Tips and trick game

In Dragon Age Origins, BioWare struck pay dirt; creating an epic fantasy world within which gamers love to play. Ferelden was rife with dangers and stories that made it a treat to play through several times, endearing players to the interesting characters, the weighty history, and the lush, lived-in world. BioWare obviously had a plan: To make an RPG platform, not just a video game. As a result, there's a lot more potential, not only for the franchise, but for the game disc players already own. Taking a cue from Bethesda's Fallout 3, players have already gotten a host of add-on goodies to augment their play experience.
Just four months after the original release, BioWare has raised the stakes significantly by introducing a major 20 hour expansion to the mix. Though you'll have to pay a pretty penny to get access ($39.99 or 3200 Microsoft points), Dragon Age Origins: Awakening will be well worth the price of admission for most players. That's because, in addition to an increased level cap, new enemies, a fresh region of the world, and innovative skills, talents, and specializations, there's an entire new set of compelling stories to discover whether you import one or all of your previous characters or start a new hero from scratch. In retrospect, $40 kind of seems like a deal in light of all the content on offer here.
As it turns out, Dragon Age Origins was really just the beginning of the adventures that await fans of the series. This first major expansion casts us back into the role of Grey Warden, this time in a new part of the world facing off against a new threat. For those of you that haven't played Dragon Age Origins, it's probably best if you just stop reading this review now and go out and get that game first, play it, then pick back up where you left off. For everyone else, know that the Arch Demon and the Blight was just the beginning. The Darkspawn didn't return to the dark roads beneath the earth; they stayed and began to form tribes. They are once again terrorizing the goodly races, but this time they might even be more dangerous. That's because a number of them have evolved - some of these monsters are actually intelligent and even intelligible. That's right; some of them can speak. It will be your responsibility as Commander of the Grey Wardens to rid the world of this new menace by consolidating your kingdom, inspiring your people, and, of course, taking the fight directly to the enemy.
A new element that comes to Dragon Age via Awakening is that of nation-building. Coming from Orlais, you are mistrusted by the local nobles and people used to the Howe family leadership. As such, you will have to quickly quell rebellious nobles and restore trade to the region to ameliorate the lingering starvation and suffering felt by the common people. Of course, you'll also have to eliminate the immediate Darspawn threat by refortifying the infrastructure and recruiting hardy individuals to repopulate the dwindling Grey Warden order. Playing as a well-known leader gives the game a very different characteristic and sets the stage for the higher-tier play. Otherwise, the strategic combat gameplay of the original is fully intact. In fact, no changes have been made to gameplay whatsoever.
What you will find are a few key additions. For starters, you'll now have access to three new skill chains: Runecrafting, Vitality, and Clarity. Runecrafting lets trained party members create runes of power and defense to apply to slotted weapons and armor. Depending on how many trained ranks you put into the skill, the better, more powerful runes you can craft. Vitality is a skill chain you'll want to adopt for your frontline fighters. As you'd expect, dropping points into Vitality will give you passive bonuses to your constitution as well as adding to your health reservoir. Clarity is a skill chain for any character. Putting points into Clarity will beef up your mana pool or give you more stamina from which to draw, depending on whether the character is a magic-user or not.
Awakening also provides players with an increased level cap as well as more than 50 new spells and talents and even two new specializations per class. The new specializations become active at level 22 (when a third specialization point is awarded - they're supposed to unlock at 20 but don't) and include Spirit Warrior and Guardian (Warriors), Keeper and Battlemage (Mages), and Legionnaire Scout and Shadow (Rogues). These new specializations add nice bonuses and open up cool new powers so you'll be able to further customize your PCs to the higher level of play. What's more, weapons have become more powerful too; an additional two tiers of equipment quality have been included. Additionally, there are new consumables, coatings, traps, recipes, grenades, etc. that can be found and fabricated.
In terms of presentation, Awakening is every bit as good as Dragon Age Origins. While one would expect this to be the case graphically (because they use the same engine), it was nice that the care was taken for both the voice acting and the storytelling aspects; I enjoyed the new recruits as well as the new plot as much or more as I did the predecessor's.
When it comes right down to it, you're going to have to decide whether it's worth it to you to extend the Dragon Age experience out another 20+ hours per play-through for $40 and change. After all, you're essentially getting the exact same game you already put 60-80 hours into, with a new story and only a few extra bells and whistles to keep things fresh. For me, I really felt Awakening helped the game come into its own. I've had enough of a pause in between play sessions that my interest was instantly rekindled. Also, the higher tier of play made things feel a bit more epic.
BioWare makes great games; there's no doubt about it. Their games are so compelling, in fact, that gamers are willing to shell out a significant amount of extra cash to extend the experience. I think if BioWare can continually put out expansions of this quality, players will likely buy at least one or two more of them. That being said, I'm not sure how many more expansions we'll see in the near future; a teaser card emblazoned with the now iconic blood dragon was included within the expansion case, hinting at a date of February 1, 2011. Whether this will be Dagon Age 2 or simply another massive expansion remains to be seen, but whatever it is, we're anxious for more.

Jonathan Marx(cheatcc.com)

There are certain miserable truths we just have to accept in life. Cake makes us fat. Going to the beach curses us with life-long sandsock. And if we want to play a cover shooter, we’d better enjoy the company of chest-bumping knuckle-heads or grizzled sociopaths on all-steroid diets.
But while seaside cake-scoffing will always remain an obesity-baiting, granular mess, the latter problem is soon to be rectified thanks to a radical new direction from Bethesda. The Oblivion creator is all set to bring us fantasy actioner Hunted: The Demon’s Forge, a Gears of War-style co-op shooter developed by InXile Entertainment.

The game eschews tired old space marines for vibrant medieval fantasy and an interesting pair of freely switchable, asymmetrically-playing characters. But it’s not only shaking things up in terms of characters and setting. The slick-looking co-operative extravaganza looks dead set on freshening up the genre from every angle of attack it can find. And here’s how it’s going about it.

Busty Elves > Grumpy Marines

Let’s face it, if you’re going to be looking at a character’s rear for eight-to-twelve hours, it might as well be an interesting one. And it might as well be attached to a personality with more to say for itself than ‘Grrr’ and occasionally ‘F*ck’. Hunted’s two complimenting protagonists seem to have a genuinely fun and contrasting personality dynamic. Buxom female Elf E'lara plays against type by being the impulsive, gung-ho aggressive one, while hulking barbarian Caddoc follows her reluctantly with a face-palming air of ‘Why me?’

Above: Despite being an archer, E'lara can get stuck in with the best of them
The game proudly displays all of the genre tropes of the cover shooter – waist-high walls, skirmish arenas and branching flank routes are all present and correct – but it’s very much out with the armoured sulk-mongers and assault rifles and in with the Tolkienesque fantasy and arrows.
It’s amazing how radically this simple change of setting overhauls the whole feel of the increasingly stale genre. With fantastical excess replacing world-weary grit, there’s a lightness and charm to Hunted that sets it well apart from its genre siblings, despite the gratuitous carnage on show. Its world feels genuinely fresh on a whole bunch of levels. And speaking of that contrasting character dynamic…

It’s a cover shooter without the cowering

There’s a certain irony to cover shooter heroes. Increasingly ripped, aggressive, planet-crushing death-bastards who spend most of their day hiding behind trees and boxes like bullied kids at lunchtime. Not so in Hunted. In protagonists E'lara and Caddoc you’ve got two radically different character classes who between them are more than capable of taking the fight right up to their enemies’ faces.

Above: Caddoc is hard to start with, but with magic buffs he's devastating
E'lara is all about ranged bow attacks. Caddoc is all about kicking in faces and slicing off important bits of anatomy. On a basic level, Caddoc can run out to engage the hellspawn gits face-to-face with a variety of brutal short-range melee combos, while E'lara covers him with a volley of pointy airborne death, but there looks to be a great deal of tactical depth to be had as the combat gets more complex. And don’t think this asymmetric pairing means that you’ll lose out on half of the gameplay in single-player mode. Smartly, Hunted allows you to switch characters at the touch of a button at every checkpoint you reach.

It’s a fantasy game without the grind

Fantasy setting + character progression = days spent killing chickens to level up beyond the state of absolute weakling, right? Not here. Hunted features character customisation and weapon upgrades, but you’re certainly not going to have to any lose sleep in order to progress. Hunted’s equivalent of levelling up happens as a result of tracking down and collecting special hidden crystals along your quest. Cash these in and you’ll be able to upgrade your magic abilities via a skill tree, tailoring your offensive, defensive and character augmentation spells as you see fit.

Despite the loose RPG trappings, weapons will accrue in the vein of a more traditional shooter rather than taking the Borderlands route of haemorrhaging loot piles. New death tools for each character will appear every couple of hours in order to make them feel significant, and presumably to compliment the game’s progressive set-pieces.
And speaking of those...

It blows co-op tactics wide open, literally

You know what it’s like. You and your wing-man are gracefully slaughtering your way through a street full of grunts with the balletic tactical ease of Chow Yun Fat channelling Napoleon, when suddenly your partner goes down in the thick of the fray. Cue an abrupt end to your apocalyptic flanking bid as you drop what you’re doing, backtrack to your fallen comrade and stumble through a cloud of bullets in order to pick him up. Then he has to do the same for you as you’re trying to retreat. Ball-ache.

Above: Finding the grunts hard to hit? Use a levitation spell before firing
Hunted aims to remedy that whole irritating fiasco by implementing a long-range approach to co-op. The most obvious upshot of this is that you’ll be able to revive fallen partners from a huge distance away as long as you’re within line of sight. Just toss a regen potion like a grenade (from what we saw they lock on automatically if you’ve got a clear shot) and they’ll be straight back up again without you having to break the flow of whatever you were up to.
And that’s going to be a very important innovation, given the way that battles in Hunted play out. The major skirmishes that we witnessed all took place over arenas much bigger and more open than most of what you’ll find in the likes of Gears of War, with architecture and scale tailored around the two characters’ contrasting abilities. Ground-cover, open brawling areas, staircases and multiple levels of verticality can gel over a single arena to open up a boatload of tactical options.

It’s much more than a shooter

All of this adds up to a game that takes the cover-shooter model and runs it in every direction it possibly can, with the marriage of melee and shooting birthing all kinds of possibilities. Both characters can hit the enemy with a pincer melee attack, E'lara’s weaker blade providing support at the back while Caddoc  wades in at the front. Or Caddoc can step out swinging while E'lara softens up the oncoming horde with arrow fire from behind cover. Or she can throw in an elemental magic buff to increase his hacking power on the fly.

Above: If all else fails, get up close and kick their faces off
But most exciting of all is the way in which the team looks to be able to split up completely in order to work on different sets of bad guys in different parts of the environment according to the suitability of their skills. Thanks to the long-range healing system there’s no need to stay close to your partner when a distant target takes your fancy, and should either character get jumped by something they can’t handle, there’s still a way out.
If, for instance, Caddoc comes up against some well-armoured uber-grunts, E'lara can swiftly make with the long-distance headshots to pull him out of trouble. And if she in turn gets mobbed by short-range melee baddos and can’t flee to a shootable distance, Caddoc  can throw in one of the aforementioned magic buffs to temporarily up her comparatively weedy hand-to-hand abilities until he can wade over and make a rescue with his mighty blade o’ justice.

Some monsters will require the combined skills of both characters to take down, and it’s sometimes even possible to perform co-operative God of War-style QTEs in order to finish of particularly tricky enemies, either directly or by using the environment (ie. having the option to knock a huge statue down on top of them).
By blending shooting with proper, combo-driven melee like this, and doing so much to facilitate player freedom outside of traditional teamwork, Hunted’s developers genuinely seem to have created a smooth and elegant evolution of co-op action, and it's one that we really can’t wait to get our hands on. Watch this space for more just as soon as we have.

(gamesradar.com)