Dragon Age is an amazingly crafted RPG with roots in previous games from Bioware.
The gameplay of Dragon Age is heavily rooted in Knights of the Old Republic. This isn't an open world game like some of the older Final Fantasy games. Instead, you travel from place to place with occasional encounters in between. The combat is a simplified system with X to attack normally and the other face buttons to preset powers you choose.
Combat is a real challenge too. Unlike the PC version where you can get a top down view and quickly choose between characters, the PS3 version forces you to cycle between them with the trigger buttons. Set the difficulty too high and even regular foes can kill a party member before you can heal them. However, fret not because you don't lose until all party members are dead. I've won many battles by some clever tricks with only one character. After the battle the characters revive with injuries that you must alleviate or their combat prowess is diminished.
The only real negatives about this system is it feels a lot more like button mashing than an actual RPG. It seems like the game is treading as close as it can to an action RPG without actually going there.
Still, there is some variety in the game that I enjoy. You only have three races and classes. You have your standard humans, elves, and dwarves with the warrior, rogue, and mage classes. At first this seems limiting, but as you progress you gain access to specializations which add new powers in addition to the already abundant skills and powers you have to choose from.
Each race and the mage class have their own unique origins where you create a character. The character creation is the standard for Bioware games which is just the face and hair. After that you spend your attribute points and choose skills and powers. From there, the magic happens.
Indeed, the highlight of Dragon Age is its robust storytelling and ability to choose conversations. The setting of the game is fully realized. By the time you're two hours into the game, you'll feel like the world around could actually exist. The character dialog and voice acting feels so natural and not at all wooden like a lot of other video games suffer from.
Even more important than the choices you can make are the impact they have on party members. Each party member reacts to situations differently. All of them start neutral to you at first, but your choices and actions can shift them either direction. Some of the choices can actively turn a character against you and you'll be forced to fight them. When you aren't in conversations with other NPCs, you can get to know the characters, all of which have deep backgrounds. You can also romance some of the characters and give them gifts to bolster your rating with them.
These things have a large impact on how you play. Do you kill a child who is possessed by a demon or do you find an alternative method to solve the problem? Killing the child might cause a massive loss in approval from one or more of your party members. This in turn makes you think critically about the choices you make and cements the game even further in great storytelling.
Visually, the game looks pretty good. The characters are modeled pretty well and there's not much repetition in the random NPCs. Of course, the main NPCs all have unique appearances. The environments look decent. Some are more compelling than others while some are pretty flat. Still, the appearance isn't without problems. Frame rate issues plague the game causing a jerky experience throughout.
Still, the audio is top notch. Dragon Age has a wonderful score and battle music. Many of the characters are voiced wonderfully by top notch actors like Tim Curry and Simon Templeman (Kain from Legacy of Kain series). Unfortunately, your character only speaks a few phrases when in battle.
Value for the game is huge. Aside from the multiple endings, each situation can turn out differently depending on choices. Adding to that, you have at least six different origin stories to choose from, each that tie into the main story and impact the overall dialog choices. If you're willing to spend a little money, there are several DLC packages that add full-fledged storylines to game and resolve some lingering questions after the final battle. You're easily going to spend a good 40-60 hours doing everything.
Overall, Dragon Age is a wonderful game filled with interesting characters, an amazing setting, and great dialog moments. Aside from the frame rate quirks, the only things I really noticed that irked me were the long initial start up time just to start playing and the fact that a rogue is necessary in order to unlock any locked chests or doors. Dragon Age is cheap these days. You can usually find used copies for just over $10 and a new one for $20. It's worth the money to play so I recommend picking up a copy.
The Good: Excellent storytelling, memorable characters, large selection of powers, huge amount of value, superb voice acting, dialog choices and companion approval dynamic is great.
The Bad: Frame rate issues throughout, too much dependence on the rogue class to acquire unique items, long start up time.