It's been mostly filler combat so far (just came back from the Derp roads). For the first half of my playthrough, my screen's been a huge mess. Every single time my rogue kills an enemy, limbs and blood fly everywhere. Seriously. Even a basic attack results in people having their torso bisected, being decapitated and having an arm cut off, with sprays of blood and gore that fill the whole monitor. I say basic attacks, though in truth what my rogue mostly does is jump and backflip around with little "swish-swish" sounds going on.
For the second half of my playthrough so far, I realized that bringing 2 mages, and teaching them the AoE damage over time spells (fire storm/tempest) and just casting those will end every encounter in 5 seconds. I still can't see what's happening on my monitor for all the explosions, but at least the pauses where everything is obscured by special effects are shorter. Also, most encounters consist of multiple waves of enemies. (Probably because the consoles memory couldn't handle areas big enough to fit everyone on the screen at once). So make sure one of your AoEs covers the spawn zones to instagib the reinforcements. Playing on hard, for the record.
The dialogue... enhhhh. It's bioware dialogue. It's never going to win any awards, but I managed to get through Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, KOTOR, DA:O and Mass Erect with a minimum of eyerolling. If you could slog through bioware's previous games it's more of the same. At least it's not a "You're the chosen one!" story. I didn't paticularly mind the dialogue wheel in Mass Erect, but in DA2 it seems to go out of its way to be misleading with the keywords it gives as dialogue options. Quite often Hawke ended up saying something completely different than the option led me to beleive it did. While choosing your dialogue line like in one of the old classics would have been better, this is not so much the fault of the dialogue wheel as of whoever wrote the keywords.
There is a *lot* of area recycling. Not as in you go back to the same area multiple times as in several areas are exactly the same. Think Mass Erects identical space stations. The maps give the illusion of multiple (extremely narrow) paths until you realize most of them either end up at the same slightly wider area with an encounter, or are blocked off by wagons/rockslides/doors/gigantic penises to ensure a linear path through this iteration of outdoor area #3.
The companions... enhhh. A few of them are vaguely interesting, but there's not nearly enough dialogue to flesh them out. Most of them, I just want to wring their little necks and sing a merry tune as life fades from their eyes. I sort-of liked the elven mage who keeps rambling, has a nice irish(ish) accent and alludes to being a blood mage. But aside from her companion quest #1 she's had 2 short dialogues and that's it. Also, Isabella has truly awe-inspiring ****. It's clear they were a labour of love for the modeller and texture artist.
All in all, there is too little actual interaction, no real choices and no real exploration. So since you can't actual make choices on what role you want to play in the game, I'd say it isn't an RPG. As an action game, the combat is too shallow. The screen gets filled with too many special effects to see what's going on. You can win most combats by spamming AoE spells while Avelline tanks everything. (Seriously, that girl is more durable than the T-1000). And there's a woefully small vareity of enemies recycled ad-nauseam and scaled to the characters level.
I'll give the game 3/10. It may make a decent drinking game, but unless things pick up drastically within the next 30 minutes of my playthrough, this game is going straight to the recycle bin uncompleted.
Absolutely pathetic.
