Dragon Age 2

As if the original Dragon Age wasn't enough of a letdown to anyone looking for a decent RPG experience, they released Dragon Age 2 less than a year-and-a-half later.  Which is right out of the Electronic Arts playbook - shovel shit out as quickly and voluminously as possible and pay your hack game journo buddies to hype it up as the Best Thing Ever so your fanboys never have the time or inclination to try anything else; if that ever happens, they'll learn just how shoddy your products really are! DA2's combat moves slightly faster but is just as shallow and monotonous as the first game's, throwing hordes of the same one enemy at you over and over again for 30+ minutes at a time.  Character interactions are still the same trite "be stoic/make stupid jokes/be an asshole" choices that never change a damn thing outside of cutscenes, and the world design is lazier than ever, copy-pasting assets wholesale from the previous game and even reusing the same exact rooms multiple times in a row just to pad out the dungeons.  Basically it's just a cut-rate Diablo 1 in terms of design and premise, with a toe-curlingly bad story set in and around a single locale so they can make as few new assets and characters as possible.  But what truly pushes it into being irredeemable is BioWare and EA's attitude toward their audience.  After two of the game's developers got caught posting glowing reviews for their own game on Metacritic, EA's official response was a flippant "who cares lol". They don't have the slightest care about ethical behavior from their employees or the quality of their products or even their own reputation; as long as they can make a buck off you and yours, it's all fair play.  If selling heroin was legal I'm sure they'd happily quit the video game business entirely to do that instead; it isn't, though, so they'll just have to settle for foisting junk at premium prices and letting their employees, journo shills and fanboys spread flagrant propaganda all over the internet instead. Fucking shysters.  

While Dragon Age 2 is technically a half-Star game for making at least a few improvements to the dragging combat of the original, there's no way I'm rewarding these scumbags for blatantly disrespecting their audience and the medium of gaming as a whole. DA2 gets a whopping zero Stars, and BioWare, EA and all of their enablers get one raised middle finger apiece.  Now please, go support a developer that has some scruples and values gamers beyond how many pennies they can shake out of them this week; I promise there's plenty to be found.

Developer: BioWare
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Released: 2011
Platforms: XBox 360, PC, PlayStation 3

Dragon Age: Origins

Mass Effect was just lame - an utterly boring slog that cribs elements of other, better science fiction works while adding no unique twists of its own.  But I had at least a little hope for Dragon Age - while BioWare was never particularly great at doing a "role-playing experience", surely they could at least recapture the challenging tactical gameplay, interesting characters and captivating narratives of their old Infinity Engine games, right?  Well, it was an RPG on a console in 2009 - a time period when people valued pretty cutscenes and online functionality gimmicks over gameplay - so you can guess how well it went.  Rather than having 60+ classes, numerous pieces of equipment, a vast array of potions, scrolls and spells and countless character builds to experiment with, you get... 3.  Yep, it's the old Fighter/Thief/Mage trifecta with boring, linear skill trees to determine what slightly different tactics you can employ. In theory, anyway - in practice combat mostly consists of big, slow, boring rounds of Rockem Sockem Robots, with everyone trading blows until one side falls and getting healed to full immediately after if you win.  No stakes, no tension, hardly any tactics and no fun.  Christ, even Diablo II, released nearly a decade prior, had far deeper combat and character building than this, and even Diablo 1 had more character choices if you factor in the Hellfire expansion pack. The plot is utterly predictable dark fantasy fare, pitting the humanoid races against whatever generic big threat is the current flavor of the month (darkspawn zombies, in this case).  The writing continues to suck major ass in the same way Mass Effect's did, just shoveling in everything you need to know with huge stretches of flat exposition that reads more like a car manual than conversations between characters.  Don't expect any decent worldbuilding either because, of course, it's all relegated to utterly boring wiki articles you get to exit out of the game entirely to read; wouldn't want to intrude on constant action and risk losing that lucrative audience of thirteen-year-old boys who only care about all the mindless monster bashing, titties and cheevos!   The game also just constantly screams "desperate moneymaking scam" because as you play there's constant popups about its dozens of DLC releases - nearly all of them being short, unsatisfying hour-long quests they're trying to milk $5 or more apiece out of.  Yeah... all the fanboys still whingeing on about Oblivion's horse armor can officially piss right off, especially because Bethesda at least had the courtesy to not pester me about buying it every three minutes.

Dragon Age: Origins is shallow, unoriginal and ruthlessly boring, but that's the entire point of it existing.  There was never a thought spared for making a decent game, just for milking a few dollars out of the dozens of D&D-clone RPGs that came before it while adding nothing new to the formula whatsoever.  Alongside other overhyped and derivative '00s/early '10s turds like Bioshock, Dishonored, Dead Space, Mass Effect, Dark Souls and especially Halo, it's just another example of companies cashing in on platform bias - shamelessly copycatting things PC and retro console games had already done well years prior, stripping out any trace of depth or complexity they had to make them more 'broadly accessible', and selling it as the "next big thing" to early teenagers too young to know they're being served cheap knockoffs and fanboys too in love with their corporate gods to care.  It only becomes worse once you consider BioWare once worked on a few of those great games they're now making empty, soulless clones of, too; they know they've got talent at their disposal and just choose not to use it because Big Daddy EA will buy them positive reviews regardless.  Utterly disgraceful and shamelessly low-effort, Dragon Age marks the end of BioWare's credibility as a developer.

Developer: BioWare
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Released: 2009
Platforms: XBox 360, PC, PlayStation 3

Mass Effect

Mass Effect is a game I was pretty lukewarm on even when it was new for a number of reasons.  I loved the Infinity Engine games on PC for their deep, strategic gameplay and storytelling, but like most digital RPGs they were a bit lacking in the, well, roleplaying department.  Whether you played a "good", "evil" or "neutral" character you were still walking through the exact same linear plot, beat for beat. The only difference is you could maybe resolve an encounter a slightly different way for a different reward or do a branching plotline for a short while, but in the end their replayability was derived from trying out different classes and party compositions much more than for their roleplaying potential.  Mass Effect takes that hook away in favor of homogenized third person cover shooting action and gives very little in exchange.  You get to choose one of three flat, predetermined backgrounds for your character (which just changes a line of dialog here and there and affects precisely nothing else) and as for classes... well, they're all just variations on "guy who shoots stuff and maybe has powers that make him more efficient at shooting stuff", which makes virtually no difference in how you play anyway since the AI controlled enemies are dumb as dirt and leave huge portions of their body outside of cover for easy sniping.  There's no ammunition management to speak of, just cooldown between each shot, and virtually every enemy you kill drops more guns with randomized stats, so you'll be drowning in them before long unless you stop to inventory manage every half-hour or so.  Also, you're required to carry one weapon of each type at all times even if you have no skill points in using them and even if you're playing a class that can't ever put any skill points into that weapon type.  There are no decent diversions from the shooting either - every location you visit is just another hallway shooting gallery and the only 'puzzles' are lame minigames you've seen in dozens of other things.  But don't worry about having to think about these puzzles or spend more than 30 seconds solving them, because you can also just pay some omnigel and completely skip past them.  Vehicle segments exist, but they're all beyond boring too, just having you center every enemy on the screen and pump them full of infinitely-regenerating ammo until they're dead. I also figured out very quickly that quicksaving and reloading will top off your shields any time you want, so vehicle trips just serve to fill more runtime and give you free experience points in an exceptionally boring way. As for the "choice based narrative", well, you periodically choose to be a nice guy ("Paragon!") or a jerkass ("Renegade!") with more choices opening up later depending on how many such choices you made before.  Like in Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale though, it really makes little difference to how the story plays out - sure things change a little in that some races will be more friendly/hostile to you in future games (in cutscenes, almost never gameplay) and some characters will survive or die, but given how flat and uninteresting they all are, it's a bit hard to care.  Moreso because the game exhumes any actual worldbuilding in favor of relegating everything to a boring "plot codex" so you can bring the whole game to a dead stop and have paragraph after paragraph of dry Wikipedia text read to you to get caught up.  Having actual plot scenes or a cinematic presentation or bits of lore to find in-game or doing literally anything more complex than shooting things and picking menu options would alienate the Halo-worshipping Xbox fanbase, you see.  Even the actors seem absolutely bored to be here, reading off line after line of dry text with all the passion of a text-to-speech program. That has to be due to bad direction, because there's some surprisingly big names here like Seth Green, Jennifer Hale and Keith David, and I know all of them are capable of much better.  There isn't the faintest hint of originality anywhere in ME's story story, just stealing characterizations and plot points wholesale from earlier works like 2001, Star Trek, Star Control, Xenosaga, Starflight and Wing Commander while putting no new twist on them, or even attempting to capture any of the personality and/or humor that made those franchises so memorable.  It's a pretty weak, thirty-hour-at-most plot pointlessly stretched out to a "trilogy" by cramming it with filler, which seems to have set a pretty godawful precedent for modern gaming as a whole, so thanks a lot for that, guys.  But even with all its glaring flaws and generally tired writing and design, it has boobs and almost-nudity and really forced romance scenes, so that automatically makes it good, right?  Never mind that when Star Control played on the already-long-dated cliché of the green-skinned space babe in 1990 it was mostly for humor, Mass Effect roars ahead with it in 2007 with no irony whatsoever!

In short, Mass Effect is a overlong subpar shooter glued to a boring and shamelessly derivative RPG.  I can't tell you why anyone considers it a "classic", let alone one of the greatest video games ever made, when those facts are plain as day to anyone who's even remotely savvy to intelligent science fiction or digital roleplaying games.  The only way I can even see anyone enjoying it is if they're in their early teens and have simply never played, read or watched anything better, in which case they should probably expand their horizons instead of just settling for this mediocre mish-mash.  Just because Game Informer said it's the absolute pinnacle of its genre and you never need to experience anything made before it doesn't mean it's true; I mean, it's not like they'd just say anything to get you into the game store that owns and sells subscriptions to their magazine just for an easy sale, right?  Blech.  Just partake of any of the much better, smarter things it's lifting ideas from instead, or if you really set on playing an actiony space opera video game with a long and convoluted plotline, just play Kingdom Hearts instead; yes it's also a clichéd cheesefest and shamelessly retreads plot points from other things, but at least it knows it has nothing new or poignant to say and refrains from taking itself so damn seriously.  Plays a lot better than ME too.

And please, if you want cheap T&A, just go to Pornhub and stop buying crappy games just to see two seconds of booba before the camera cuts...

That's your reward for over 100 hours of repetitive gunfights, plagiarized plot points and trite, boringly-acted dialog. There, I just saved you a whole pile of money

P.S.: Kindly spare me the empty claptrap about how not liking this series makes me a 'sexist' because a woman wrote it or that I'm a 'homophobe' because it features cheap, shoehorned-in gay romance options; those are just disingenuous red herrings fed to you by EA so they can score more sales and make negative publicity of their company and games, related or not, disappear by getting perpetually online 'activists' to false-flag unfavorable content or harass the families of its creators until they disappear from the Internet.  I'm sure the mostly-white millionaire conservatives on EA's board of directors are grateful for your efforts though, because nobody with half a brain or without a thinly-veiled self-serving agenda is ever going to be.  Just don't expect any reward for all that culture warfare you wage in their name, because that's not their way either.  In fact, they'll just toss you aside too the instant pretending to like you no longer benefits them; ruthlessly exploiting the gullible is how they got rich and intend to get richer, after all.

Developer: BioWare
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Released: 2007, 2008, 2012
Platforms: XBox 360, PC, PlayStation 3