slayers. You can switch out party members back at your camp or in other friendly areas. Party members you don’t use will remain at camp, though they thankfully level up even when you don’t take them along. Your comrades aren’t just AI-controlled henchmen; you can take full control of any party member at any time, though how you do so depends on the platform. PC owners get the most versatile and rewarding experience in this regard. You can zoom the camera in to a close third-person view when exploring and conversing with non-player characters, or pull the camera back to a tactical view, which makes it a breeze to quickly and easily micromanage every spell and attack, in true Baldur’s Gate tradition. On consoles, you always view the action from behind a single character, and you use a shoulder button to switch among them. It’s a great way of experiencing the buzz of battle, though occasional pathfinding quirks are more apparent in the console versions, simply because you experience the action from a single perspective at a time, rather than while managing four characters simultaneously.

If you’ve played a BioWare fantasy RPG in the past, you’ll feel right at home with the combat system. By clicking on your target or pressing the attack button, you don’t just swing a sword, but you approach your target and queue up your attack. Once your party has gained access to a good number of spells, stances, and skills, battlefields explode with bright colors and raucous sound effects, and it’s a lot of fun to switch back and forth between party members, managing your abilities and taking advantage of various spell combos to wreak havoc. There are dozens of different types of enemies to slice up, from giant spiders and darkspawn, to ghosts and walking trees, to demons and, of course, dragons. Allies will join you in the biggest battles, and the best of these, particularly those toward the end of the game, are thrilling. On the PC, they’re particularly challenging, and many battles benefit from frequent pausing and tactical thinking, so that you can queue up attacks across your entire party. The same battles on consoles are noticeably easier.

Nevertheless, the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions have their challenges, and no matter which platform you choose, you can customize your cohorts’ AI behavior to be more effective in battle. Using the tactics menu, you can set characters up to drink potions when their health gets low; have Morrigan cast helpful crowd-control spells when enemies are clustered together; and program sturdier characters to draw enemies’ ire when more vulnerable party members are under attack. As you level up, you will earn additional tactics slots, allowing you to implement even more intricate actions. You can also apply basic behaviors to your team members, making them more aggressive or defensive, and you can switch them around on the fly if an experimental custom tactic isn’t working as you intended. When things come together as you plan–such as when Morrigan freezes a hurlock in place and Alistair smashes it to smithereens–battles are even more rewarding.

All of these elements coalesce wonderfully, making for a memorable and exciting adventure that keeps you on the move. The flow of loot and pace of leveling are both highly satisfying, and because you have four active characters to consider (in addition to others back at the camp), you spend a lot of time poring over armor and weapon choices. The tempo is even quicker than the Dungeons & Dragons games that preceded Dragon Age, thanks to important tweaks that minimize downtime. For example, you do not need to rest between encounters to replenish your health and recharge your spells. Instead, health and stamina are replenished quickly once the skirmish ends, allowing you to string encounters together without unwanted breaks in between. Should a party member fall during battle, he or she will be resuscitated once the battle has ended, albeit with a stat penalty applied (though it can be cured with an injury kit). These factors, and more, give Dragon Age an excellent sense of forward direction.

All the spells, tactics, and skills sound like a lot to organize, but the interface does a great job of helping you keep track of things. The PC interface is brilliant, letting you browse through your inventory and tweak your quickbars quickly and easily. The console versions do a surprisingly great job as well, making it simple to sort through your quests, and to queue up actions while battle is paused. One particularly useful feature is the ability to identify inventory items as trash and sell them all with a single button press once you’re back in town. There are some console-specific interface irritations that could have been cleaner, however. For example, identifying new codex (that is, lore) entries can be troublesome, because the list doesn’t scroll down until your highlight cursor reaches the bottom of the window. As a result, you can’t always distinguish new entries from old ones, which is an issue that doesn’t plague the fantastic PC interface. The consoles’ radial menu, on the other hand, is an excellent way of letting you access every battle skill, and it works somewhat like the similar interface in Mass Effect–albeit with a few more layers.

The differences between versions aren’t limited to the interface. Dragon Age doesn’t look amazing on the PC, but it’s an attractive game nonetheless. Zooming from an isometric view to a third-person perspective is slick, and while environments don’t hold up quite as well when viewed up close, they’re consistently lovely when viewed from above. On the flip side, the Xbox 360 version looks positively disappointing. Textures are highly compressed and colors are washed out, though the upside is that this version maintains a smoother frame rate than on the PlayStation 3, where things might get jittery when swiveling the camera around. The PlayStation 3 version features higher-quality textures than those on the Xbox 360, better color saturation, smoother facial animations, and shorter load times. Minor visual hiccups, like corpses that disappear and reappear, are a bit more common on the PS3, however. The PC version is the superior experience, but if you’re choosing between the two console releases, the PlayStation 3 has the upper hand. Some minor glitches are shared between the console versions, however, such as rare occasions when the soundtrack or voice-overs disappear. We also ran into a few quest malfunctions that could be replicated on all three platforms, though they were relatively minor and did not interfere with the progress of the main quest.

No matter which version you choose, however, there are plenty of audiovisual details to note. In many ways, Dragon Age looks and sounds like other high-fantasy games, but while the towers, forest paths, and underground caverns are what you’ve seen before, the art style is attractive, and a few sights, such as an underground dwarven city, are particularly eye-catching. Character models don’t exhibit Mass Effect-level expressiveness, but they look good and animate smoothly enough. Also of note are the splatters of blood that appear on your party members after battle. It’s a nice idea, but the splotches look like they’ve been splashed across you with a paintbrush. The crimson stains are a cool thematic touch, however, because blood plays an important role in Dragon Age. The sound effects are excellent, console glitches notwithstanding, and the soundtrack, while typical for a fantasy game, swells and murmurs at all the right moments.

Few games are this ambitious, and even fewer can mold these ambitions into such a complete and entertaining experience. You might spend 50 or more hours on your first play-though, but there are so many paths to follow, so many details to uncover, and so many ways to customize your party that you’ll want to play again as soon as you finish the first time. PC owners even get an extra dash of depth via the downloadable toolset, which lets you create new levels, spells, skills, and even cutscenes. But any way you slice it, here’s the fantasy RPG you’ve been waiting for, the one that will keep you up late at night, bleary-eyed, because you have to see what happens next. Like the best fiction, Dragon Age will sweep you up in its world, so much so that when you’re done, you’ll want to experience it all over again.

Source: GameSpot

Source: GameSpot