Before the expansion starts, you can choose whether you want to import your old hero or create a new one from Orlais – if so, the game assumes that there was no Gray Warden left in the country f Ferelden. Creating a new character is probably not an option for most players, but in case you didn’t build a great one in Origins it could be an alternative worth considering. Otherwise – just like in Mass Effect 2 – all of your decisions and relationships from the first part will carry over, as well as your equipment.

As the new leader of the Gray Wardens, your new responsibilities include settling disputes; decide how resources should be allocated, and judge in criminal proceedings among other things. There is no way to make everyone happy, but you can still choose between playing the villain or the hero in lots of situations.

New Features and Characters

The expansion has a lot in common with the original story. You get several new quests right away, one of which is the main quest, but you can choose in what order you want to do them and skip some if you want to. You have a sizeable to-do list in Awakening, and some of the side quests are pretty short and to the point, which ups the overall tempo of the game.

As this is a real expansion, it means new abilities (including an extra specialization slot) and a new colorful cast of characters, although some of your old friends will also show up of course. It looks like BioWare has put some extra effort into the visuals – all of the basic mechanics of the game engine are still there, but the environments and items have been given extra details.

Unless you had already reached higher, you start at level 18. There’s a host of new abilities once you reach level 20 and above, which adds a lot of new options for character customization. However, since your characters are now so strong, the game feels somewhat easier than the first part of Dragon Age: Origins. It’s not as likely that you get your butt kicked by surprise. New passive abilities enhance your health or mana, and new potions let warriors and thieves increase their stamina even further.

Summary

Dragon Age: Origins Awakening is a worthy expansion for one of the best RPG experiences right now, and it’s definitely worth the money. It adds a major new campaign that further develops the game world and expands and improves on an already brilliant RPG. Considering all the cheap downloadable content that is so popular these days, it’s worth pointing out that this is an old-school expansion, which genuinely adds another dimension to the game and at least two dozen hours of new gaming.

*********~ (9/10)

Download from Direct2Drive or check prices on Amazon.

The game is set in the Mining town of Torchlight (hence the name of the game). Ember, the ore that runs through the veins of the mine, is what keeps the town running. Ember has magical properties that are good for magic and alchemy alike. While mining the miners mistakenly broke through and let out an old evil that was buried within. Now this Evil is causing chaos in the mines and with the Ember itself.

Classic Hack ‘n Slash with a Twist

Your character trudges through the mines ridding it of the evil that inhabits it, with your trusty pet. Yes, that’s right, your trusty pet: you get the choice of either a cat or a dog. Your companion pet helps you kill off all that nasty stuff and will even carry stuff for you. If his backpack should get full just send him back to the town on his own and he can sell it for you. He will find his way back to you even if you’re on the 10th level of the mines. But he can also be taught and trained just like a regular pet, except the difference here is that this pet can be taught spells. During your trek through the mines you will be loading your back pack and your pet’s down with loads of loot.

Getting bored is not easy to do with this game. There are plenty of quests to do from the main story line, right down to the side quests that the townspeople will give you to do. Plus there are plenty of Boss level fights to go through, and you get a nice reward when you finish them. While fighting the bevy of monsters that surround you, your character will be advancing in levels. Each time that you advance in level your character will gain attribute and skill points for you to allocate. You will also gain fame through boss fights and quests.

Don’t forget to go fishing! Yes there is fishing in the game when you get tired and who would with everything to do, find a fishing hole, to sit down at and do some fishing then feed them to your pet and watch them turn into something interesting.

What about System requirements you ask? Don’t worry the system requirements are simple they say it can even be played on a netbook – it even has an included “netbook mode” checkbox. You need at least Windows XP or later, an 800MHz processor, 512MB of RAM, 400MB of HD space, DirectX compatible Graphics card with at least 64MB of addressable memory (for example ATI Radeon 7200, NVIDIA GeForce 2, or Intel GMA 950).

The game is a 402 MB download available at the Torchlight website or from Runic games itself. There is a demo or try before you by version available for download from those sites as well. The music and 3D graphics add to the wonderful world that is Torchlight so, take a run through the mining town of Torchlight today and immerse yourself in another world.

*******~~~ (7/10)

But then again they should have full confidence in their abilities to create excellent games. Both the Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic have been smash hits and bring back fond memories in any RPG fan that has played them. Dragon Age: Origins has been five years in the making, and the expectations have been appropriately high. There’s no doubt that Dragon Age met or surpassed those expectations. It’s a highly polished, classical epic fantasy RPG with an intricate world on par with (or even better than) Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls series.

Sharing tales by the campfire

Basically, Dragon Age is a back-to-roots, traditional RPG. After the prologue you get more or less open access to the whole game world. Your task is to unite the different factions of Ferelden against a common enemy – you’ll need to get support from dwarfs, elfs and mages and prevent a civil war from breaking out among the humans. The common enemy is an army of creatures from the underworld known as Darkspawn who are ruled by an arch demon that you’ll eventually have to put an end to.

Background, Classes and Cast of Characters

Depending on your class and race you start in different locations and get different openings. Warriors and rouges start in the Cousland family castle in Highever; as the youngest family member you are assigned with the less-than-exciting prospect of protecting the castle while your brother and dad head out to war. Naturally, things don’t turn out quite as expected and before you know it you are enrolled into a mysterious group known as the Gray Wardens. Soon enough you’ll be out hacking ugly trolls to pieces.

DIE you ugly bastard, DIE!

Starting as a Cousland noble is of course only one of six different backgrounds – all of which are worth trying out even if you don’t plan on playing the entire game with each of the classes. Throughout the whole game there are different choices and multiple dialog paths, making each playthrough a unique experience.

Choosing the Mage class gives you a different starting point

Just like in the old classic Baldur’s Gate, you don’t create a full adventuring party – instead you meet potential party members that are all tied to the story line. Each of the characters has a unique personality and all of them will not agree with the choices you make. If they feel sufficiently let down they may leave your party permanently. On the flip side, if their approval rating is high enough they will receive stat bonuses and in some cases unlock romance options.

Party Selection Screen

All of these well-chiseled characters add tremendously to the overall experience – you will sometimes feel it appropriate to forego otherwise beneficial choices just to gain more trust with a certain character. The fickle witch Morrigan, for example, will not approve if you are too timid or agreeable. The bard Leliana on the other hand, won’t like it if you’re too brutish. Therefore it’s also important to select the right party members depending on how you want to play the game.

Gameplay

Just like nearly all other BioWare RPGs the game is real-time with an option to pause the game to assign tasks and spells, which gives it kind of a turn-based component. In the normal and difficult settings, it is absolutely necessary to pause the game occasionally to consider your strategy.

Each character also has a number of “tactics slots” that you can assign for specific situations – if their health drops beneath a pre-defined level you can set them to knock back a potion; optionally, if one of the characters is surrounded you can have him use a protective spell or have another come to his aid. These are just examples of course, and you’re allowed to be very specific with these contingency plans.

Yes, there are dragons in the game. Prepare well before taking them on.

Fights are very well balanced and the system works flawlessly. However, Dragon Age is a quite difficult game and even the best laid plans can go wrong. Thankfully the game auto-saves right before any particularly tricky situation, so there’s rarely a need to replay an entire dungeon.

Graphics and Sound

Without being groundbreaking in any way, Dragon Age looks great and runs fairly well even on older computers. The environments are very detailed – especially cities and other key areas, but the dungeons are not your average, randomly generated mazes either. If you are able to turn the details knob up a little, you will see that the textures for armor and weapons are intricately detailed.

Fun with nude patches

There’s plenty of mature content in Dragon Age and lots of gore. With the “persistent gore” option your characters will basically be covered in blood from start to finish.

The voice acting is well above average, and for a game this size you can only imagine the amount of work that BioWare have had to put into it. Unlike Mass Effect, however, the main character remains nearly silent throughout Dragon Age aside from a few battle cries and other Baldur’s Gate-like one-liners. The soundtrack is well balanced and improves the atmosphere whether you’re in camp or in the middle of an epic battle.

Conclusion

With very few exceptions, Dragon Age: Origins meets all of the high expectations on it and is almost the perfect fantasy RPG. There is plenty to do in the game besides the huge main quest, and counting the DLC available now as well as future expansions the game will literally last for hundreds of hours. Dragon Age may well be BioWare’s best RPG since the Baldur’s Gate series, and that says a lot. DA: Origins is also available for Direct Download at Direct2Drive.

Plot

Mass Effect 2 continues where the first part left off – but where did it leave off? You made some game-changing choices in the first chapter, so tying all those loose ends together must have been extremely problematic for the developers.  Without spoiling the surprises, they did an amazing job – the sequel is better in almost every way.

After a playable intro, the game starts with an organization called Cerberus trying to locate the missing Shepard. Cerberus motive is to protect human colonies that are under attack by a biomechanical race known as the Reapers, and to do this they need Shepard, who is the only one in the galaxy with knowledge on how to defeat the Reapers.

BioWare has gone to great lengths to make sure that the choices you made in the original Mass Effect are acknowledged in Mass Effect 2.  Familiar characters you run into will often remember what happened in the first game. Of course, if you want to start with a brand new character that’s possible too by “reconstructing” Shepard as you want to remember him. Transferring your original character gives you some benefits, but nothing that makes or breaks the game. An important note is that the romance options will carry over.

Tweaked Gameplay

The gameplay in Mass Effect 2 looks highly similar to its predecessor, but BioWare has improved on some key aspects to make the whole thing smoother. The overall movements have been polished significantly – in duck-and-cover situations for example, your characters will behave more intelligently and not run willingly into the line of fire, which occasionally happened in the first game. As usual, you will also be able to pause the game mid-action to assign actions. Different enemies may require a vastly different approach in terms of skill use, ammo and tactics.

Tweaking you characters’ stats and managing the inventory is simplified, but there’s still room for some fine-tuning. The Paragon/Renegade meter is still around, and the intimidate/charm skills are now relative to your alignment instead of utilized as separate skills – in other words you don’t need to spend valuable skill points on them. Both the weapons and managing the weapons have been improved for Mass Effect 2 – especially the smaller weapon types like pistols and sniper rifles. There are no “full-body” armor types; rather you can mix the different parts however you want.

ME2 retains the conversation wheel with different responses, but there’s an added twist: you can sometimes interrupt a conversation mid-sentence and start firing (or some other, less fun action). What choices you have here depends on you Paragon/Renegade status.

Visuals

Although it’s the same game engine, the graphics have also been improved in the new game. There are more details allover and the characters look (even) more realistic, and are able to express emotions more convincingly with new facial animations. The game still has some quirks here and there, but there are no overly disturbing bugs – most or all of them are likely corrected with an upcoming patch.

To summarize, BioWare has listened to the community and improved on a game that was already excellent. Mass Effect 2 isn’t perfect, but it is better than the first game in the series and it’s an absolute must for any sci-fi RPG fan.

The plot is hardly unique – you start as an anonymous adventurer and eventually discover that some prophesy or other is about to fulfill, and unsurprisingly you are neck-deep in these strange on-goings before you know it. Don’t get me wrong, the story is likable enough, but it’s hardly on par with classics like Baldur’s Gate and Planescape: Torment. But then again few games are.

Drakensang Character Creation

Drakensang is based on a German pen-and-paper RPG of some renown (apparently) , and it’s immediately obvious that the game is built on a fairly intricate rule set, although a very different one than the more familiar D&D rules. There are lots of character classes, sub-classes and races – all with their respective pros and cons. There are twenty classes in all, and among the more traditional ones (elves, humans, dwarves in different shapes and sizes) the game also lets you play as a pirate or the aforementioned Amazon.

If you have some experience with this type of game, you’ll recognize most of the different stats and attributes, but there are also a few new ones. In addition to the constitution, strength and agility modifiers, say hello to stats like courage and intuition. Then there’s all manner of different resistances to various types of magic and energies. Let’s just say that it’s a little bit more complex than the average RPG – personally I had a few head-scratching moments before I got the hang of it. Then again I’m one of those folks who are too inanely stubborn to just look in the manual.

Setting out to Explore the Battle Mechanics

Drakensang starts out slowly with a few exploration-type quests that lets you get to know the camera and inventory system. After a while you hook up with other characters and form a party, after which you’ll finally get to kill something – or at least try to. Just like Neverwinter Nights the game plays out in “real time” but has a pause button that you better locate and learn to use right away.

The semi-tactical fights also takes some getting used to – at least for 99% of all non-German players who are most likely not familiar with the rules. For one thing, your to-hit rolls should be as low as possible instead of the other way around. Also, other than just losing hit points, your characters occasionally get “wounded” when hit. Getting more than four of these wounds will leave your character incapacitated even if it still has more hit points than Demogorgon the Prince of Demons.

The Bottom Line

Download now from Direct2Drive

It’s safe to say that Drakensang: The Dark Eye is more challenging than the average RPG. On the other hand I’m tired of the dime-a-dozen action RPGs that have been pushed out lately, so some added tactical depth and difficulty only makes the game more rewarding once you get the hang of the mechanics. On the downside the story feels a bit generic and shallow, and so does much of the dialog and the lack of interaction between the player character. In the end, however, the good parts of Drakensang win out; there’s plenty of stats to play around with, a great-looking game world, and some classic fantasy environments that will neither surprise or disappoint.

Create Unique Heroes with the Champions Online Character Planner

The character creation aspects of Champions Online is what will supposedly separate it from other games in the genre – aside from the fact that it’s a world free from trolls and elves and instead based on superheroes. You can tweak every detail of your hero – if you want the power to smite your opponents with a hideous armpit-stench you got it (or something like that).



This is undoubtedly one of the game’s biggest strengths and actually makes it unique in the genre. In what other MMORPG does no two characters look the same? In Champions Online they don’t. It’s also fun to spend a couple of hours with the character creation kit just because it’s rewarding to know that your hero really is one of a kind.

Cover Lots More Ground

There are more than 900 missions in the game, and although many of them involve someone with an exclamation mark hovering over their head, there are also some novel ways of receiving quests, such as finding certain objects or being approached by someone in the street.

Compared to City of Heroes and City of Villains, the game world in this game is much larger. Other than Millennium City, you also get to visit deserts and tundras, plus Monster Island and the underwater world of Lamuria. Each of these areas are divided into subsections, so the total landmass has to be vast. Thankfully, you have some special Champions Online travel powers of which flying is one of the more mundane.

Make Your Own Bad Guy

Every superhero needs a nemesis, and a fun feature of Champions is that you also get to customize yours. It’s up to you to decide what his minions will be, what motivates his (presumably) evil quest for world domination and how he should fight. You’ll then get to face him every now and then until the eventual showdown. Naturally, there’s a system in the game to prevent you from making him unusually weak – he will evolve and gain levels just like your own character.

Set Out to Play in a Comic Book

The comic-book style, cell-shaded graphics suit this RPG well, and there’s never any doubt that this is exactly the plan. Every facet of the game design reminds you of classic Marvel or DC comics, and that’s arguably a fresh take on the whole RPG concept, even if I’ve come to be somewhat partial to the whole “orcs & elves” settings. In all, it’s a fresh MMO that will certainly capture its intended crowd.

The forth piece of downloadable content for the lovely post-apocalyptic role-playing game Fallout 3 for the PC following Operation Anchorage, The Pitt and Broken Steel takes you to the swamps of Maryland.

Someone needs your help – or so they said over a cryptic radio transmission to your pip-boy – and a new location has appeared on your map. Once you get there you realize that all of the inhabitants suffer from some sort of affliction, possibly due to a deteriorating gene pool but nonetheless they look awful.

The Point Lookout DLC expansion is different from the previous expansions in that it’s actually a lot more meaty. There’s plenty of stuff to do and explore and the main mission is quite time-consuming (in a good way). If you don’t run straight through it, Point Lookout should last you a healthy ten hours, which is more than some full games in other genres will offer.

Maryland was apparently spared most of the nukes that laid waste to the rest of the Fallout 3 world, so unlike the Capital Wasteland it’s a green environment. Naturally it’s not pleasant by any means – there’s just swampland, everything is worn down and the aforementioned inhabitants are unusually ugly. It’s obvious that Bethesda has gathered inspiration from games like Resident Evil and other survival horror games. There are quite a few scary moments in Point Lookout.

You shouldn’t consider traveling to Point Lookout with a low-level character. The enemies you’ll encounter can really take a beating before they fall over, and even with a nearly maxed out character you’ll occasionally have a hard time tackling the misshapen Maryland farmers. Unfortunately there initial release of Point Lookout wasn’t entirely bug free, but those problems have no doubt been corrected since by the developers at Bethesda.

In all, Point Lookout is still the best expansion so far for Fallout 3 in my opinion, as long as the previously mentioned issues have been ironed out by the time you read this. There’s plenty of new things to do, places to explore and lots of amusing new dialogue.

See also: Fallout 3 review

A lot of RPG gamers are looking forward to the upcoming release of the new Aion online game that is setting out to challenge the almighty WoW for dominance in the MMORPG genre. I’ve had the opportunity to try out the beta version of Aion, and it looks like it’s shaping up to something really exciting!

Aion has the potential to outshine all online role-playing games’ main competitor World of Warcraft; maybe not so much by offering previously unseen and incredible new features, but by challenging WoW in ways where it can’t compete.  Aion feels familiar right from the start – you have the usual classes like the archer, mage, warrior and priest, and the missions are pretty standard for an RPG. So, what’s so new and refreshing about Aion?

Well there are several aspects in which the Aion PC game excel actually. The first thing is the character design – You can tweak your character down to the smallest detail, and although there are only two races to choose from you can customize them a great deal with the built-in character tool. Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly is the incredibly detailed game world. It’s probably the best-looking MMORPG ever, even trumping Age of Conan for fancy graphics. Screenshots won’t do it justice – you have to try it for yourself to see how good it all looks. A real game highlight is when you eventually grow a pair of wings and get to fly around on your own.

You start out in either of the two lands that belong to the respective races. When you play an Elyos – the race with access to sunlight – you get to enjoy lush forests brimming with detail. The Asmodian starting grounds are not as exciting though, as it’s dominated by darker shades, but at least the developers have managed to produce two very distinct environments to give the players a feel of the two opposing worlds.

The Aion game has been in development for a long time, but it’s already live and active in Asia. In other words the beta is already highly polished and not what you normally expect from a prerelease game. It’s very stable and does not suffer from any noticeable glitches. Thanks to the beta release Aion already has a rather large following and has already received lots of praise from the online gaming community before its official premiere. A lot of the discussions revolve around how technically superior Aion is to World of Warcraft, and that it’s about time that the aging online RPG gets some real competition.

The bottom line then? While the offers some breathtaking graphics, what it all eventually boils down to is the how the Aion game play measures up to the competition. As opposed to a lot of similar games, there is some focus on the story. All the players are basically godlike or angelic creatures that have fallen and need to fight to attain that god-hood again. Once you have reached that goal some of the game’s appeal could be lost. But we’ll wait for the retail release before we pass any judgment on it. At least we can safely say that it’s an incredible-looking game, and maybe it’s the one that can finally dethrone Blizzard’s masterpiece.

Aion Game Computer Requirements (minimum/recommended):

CPU: Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz/Core Duo or AMD 2800+/better

RAM: 1GB/2GB

Graphics: Nvidia 6600/7600 or  ATI Radeon X1550/X2600

HD Space: 30GB

OS: Windows 2000/XP/Vista DirectX 9c

As the player character Geralt, you wake up in a castle with no recollection of how you got there. You’ve been patched up and taken care of by friends, but soon enough all hell breaks loose and you’re forced to defend the castle from a gang of magic-using thieves. That’s the tutorial and introduction to The Witcher, and after that the real adventure starts. While The Witcher isn’t a medieval GTA, it’s about as close as it gets. There’s a lot of violence and adult themes, so it’s not overly suitable for the young ones.

The Enhanced edition of The Witcher is not a bug fix by definition, but it deals with a few issues that players were experiencing, such as long load times and some less-than-superior voiceovers. The original Polish version actually had much more dialogue than the English version, which stole away some of the plot from  those of us whose Polish isn’t the best. The game has also been endowed with brand new animations that look and feel better than the original ones.

In all, there are quite a few enhancements that makes it deserving of the new title. For those who already own the game, there’s no reason to go out and buy it again unless you’re a huge The Witcher fan; you can get all the new in-game content for free by downloading the official patches. What you don’t get, however, is a couple of bonus discs with the game’s sound track and comments from the developers. Plus a more interesting add-on of two new missions, although those are quite short and not enough to warrant another purchase.

Nevertheless, The Witcher Enhanced Edition should be more than enough to persuade those who haven’t already grabbed a copy to do so now. Get it at GameStop.

Describing Mount & Blade as the poor man’s Oblivion would be a half-truth at best. Lots of gamers already enjoy the game more than they ever would the high-profile Elder Scrolls franchise. There are still similarities; the game is huge, it does not have a linear plot, and there are lots of Mount and Blade mods and other extras that you can download (for free) to make the game even more grand.

You are placed in the fantasy world of Calradia, and right from the start you’re free to  do whatever you want. No one will show you the way or tell you what to do – whether you want to gather an army and besiege castles or start a trading career, the possibilities are there just like they should be in a true role-playing game.

This game was made with a tiny budget and the technical aspects are not on par with bigger and more high profile games, but that’s also reflected on the games price tag. Besides, there are so many free extras available from the player community that the less fancy graphics feel like a minor issue.

It takes a while to get used to the game controls, which don’t behave exactly the way you’d expect in a game like this. Especially the fights are a bit awkward at first,  before you learn to block and parry properly. With a little training you will eventually get there though. Then again, depending on what profession you chose you may not need to fight that much.

Mount and Blade is a game with an insanely dedicated community of enthusiasts, who help the game grow and develop continuously by adding new mods and expansions. There’s always a chance that you’ll get hooked, too and be one of those who make long-term plans for capturing that castle that you’ve wanted for so long and draw your own maps and discuss the details in the forum.

If you feel like trying it out, you can do so for free by downloading the Mount and Blade demo off its developer Tale Worlds home page.