Starcraft II will be released in a few short days. Hopes run high among its fan base that Blizzard can recapture the magic that vaulted the original Starcraft to the top of the RTS heap. Blizzard has an impeccable track record, and many fans have received an extended free look at the multiplayer during beta testing. How did it stack up?

Balance

Real time strategy games usually only distinguish themselves through innovation. Balance is typically a prerequisite to being a passable RTS; without balance what does it matter what unique strategic decisions you allow? Rarely, however, is balance not just a building block but a distinguishing characteristic. By rarely, I mean only in one case: Starcraft. Include Starcraft II, and that makes two cases.

RTS games are complicated enough to make - designing tech trees, animating units, creating maps, scripting single player campaigns and recording sound effects is a tall order. Considering that poorly balancing a game can render all other work meaningless, developers usually just make factions symmetrical in function and slightly different in appearance.

Not Blizzard.

The iconic 3 factions from Starcraft: the Zerg, Terran and Protoss, return for Starcraft II. By some black magic Blizzard has managed to make each faction distinct yet perfectly balanced. Many baby seals must have been sacrificed to successfully perform this feat.

These guys might look hardcore, but they are slaughtered by the truckload in-game

Gameplay

A great game is easy to learn but impossible to master. While Starcraft II is slightly more complicated than chess, it is conceptually simple. You harvest resources with workers, and use those resources to build production facilities which in turn consume resources to build an army. You use that army to (hopefully) kill your opponent before they kill you.

There are of course many complicating factors. You don’t have perfect information as you can only see what your units can see. Imagine in chess if your pieces could only see the squares immediately surrounding them. You wouldn’t know how your opponent opened or how his pieces are positioned until you got close, so you would have to make decisions with less than complete information.

A good player in Starcraft II will try to counter what their opponent is doing, so initially you want to be able to scout out their strategy while preventing them from doing the same. You also need to be able to make educated guesses about what your opponent is doing from what you are able to see. At the highest levels, nearly as much can be gained through knowledge of what your opponent isn’t doing as from what he is doing.

The Immortal is one of the most powerful Protoss units that perfectly exemplifies how units are never obsolete even in longer games: it shrugs off powerful attacks but is susceptible to weaker tier 1 units

In addition, you can trick your opponent by allowing them to scout what looks like a certain strategy, destroying their scout, then changing your strategy to what will counter how he was planning to counter you. You can go around in circles trying to outmaneuver your enemy, but like in actual warfare many battles are won or lost before they even happen.

Decisions don’t end when a battle begins, however. There are many tactical and strategic decisions to be made that influence the outcome of a fight. You can take the same 2 armies and have them face each other with different positioning and on different terrain, and the outcomes will be drastically different.

Certain units and armies thrive by being in wide open space with the ability to maneuver around their enemies. Certain units do lots of damage to a small space and funneling an enemy army through a small choke point leads to total annihilation. Air units can outmaneuver their opponents in complicated terrain. Some units can tunnel underground and surprise their enemies from below, or circumvent static defenses.

Even within large battles, certain individual units can turn the tide. Some units can convert enemy units to your side for a small period of time. Stealing a key unit can make the difference between victory and defeat. Some units are good against clusters of enemies but become weak if their enemies are spread out; controlling your army is key. Having the correct parts of your army in the front, and in the back, and sometimes even flanking or surrounding your enemy is paramount. Even if you have a bad army composition because you misjudged your opponent’s strategy, you can still win with proper troop micromanagement.

In Starcraft II you are almost never out of the fight. The further behind in a game you are, the higher risk strategies you must implement, because conventional thinking won’t get you back into a losing game. Never give up. Never surrender!

The Corruptor is basically one of those squid things from the Matrix. Unfortunately, nobody can be told what the corruptor is. They have to see it for themselves

User Friendliness

Starcraft II will be the first game to utilize the full Battle.net 2.0 interface. While many fans of the original Starcraft criticize the system for being too ‘simplistic,’ that is because they’re living in the past. Battle.net 2.0 is a streamlined and comprehensive gaming system.

Games can be set up with the push of a button, and everything is taken care of automatically behind the scenes. Ladders ensure you’re going to be facing players of comparable skill level, and the wait to get into a balanced game is frequently a couple seconds for a 1v1 game, and a couple minutes for a 4v4 game. I’m sure those times will decrease in release as there will be orders of magnitude more players compared to the beta.

In addition, there is a great replay system where you can watch and analyze old games. There are achievements and custom user portraits and decals to individualize yourself in-game. Finally, there is a friend system where you can chat both in and out of games, and eventually across Blizzard games. Battle.net 2.0 might not yet be perfect, but it’s a great start, and over time players will wonder how they lived without it.

Interesting that the protagonist in Starcraft bases his operations from a Terran Battlecruiser. In game, however, Battlecruisers are powerful but still slaughtered by the truckload. Maybe it's a special battlecruiser? Otherwise this might be a short campaign

Custom Content

The award for the game with the most longevity has to go to either Counter-Strike or the original Starcraft. While the actual game of Starcraft II has the potential to be just as long-lasting, its lifespan will be prolonged by user-generated content. Even though the game hasn’t even been released, there are already hundreds of custom game mods created for the beta.

Some of the most popular include variations on tower defense and tug of war game modes. In the popular Battlecraft: Armageddon mod, players receive money every few seconds and have to choose which units they want to spawn to run at their opponent. They can’t control these units, which merely mindlessly run at the enemy. The skill comes in using your money to choose units which counter your opponent’s units for lower cost. The number of game types that will emerge during release when millions get their hands on the editing tools mean that people will be playing Starcraft II far into the future, even if the standard game modes have long been forgotten.

Starcraft II is going to be a massive success. Blizzard has created the RTS that will long be the gold standard considering its polish, balance and refined gameplay. It will storm the sales charts and more than return the $100 million spent on its development. Video gamers around the world are about to find out what we beta testers have known for the past few months: Blizzard has created something really special that we will be playing for a long time.

What went right?

Parity among factions

Starcraft was so popular because it was the first and only RTS game to achieve parity among factions without merely mirroring them. Balance is key to an RTS, and the only way most developers have achieved this is by giving every player the same units.

This is not the case in Starcraft, with the three factions (Zerg, Protoss and Terran) being significantly different from each other. Not only are none of the units the same, but each faction fits into their own unique but fair niche.

This doesn’t just break down into standard ‘these units are stronger but more expensive’ delineations used in other RTS games. Zerg, for example, don’t even build units from construction buildings such as barracks. They evolve their units from larva, and the implementation of this is completely distinct from anything players will be familiar with from other RTS games.

The mighty Protoss mothership is the final unit on the Protoss tech tree. See it and be afraid!

While Starcraft II had a significant leg up in terms of balancing as many of the mechanics and units are the same from the previous game, which had a decade of iteration, it is still an impressive accomplishment. Many of the units are new, or have been tweaked slightly, and yet still it all works well together.

These factions are not rock paper scissors to each other. It’s not like Zerg always beats Terran but Protoss beats Zerg; each faction can succeed or fail against any other depending on the choices they make.

Battle.net

Online games are threatening to new players because it’s easy to log on while you’re still learning and just get crushed repeatedly which isn’t much fun. Fortunately, the new Battle.net system seems to solve many of these issues. You start with 5 practice matches on maps that prevent rushing from your opponent to give you time to learn the ropes.

After practice, you play 10 placement matches to determine in what league you’re going to be placed. While the players in the platinum league are probably micromanagement masters who will outmaneuver you at every turn, the copper or bronze leagues are full of new players learning the ropes, just like you.

They might make a few mistakes, or fail to expand their economy at the right time, or even choose the wrong units to counter whatever army you’re building. You are constantly shifted up or down the quality scale until you’re winning about 50% of your matches. The game remains challenging without being frustrating.

The mighty Protoss colossi storm in from the left. As zerg, these are the units of which I'm most afraid

Gameplay

This is the most important part of any game, but I have it listed lower on the list of positives for Starcraft II because you know what the gameplay is going to be like. If you have played Starcraft, then be comforted that Starcraft II plays just like it. If you haven’t played Starcraft, then just look at the monstrous sales figures.  Over 10 million players can’t be wrong.

The gameplay is smooth and refined. The graphics are fantastic. The presentation is elegant and intuitive. When films cost hundreds of millions of dollars, producers want to make sure all that money is ‘up on the screen.’ In Starcraft II, you can really tell that the years of development are there in the game. There is a huge amount of polish for a Beta.

What were they thinking?

Viewing perspective

The most recent RTS I played was Supreme Commander, a game that took pride in its massive scale and its ’strategic zoom,’ where the camera could be pulled out to see the entire map. Starcraft, on the other hand, is a very small-scale game.

The first thing I thought upon loading it up was ‘holy crap this camera is zoomed in really far.’ The lack of strategic zoom felt like a holdover from the past. The maps in Starcraft II aren’t nearly the size as those in Supreme Commander, and therefore the need for seeing the whole map isn’t as significant. Still, why not just throw it in? Is it really that difficult to implement in the engine?

If Blizzard wants to suggest that it somehow adds to the game, I would say that’s ridiculous. The minimap is an outmoded way of moving around the map, and strategic options are limited as a result.

Zerg usually depend on greater numbers to overwhelm their enemy. Zerg has become a verb among those in the know (losers)

Limited options

Customization options in Starcraft II are very limited. You can’t change hotkeys (although Blizzard has suggested in the past this is something they might implement in the final release). In addition, there are few ways to select all units when some competing RTS games have a built in ’select all air units,’ ’select all ground units,’ and ’select all army units’ hotkey.

I’m pretty confident this is an easy programming solution, and so the reasoning for not including these functions seems to be that they weren’t in Starcraft. In fact, this seems to be the rationale behind most of the outmoded decisions in Starcraft II. It’s understandable that Blizzard would hold constant much of the game; if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it and all. Why not just include the extra options? Allow people to decide how they want to control the game, don’t do it for them.

Needless work

Starcraft players are famous for taking pride in their multitasking abilities. The whole purpose of an RTS game, however, is to test your ability to outmaneuver your opponent. Putting needless difficulty barriers between the game and the player is a terrible game design choice.

Think about Street Fighter: you should win or lose a match based on the moves you pull and what you implement to counter your opponent’s strategy. You should lose because you throw a high kick and your opponent chose to block high, expecting it. If you lose because you wanted to throw a high kick but couldn’t figure it out and therefore just flopped over onto the ground to be curb stomped, then the controls have failed.

Every unit is vital in Starcraft 2; unlike most RTS games, carelessly throwing away even a handful of units can be the beginning of the end

Starcraft players have complained that workers will auto-collect minerals for you. They complain that being able to click drones quickly and tell them to collect minerals for you is part of being a good player. This is absolutely ridiculous.

Being a good player is choosing the right units to counter your opponent’s army. Being good is managing your forces in battle correctly by sending tougher units in first and not needlessly sacrificing units against their direct counter. If you have a perfect battle plan but the controls prevent you from implementing it, then the controls have failed.

Blizzard should work to automate everything they possibly can, ‘purists’ be damned.

Starcraft II is still a work in progress, and it will remain a work in progress long after the retail version is released. The original game is still going strong after more than a decade, and while Starcraft II will probably replace it in the E-Sports scene, this is not just a game for professionals.

The matchmaking allows anybody to compete and have fun, and while there are a few missteps here and there due to influences from the original, Starcraft is the king of strategy franchises for a reason. The sequel does not disappoint.

If you like role playing and conversation, you’ll love this game. If you like cover based squad shooting, you’ll love this game. If you like weird alien fish races and futuristic space prostitutes, you’ll love this game. There is so much to love about this game. Is it perfect? Not by a long shot. It has set a high early bar for game of the year honors, however, and it’s going to take a heroic effort to dethrone Mass Effect 2.

What went right?

Character personality

At its heart, Mass Effect 2 is a game about interactions. Each of Mass Effect 2’s characters has their own unique personality. This doesn’t only extend to the main crew members, but also to the random people you encounter in random space stations. Not once did somebody have a reaction to a situation that I found unrealistic or out of character.

For every mission you get to choose 2 members of your team to accompany you, and it’s interesting to try to take personalities that are diametrically opposed to each other to spice up a situation. Each character has their own responses and comments for every mission, and knowing a race’s history can be useful.

For example, the Quarians and Geth are racial enemies, so it’s fun to bring your Geth companion onto the Quarian home fleet just to change things up.

By the end of the game, Asari and Turian characters will blend right in with the humans as just another part of your crew. They're that realistic

Art style

Mass Effect 2 is a beautiful game. The environments are varied and everything is well designed. The space stations look real; they aren’t overly high tech but are appropriate (who can say, I suppose, but they look reasonable) for how far into the future they are.

Characters are unique and have tons of little details that mostly stem from various animals, and yet even the least human ones have great personality and expressive faces.

The weapons and enemies are all top notch, and the explosions and biotic power special effects are great and never get old even though you use them thousands of times throughout the game.

On more than one occasion I stopped and looked around and said ‘this is somewhere to which I’d like to travel.’ Am I really the only one who would like to go to the seedy space nightclub ‘Afterlife?’ I doubt it.

The bloodthirsty Krogan are one of the funniest races you'll encounter in Mass Effect 2, but like all Bioware characters none of the Krogan you meet will be 1-dimensional

Little touches

So many games take little shortcuts to streamline their visuals. Mass Effect 2 is not one of those games.

One of the best little touches I noticed was that frequently people will compliment your guns, or notice that you’re carrying them and treat you with caution. In most games, it is just assumed that you have guns on you. In Mass Effect 2, however, every gun you are carrying is displayed on your back in a surprisingly non-awkward or cumbersome way.

While this can become hilarious when you carry the largest weapons and turn into a walking tank, each time you select a new weapon you actually holster your current weapon and smoothly unholster whatever new weapon you selected. It’s these little details that make the world convincing.

In addition, your body language speaks volumes, and animations aren’t merely functional. Conversational interruptions are smoothly integrated into your dialogue options and well executed.

High tech doorways, computer interfaces and outfits are as realistic as fantasy products can be, and it’s these little details that combine to create a world that seems alive.

The husks are some of the most single minded and annoying characters you'll encounter. Mostly they want to punch and bite you

Choices

Mass Effect 2 is a Bioware game, and their top gameplay feature is choice. They started the trend with KotoR, and perfected it with Dragon Age: Origins. While ME2 doesn’t have quite the same level of choice allowed in Dragon Age, there is still more here than in most other games.

The main choice mechanic in Mass Effect 2 is the paragon/renegade meter, where you get paragon or renegade points depending on what conversation and action choices you make during encounters.

Which option is the friendliest or most rude isn’t always obvious, either. The dialogue system is the same used in Mass Effect where you choose the general gist of what you want to say rather than the exact words. If you’re a jerk, even if you’re doing somebody a favor, you might get a couple renegade points.

If you stop somebody from shooting their childhood friend in a moment of frustration and anger, however, you might receive a huge number of paragon points. These open up additional good or bad conversation options and action moments down the road.

By the end of the game you really feel like you’ve shaped your own path and your Shepard is the one in charge, not some generic game Shepard chosen by Bioware.

Shooting mechanics

Not many would expect a role playing game to have great shooting mechanics. Gamers forgave System Shock 2, Deus Ex and Bioshock for their terrible shooting because the rest of the game was so great. Mass Effect 2 has nothing for which to apologize.

This is a full fledged shooter, with locational damage, tactics and twitch reflexes. Enemies take far more damage from headshots, and choosing the right weapon for the job is critical.

In addition, the game adds biotic powers. As you level up and gain experience you can choose from several powers as well as adopt some of the special abilities of your team. Battlefield management is key because not only are some abilities far more useful against certain opponents and defenses, but the environment can also be used to your advantage by throwing enemies off cliff edges etc.

There are many destructable cover points as well as explosive materials littering the environment, and as ammo is sometimes are a premium (especially earlier in the game). Using every advantage is key.

In the face!

Tactical combat

The squad based combat in Mass Effect 2 is fantastic. You have limited control over your two teammates, but what influence you do have is well implemented. You can utilize their special abilities when they’re not on cooldown, and direct their movement and attacks. If you don’t tell them to do anything, they’ll intelligently react to the current battle situation.

This allows you to set them up in a forward position to lay down covering fire while you advance from cover point to point.  You can also set them to distract an enemy by moving them in front and then flank your opponent and get a free shot from behind. It never gets old.

Exploration

There are a huge number of side missions in Mass Effect 2, and as you go from galaxy to galaxy and explore the dozens of planets on offer while searching for resources, you will occasionally encounter a random mission.

These can range from chasing down mercenaries, to saving a crashing ship, to merely recovering stolen cargo from a pirate facility. They’re great little diversions from the main mission, and the universe in Mass Effect 2 feels massive as a result.

It is easy to imagine there are thousands of worlds out there that you haven’t visited, and the scale of the opposition you face is really put into perspective.

Streamlined RPG elements

Finally, Mass Effect 2 has greatly streamlined the RPG elements from Mass Effect. Inventory management is completely gone. In its place is a very simplistic inventory system where you merely switch out various armor components on your ship, and the tweaks they offer to stats are minor.

In addition, the leveling system breaks down to adding points to one of a handful of abilities to use on the battlefield. It is extremely simple.

To be honest, I only really noticed that I was getting more guns and more abilities; I’m not sure whether the enemies level with you over the course of the game but they never seemed to get easier or harder to take out as I leveled up.

Progression comes from your research system, which gives you access to greater damage and experimental weapons. It also gives your ship upgrades which help to protect your crew during some of the late stages of the game.

Overall, it is a great tradeoff as the game is really about conversation and cover based shooting; managing too many role playing elements would have been cumbersome and frustrating.

Even the alien races are extremely lifelike and expressive. The Asari (pictured) are some of the most human-like, but even the frog-like Drell never once seemed unrealistic. I would think 'they have interesting double eyelid physiology,' and not 'wow that's fake.'

What were they thinking?

Resources collection

The upgrades that you can research in this game require mineral resources to complete. Those resources are found by launching probes onto planets at mineral hotspots and extracting the material. Unfortunately, this process involves moving a criminally slow reticle over the surface of the planet and watching your measuring seismometer to find mineral spikes.

While at first I was diligent about scanning every planet in a system completely before I moved on, I soon learned that there are far more resources out there than are required for every single upgrade in the game, and I’d be better served only mining when it was required.

That being said, this was the most tiresome part of the game by far and whoever decided that this was a good mechanic needs to be fired tout de suite. This problem is slightly alleviated by any subsequent playthroughs after the first offering significant resource bonuses.

There are hacking minigames as well, both of which were a little repetitive but much preferable to the scanning system. The game would have been far more fun if you just received the upgrade when you found the schematics for it instead of having to supply the minerals as well.

Formulaic design

Mass Effect 2 feels like a game. All the rooms in which there is combat are conveniently set up with multiple cover points, and each mission concludes with a summary screen of your accomplishments. While I’m not as big on ‘immersion’ as many gamers, I still think it’s strange that Bioware created such a compelling world and then introduced elements that take you out of it.

In addition, the solution to problems are almost always fairly intuitive if you’ve played a role playing game in the past. The missions are never straightforward, there’s always a twist, but that becomes the norm after a while and therefore expected.

Each one of your crew members has a loyalty mission which delves into their backstory. By the fourth or fifth one, it’s pretty clear that the outcome of the mission will be directly opposed to their preconceived notions going in. It becomes a little predictable.

There is always a right answer

In Mass Effect 2, you have to make a number of choices, but if you’ve been good enough at being consistent with your Paragon or Renegade points, there is always an optimal outcome. There were no choices in the game where I was forced to choose between crew members.

There were no choices in the game like in Mass Effect 1 where you had to choose which crew member was going to sacrifice themselves for the good of the mission. There was always a way out.

While this would be forgivable if this game was released last year, as it would still have allowed the most choice in any game to date, Mass Effect 2 has the misfortune of coming out after Dragon Age.

In Dragon Age there were truly some horrible decisions to be made that tested your resolve. Mass Effect 2 in comparison comes off as having kid gloves and coddling the player, and as a result not being as realistic. It maintains the theme throughout that sacrifices must be made for the good of humanity, but never quite delivers on that promise.

Mass Effect 2 is not a perfect game, and as you can see above there are a couple of shortcomings. That being said, it’s damn close and one of the most fun game experiences I’ve had in a while.

I can’t wait to jump back in and see what happens if I choose all the renegade conversation options. I want to choose different romances, and even take a different crew member (where I can). What if I play through as a female Shepard; how will everybody react to me? Will there be a significant difference? I’m not sure, but I sure as hell want to find out.

I want to explore all the biotic powers. I want to take different crew members on different missions, and even find out what happens if I cut corners on crew upgrades going into the final mission. There are so many possibilities, and only in a game like Mass Effect 2 can they be brought to life.

Unfortunately, I’ll also have to mine more minerals if I play through again. Sigh …

I have long considered Baldur’s Gate 2: Shadows of Amn to be the finest offline RPG. Bioware seamlessly streamlined the unwieldy Dungeons & Dragons rule set into a beginner friendly game system and layered a still impressive and non-linear story over the top. The scope of the game was unlike anything experienced up to that point, and it has long been the barometer against which all CRPGs are judged.

It is surprising then that I can claim without hesitation that Dragon Age: Origins is better in nearly every respect. The only checkbox in the Shadows of Amn column is that it had Minsc (which was nearly enough for it to keep its title of greatest ever according to my ‘Minsc is God’ adage).

There are a surprisingly small number of dragons considering it's their age. It should have been the Hurlock or Giant Spider Age

What went right?

Combat: Combat in Baldur’s Gate had so many problems. It was stilted, it was uninvolved and sometimes I had to depend on glitch solutions to tough fights instead of strategy. While not everything has been fixed, combat in Dragon Age has adopted many combat mechanics from MMORPGs and it is a big step forward.

First and most important is the aggro mechanic long used in MMOs incorporated in Dragon Age. Functionally this means that enemies will attack the player they deem to be the greatest threat (usually the one doing the most damage to them). Warriors have talents to gain the attention of enemies, and therefore battles take on a more traditional tank / healer / DPS dynamic vs. the free for all battles from Baldur’s Gate. I hardly ever felt like battles were spiraling out of my control, and effective use of crowd control abilities can transform a seemingly unwinnable battle into a manageable affair.

In addition, abilities are no longer limited by resting; they’re limited by a mana/stamina system and cooldowns. In Baldur’s Gate, there was no incentive to do anything but use abilities as fast as possible. In Dragon Age, especially in larger fights, there is a big tradeoff between resource management, cooldown management and threat management.

Furthermore, while many of the boss battles are reminiscent of MMO raid bosses in their infancy, heavy on ‘tank and spank’ fight types, there are a few that are more detailed and become pattern management more than fighting a big life bar. Finally, there are few ‘game changing’ abilities like Greater Whirlwind or Dragon’s Breath from Baldur’s Gate that are simply superior to everything else and my active ability repertoire was quite extensive by the end of the game.

Comrades: A significant improvement in Dragon Age is the party system. No longer are you forced to choose between interesting companions. You now take them all with you in a Final Fantasy esque manner, and can substitute them in and out as you choose. Most importantly, they receive the full experience that you’re gaining even when they’re not in your party, so even if you don’t use them for a while they’re never underpowered.

More significantly, each has their own distinct personality and their spontaneous interactions with your other companions are hilarious and fascinating. While in Baldur’s Gate you could annoy your party members to the point of leaving you, it was almost impossible to do unintentionally. In Dragon Age, on the other hand, there is incentive to create a harmonious party as companions gain abilities the more they like you.

Finally, there is significance to your decisions both for party members and in general that isn’t seen in most games. You can get in disagreements with your companions to the point that you fight and kill them. If you do so, they’re gone forever. You can disagree with them on a decision so important that they leave you, forever. In addition, no matter how much you think you’re not going to be interested in a character, give them a chance and they will grow on you.

The blood in the game can be a bit over the top. Bioware should have done more market research by murdering some hobos

Choices: I have long claimed that realistic moral choices in games were a pipe dream.  I was way off base. There are many decisions in Dragon Age, but no ‘right’ decisions. Even games like Bioshock that claim there is a fair tradeoff between the good and bad choices, the game betrays that promise in the end when one path is revealed as superior.

In Dragon Age, on the other hand, there are over a dozen significant gameplay decisions where I still don’t know whether I did the right thing. I don’t even think there was a right thing, there are only different things. While the broad strokes of the game would be the same on a second playthrough, choosing a different origins story and different solutions to game problems would create a significantly different experience.

Story: Don’t listen to critics saying ‘the story is cliché and repetitive, it’s just a Lord of the Rings spinoff!’ Have these critics ever played a Middle Ages era fantasy RPG? That’s like saying ‘Battlestar Galactica is just a cheap Star Trek rip-off because they both take place in space, in the future, with aliens!’ While I would struggle to find flaws in your argument if you want to make it, I believe that interesting stories are in the details and not solely in the setting.

It is in the details where Dragon Age excels. The origins mechanic where you start the game in one of six potential scenarios all feel completely different, but as you progress through the game you realize they’re fully consistent with the game world. You will encounter each race and player type and realize how your experiences coming to terms with the game world correctly set your expectations for how NPCs will react down the line.

The only thing the Ogre can't understand ... is love

Open-ended: I’m not going to pretend that Dragon Age is non-linear. It has a very traditional area system where each area has an overarching quest but you can tackle the areas in the order of your choosing.

That being said, there are huge dungeons to explore, and significant chunks of them are not necessary to progress. While you’re going to run into enough of the optional segments just wandering around looking for the next area, there are also times when you find the exit door and choose to backtrack to that fork in the road and see what you missed. Frequently it’s more than just trash monsters and there’s a minor quest or named enemy you almost skipped.

Customization: While Dragon Age doesn’t have more customization than the Baldur’s Gate games, and certainly no more than most MMOs, the loss of the D&D license was for Bioware a blessing in disguise. While there were many aspects of the D&D ruleset that were impenetrable unless you cracked out the rulebook, everything in Dragon Age is clear and progressive.

You choose an overarching skill area such as damage spells or control spells as a mage, or tanking vs. DPS as a warrior, and then there is a clear connection from weaker abilities in a 4 ability tree to stronger abilities. At no point do you encounter non-sequitur skills. If you take the weaker frost spell skills, it unlocks the stronger frost skills. Given Bioware games’ inability to respec, knowing what you’re getting into is a welcome development.

Presentation: If a character is more than throwaway place filler, and they have dialogue trees, their lines are fully voiced. While your character is silent, the voice acting for the NPCs is fantastic. A few of the conversations are cliché, but for the most part the emotion really comes through and adds to the experience.

The dwarves, surprisingly enough, live underground and are miners and blacksmiths, a substantial departure from prevous dwarven lore

What were they thinking?

Imbalanced: Some of the combat mechanics in Dragon Age are imbalanced to say the least. While a well rounded group is necessary, all that really means is you’re going to need a mage, the big hitter of the party. Combat assignments usually went something along the lines of ‘warrior 1, you take that guy, warrior 2, you take that guy, healer … heal, and mage, you handle those 18 guys over there.’

Some spells, such as cone of cold, are so overpowered you wonder if Bioware even tested them. It ‘freezes’ enemies in its radius, completely incapacitating them with a near 100% success rate. Any enemy can be frozen up to and including the final boss. The effect lasts for 5-6 seconds, and the cooldown on the spell is barely longer than that, so as long as mana remains you can keep a boss permanently frozen. Obviously this makes fights far easier.

In addition, area of effect spells are so powerful that I could frequently kill 10 or 12 enemies in a pack before they even reached me using a combination of damage over time and knockdown effects. I imagine the developers thought friendly fire on mage spells would prevent their abuse, but I rarely found it to be a problem.

Mage vs. melee ... in Dragon Age this fight is no contest

Copout: In a game all about choices and living with the consequences of your decisions, it is frustrating that Bioware chose to implement a gift system with your companions. Small decisions increasingly annoy some party members, decreasing their affinity towards you. To counteract this, you can give them huge numbers of trivial gifts to move them back into the friendly category.

While there are some story-related gifts that make sense in context, I question how many throwaway trinkets a companion really wants before they stop caring. Also, why would a character that hates me want to accept a gift from me in the first place? The system is only slightly redeemed by different gifts being more appropriate and having a greater effect on certain characters compared to others, adding a marginal layer of realism and complexity.

Difficulty curve: It’s likely that Bioware didn’t play through this game too many times, because the difficulty is greatly skewed from beginning to end. In the early parts of the game, I found myself struggling with most of the fights and a few of my characters would die each time even on the ‘normal’ settings. Later in the game, however, I would power through all but boss fights as I had become an unstoppable juggernaut. There was a real difference between fights before and after you have a well equipped healer and tank in your party.

In addition, while the mechanic where your dead (unconscious) party members resurrect automatically at the end of the fight was a great one, the regeneration rate of your health, mana and stamina between fights is frustratingly slow. I didn’t want to progress until at full strength, so most of the time I would just sit around. It’s not like there’s the risk that enemies will stumble upon you when you’re still weak, there were no mobile foes. Sometimes I would make a sandwich while waiting the 60-90 seconds for my bars to fully refill.

Finally, potions make the fights trivial as long as you have enough of them. In most MMORPGs, the cooldowns are such that they become emergency use only items. In Dragon Age, on the other hand, they can fill in for a healer entirely as you commonly pick up potions from trash mobs potent enough to refill your entire health bar.

This was, at least for me, by far the hardest battle in the game. And it is also extremely early on. I had to use the 'run in circles like a baby' technique

Crafting: Dragon Age has an extensive crafting system, with recipes and reagents required to create what turn out to be very helpful items. Unfortunately, the requirements are far too high and reagents far too difficult to find. I focused in herbalism to create potions for my characters, but ended up never making anything. While I could find potions off monsters left and right for free, creating just one comparable item required four reagents and an expensive recipe. It just wasn’t worth it.

Rushed ending: It’s clear that despite the delay in the game’s release date, Bioware was rushed to get the game out the door. The first 80% of the game feels well paced and epic. Once you begin the final sequence, however, it feels like everything happens too quickly and some of that ‘grand final encounter’ feeling is lost.

Tactics system: The tactics system for your party is helpful in theory, allowing you to set up situation contingent actions for your party members to minimize micromanagement. In practice, I still told them what to do most of the time. Unfortunately, once you’ve given a single command such as ‘attack this enemy,’ they won’t do anything else until that enemy is dead. There should be a ‘return to scripted action’ button, or something along those lines. I would frequently forget my healer wasn’t automatically healing until after it was too late.

Quest confusion: The quest system could have been significantly streamlined. You pick up multiple quests along the way, but the journal merely records actions you’ve taken instead of clearly delineating what needs to be done. It’s easy to forget what the mage guild is asking you to do, and it’s frustrating to re-read a multi-paragraph summary instead of scanning a bullet point that says ‘kill this man.’

Dragon Age is an epic game. I didn’t go out of my way to finish every quest, and there were four or five non-trivial ones that I passed over. Even so, the game took me over 40 hours to complete. This isn’t a measure of the Final Fantasy ‘grind for 20 hours in the same place with random encounters’ filler length, either. While there are extensive dungeon crawls, there are no random enemies and all actions contribute to progression.

The dialogue is the most involved of any RPG to date, and the satisfaction gained from conquering some of the later multi stage scripted boss fights is incredible. I felt a connection with my character by the end of the game, and would love to see where his adventures next take him.

Hopefully that is wherever Minsc is. That is potentially the only addition to this game that would make it even more epic. Hamsters and rangers everywhere, rejoice!

I’m a sucker for loot. The item hunt in Borderlands was like an addictive drug to me; I tried to inject the guns directly into my veins. I can’t fully discuss the details as my lawsuit with Heckler & Koch is still pending.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Torchlight holds the same appeal. I can say across the board that the things I expected would be fun in Torchlight, are, and it so closely lived up to my expectations that I’m going to approach this review slightly differently.

You know what’s good about Torchlight. It’s an extremely addictive game with a great art style, effective character customization and relentless pacing. Runic Games have taken Diablo 2 and streamlined the gameplay. At $20 it’s the best deal since The Orange Box. To reiterate: Torchlight = incredible.

In this review, however, I’m instead going to discuss what went wrong in Torchlight (hint: not much).

What were they thinking?

What am I doing here: Torchlight is a budget game, and I wouldn’t expect it to come with a full manual and tutorial. That being said, while there are helpful tooltips for how to play, there are many things in game that are not well explained. What exactly does the transmutation vendor in town do? How does each statistic factor into my character’s abilities? While there’s always a helpful online amateur community to lend guidance, saying the transmutation vendor can ‘combine items’ doesn’t help when 90% of the things I try do nothing.

This was possibly most frustrating when I found a ridiculously good weapon and went to the enchanting vendor in town to improve it. I knew from experience that sometimes he failed to enchant and still charged you money: a risk I was willing to take. Unfortunately, I was not aware that there was also a small chance that he would remove all enchants, both those added by me and the ones that were preexisting on the weapon, rendering it useless. Now I’m the proud owner of a ‘sword of much sobbing and shattered dreams.’ How about a heads up, Runic?

Ooh fireworks: The art style in Torchlight skews toward a simplified and colorful look. To add some flair, each spell has striking particle effects which are quite impressive especially given the modest technical requirements of the game. Unfortunately, sometimes so much can be happening onscreen that I lose track of my character (even more remarkable considering he’s always in the exact center of the monitor). While this mostly happened when I was playing as an Alchemist Summoner and therefore had about 10 minions cluttering up the screen, it sometimes relegated me to watching my health bar and hoping nothing was hitting me.

Ok, maybe in this case I can tell where my guy is as he's at the center of the blood explosion. Just wait until later in the game, however ...

Control, you must learn control: Torchlight wants to keep things simple, and for the most part it succeeds. Unfortunately, there are a few hiccups. First is the lack of key binding modifications. While the mouse / 1-5 number keys and tab works fairly well for a couple abilities, once you get into using the 6-9 keys and beyond, things spiral out of control and some worthwhile skills go unused. Even a few control choices such as number pad or the ‘WASD’ keys would have been preferable to a single payer system.

In addition, mouse commands can be fiddly. If attacking from range, clicking and missing an enemy will cause you to run right up into its face which is generally undesired. Holding shift keeps you stationary, but then sometimes you fire your weapons towards an enemy without realizing you’re just out of range and not actually doing any damage. If you’re melee, on the other hand, sometimes it’s tough to click a moving enemy and instead you walk around him in an awkward dance (either of death, or of seduction, depending on your character’s talent specialization). While this had potential for an amusing minigame, it can be frustrating when you’re trying to bludgeon faces.

It’s hard to envision a scenario where you don’t want to attack an enemy, so an expansion of the hit boxes might have solved a few of these issues.

Care to Tango?

Click click click: This game is about loot, and there is a ton of it on the ground. While Runic made an inspired design decision by allowing your pet to return to town to sell off useless items while you continue playing, they didn’t streamline loot collection at all. I end up clicking maniacally at all items on screen and I can’t think of a single time where I chose not to pick something up when I had inventory room. Everything sells for a little bit, so a ‘pick up everything on screen’ button would be more than welcome.

As it currently stands, I fear my relentless clicking has become a break-up-able offense in the eyes of my fiancée. Maybe Runic games can do a deal with Logitech to bundle in a silent mouse.

At least put a shirt on, man. Don't you know there are monsters down here?

Don’t misconstrue my comments: Torchlight is an excellent game. You must experience for yourself how truly different the three characters feel depending on how you allocate your skill points. The three Alchemist trees (summoner, glass cannon and magic melee damage dealer) play like three different classes on their own, without overlapping more than marginally with the play styles of the Vanquisher and Destroyer. The excitement at picking up a unique orange item and identifying it, hoping you have hit the item jackpot is unparalleled. Finally, the game is fast paced and addictive enough that you can jump in and out for short bursts of playtime that suit your schedule.

If none of the things here sound too terrible, and the lack of online functionality isn’t a deal breaker for you, then you need to give Torchlight a shot. Just be careful with that bastard enchanter. Sometimes you need to know when to hold them and when to fold them.

Imagine waking up on Christmas morning. It’s early and nobody’s awake, so you sneak down to check out the tree. Lo and behold, presents everywhere! Now, imagine that those presents are Skags, viciously snapping at your heels. Instead of Christmas morning, it’s the future and you’re in a post apocalyptic wasteland, and there are guns, and bandits … you know what, this metaphor is terrible. Long story short: Borderlands is an incredible and addicting game.

Borderlands seamlessly merges first person shooting with role playing mechanics into a package that is the best and most addictive game I’ve played in some time. The ‘just one more gun’ mechanics will draw you into the game and the solid shooting and co-op tomfoolery will keep you there for a good long while.

If you like shooters, you must play Borderlands. If you like RPGs, you must play Borderlands. If you only play Spider Solitaire between phone calls, you must play Borderlands. [For all ‘X’, ‘X must play Borderlands.’]

What went right?

Progression: Most reviews are going to focus on the guns of Borderlands, or the graphical style, or the shooting mechanics; don’t worry, I’ll get to those. The real jewel in the crown of Borderlands, however, is the sense of progression. RPGs have always had character development, but previous ‘role playing shooters,’ such as System Shock 2 or Bioshock, did not include significant increases in power. Sure, you add plasmids and gain additional health, but the splicer that could kill you at the beginning of the game could still kill you at the end (if you’re grossly incompetent).

In Borderlands there are no such worries about lowly starting level Skags. Occasionally for sport I’d shoot one for 100x their health, but usually I let them nip at my heels as I ignore them. Go find a low level player, foolish Skag! You continuously pass through low level areas during the game while returning to towns, and it really gives you perspective on how far you’ve come. In most shooters, weapons remain the same with the same old damage even at the end. In Borderlands, however, you inherently grow in power outside of equipment and there’s nothing more satisfying than encountering a frustrating enemy from a few levels back and one-shotting them in their stupid face.

Second Wind: Another great mechanic in Borderlands is the ‘second wind’ effect: once you die, you have a short period of time to kill an enemy in order to resurrect yourself with low health but a full shield. While it can be frustrating to die with nobody around, or while fighting a boss who has far too much health to kill before you bleed out, but there are an equal number of moments where you are brought down by an enemy with a sliver of health remaining and you catch him in the back as he retreats towards cover, saving you time and money. I had one fight with six separate second winds, and the frenetic rhythm of some of the battles with repeated deaths and resurrections is exhilarating.

Skags: the only natural enemy of the Borderlands player

Guns: Here we finally are – the guns! Don’t worry, they do not disappoint. The variety of guns is perhaps not quite as great as the developers make out given they mostly share a dozen or so stats and weapon models, but the combinations create nearly infinite variations. The functional difference between the guns is primarily due to what class you choose, be it pistol, shotgun or sniper rifle etc. as well as which elemental damage and other statistics you go for. Most of the excitement isn’t so much associated with the guns themselves, but for the childlike glee that comes from opening a weapon chest and hoping to find a purple (epic) or orange (legendary) weapon. Sure, it’s mostly vendor trash, but once in a while …

Customization: The game makes quite a big deal of its ’87 bazillion guns,’ but the gun you choose is but a small part of your character’s identity. The skill trees for each player are varied and the choices you make really do adjust the strengths and weaknesses of each character. There are class modifications and grenade modifications that can adjust magazine size, weapon damage type, whether your grenades damage enemies or heal you etc.

Style: Yeah yeah, you all know about the graphical style, but the world of Borderlands is more than just guns, and most of the characters are zany and completely over the top. Boss freeze-frame introductions and enemy comments are some of the little touches that transform otherwise faceless foes into memorable encounters.

My name's Brick. I like easy listening music, bowling and PUNCHING PEOPLE IN THEIR FACES RAAAAAAAAARGH!

What were they thinking?

Slowdown: There is some unforgivable frame rate loss on consoles when the action on screen becomes hectic. This is mostly when you shoot a squid-like insect worm in his fat face and the bloodsplosion and particle effects along with a giant ‘CRITICAL’ word flash up on screen, dropping playability to zero. While it is sometimes amusing to get a still image confirmation of the no-doubt horrendous damage you just inflicted on some poor innocent squid-worm, it would be nice if everything was tuned to the hardware’s limitations.

Repetitiveness: I understand that it’s tough to introduce more variability than ’87 bazillion guns,’ but every town pretty much looks the same, every human enemy until the very end of the game looks the same, and I can practically count the number of separate ‘enemy types’ there are with one hand. Was it too much to ask for different map tilesets, or a couple enemies that weren’t just Skags with poison/fire etc.? I am grasping at straws here somewhat, but what do you want from me? The game is amazing and this is the negative section of the review.

IN THE FACE!

Disorientation: Modern games have come up with a useful invention: guidelines on where to go. While there is a diamond on your compass that shows you the general direction, sometimes that leads you to the opposite side of an impassable wall from your objective, and you have to circle around the entire map. I found myself opening the interface constantly to make sure I was going in the right direction and either an onscreen minimap or a Dead Space-esque quest line would have been immensely appreciated.

Borderlands is not without weaknesses. The slowdown likely can’t be fixed given console hardware limitations. The co-op mode really needs a trading interface, and having to look at the ground to pick anything up is fiddly. These are trivial in comparison with the ridiculously addictive gameplay mechanics on offer in Borderlands. I wanted to exclude the negatives section from this review, but I haven’t yet received my duffel bag of cash from Gearbox yet (seriously Gearbox, what’s the holdup?).

If you have an especially addictive personality, you might actually want to stay away from Borderlands. Or at least get a few weeks of snacks ready before you start so you don’t starve to death. I suppose being addicted to a videogame is a little better for your health in the long run than being addicted to most other things.

Don’t miss this instant classic. Now excuse me, I’m off to settle an old score with Skagzilla.