Metascore

Generally favorable reviews - based on 68 Critics What's this?

User Score

Generally favorable reviews- based on 581 Ratings

  • Summary: As the spiritual successor to BioWare's "Baldur's Gate", one of the most successful role-playing games in the industry, Dragon Age: Origins represents BioWare's return to its roots, delivering a fusion of the best elements of existing fantasy works with stunning visuals, emotionally-driven narrative, heart-pounding combat, powerful magic abilities and credible digital actors. The spirit of classic RPGs comes of age, as Dragon Age: Origins features a dark and mature story and gameplay. Epic Party-Based Combat – Dragon Age: Origins introduces an innovative, scalable combat system, as players face large-scale battles and use their party’s special abilities to destroy hoardes of enemies and massive creatures. Powerful Magic – Raining down awesome destruction on enemies is even more compelling as players apply "spell combos," a way of combining together different spells to create emergent unique effects. Players develop their characters and gain powerful special abilities (spells, talents and skills) and discover ever-increasing weapons of destruction. With its emotionally compelling story, players choose with whom they wish to forge alliances or crush under their mighty fist, redefining the world with the choices they make and how they wield their power. Players select and play a unique prelude that provides the lens through which the player sees the world and how the world sees the player. The player's choice of Origin determines who they are and where they begin the adventure, as they play through a customized story opening that profoundly impacts the course of every adventure. [BioWare] Expand
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 65 out of 68
  2. Negative: 0 out of 68
  1. 100
    With an estimated 40-60 hours for a relaxed, fairly expansive play through, and the choices of origin, class and race to ensure at the very least two to four replays, Dragon Age: Origins may well be one of the most addictive, satisfying and life-swallowing RPGs that you can play offline.
  2. 100
    Truly epic single-player RPG with a compelling story.
  3. Whatever the game may lack in visual splendor it makes up for with a deep story and pure awesome fun.
  4. If games were rated on story alone Dragon Age: Origins would sit at the top of the scale, but you simply can't ignore the gameplay issues.

See all 68 Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Negative: 12 out of 127
  1. Story: 10 Characters: 10 Graphics: 9 Setting: 10 Multiplayer: N/A Technical: 5 Audio: 10 Gameplay: 6 Re-Playability Value: 10 Fun Factor: 9 Score: 8.7/10 = A Expand
  2. peterD
    8
    this game is one of the better. the storyline is definately its best quality, managing to keep you drawn into the universe of origins at all times. You get a great feel for the Characters, and you start to learn their ways, ideal and principles quickly, andd you learn to predict what their choices would be in the situation. impressive and rarely seen if you ask me. gameplaywise, it doesnt manage to do anything specificly new, other than the tactical element. but i get the general feeling, that the difficulty curve is very deform. some things appear very easy, but some things, like random encounters, are absolutely punishing. there were a lot of thing s that were absurdly difficult, and that drew the game away from me. and, before you start pointing fingers, i did spend a lot of time in pause Expand
  3. I'm really not sure what to say for the first time , Dragon Age is more like a mixed bland boring combat game. But in the same way, the compelling story-line drags my attention completely and push me to play it. The game has lacking bad animations , they don't seem to show an emotion, they just talk and everything start progressing. While It is a very deep game in terms of story and decisions that by far that's how Bio Ware rule the RPG ( they are flawless in creating story ) I see more Dragon Age as a lacking Mass Effect ,is more like the other side of Mass Effect . But don't get me wrong Dragon Age is an interesting story teller with no problem. Expand
  4. sceptic
    3
    Incredibly poor graphics,combat,spells etc.I was expecting a better version of an Oblivion type game but instead forced myself to sit through this generic rubbish.I thought they had stopped making this type of crap years ago.It makes sacred:fallen angel look good;and it was rubbish too.Points for the awesome trailers. Expand

See all 127 User Reviews

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