Dragon Age: Origins Preview

Enemies come in all shapes and sizes

Thankfully, my second attack fared slightly better. While Dragon Age: Origins has a default perspective from just above and behind your current character, you're free to manually reposition the camera to anywhere you like. By getting a raised view of the battle it becomes a little easier to keep track of what’s going on. Using Alistair's special melee abilities, like the stunning shield bash, I was able to pick off Aldred's gruesome assistants, leaving my entire party to focus on the big man himself. Things seemed to be going well until the magical git started to resurrect his chums. Since every decent special attack and spell has a cool-down period, and since I'd exhausted most of these on wiping out the magician's gang the first time, the revived abominations made short work of my hapless party.

Only on my third stab at Aldred did I notice the dialogue mentioning the "Litany of Adralla" - a special item carried by my main character. As it turned out, using this would prevent the nefarious Paul Daniels-wannabe from recalling his dead companions. Unfortunately, the item would only work for a specific length of time, so the resulting battle required a lot of multi-management: I used Wynne to magically paralyse Aldred, battered the hell out of his goons, used the enchanted item to halt the resurrection, and then concentrated on attacking the boss - all the while pausing to issue healing commands and to get my rogue to do a bit of backstabbing.

Eventually, the big man went down - leaving my party to lick their wounds. It wasn't the most graceful of battles, but my gang got the job done. Of course, this was only my second encounter of the game, and once you've got a bit of experience you should be able to handle these scraps with a lot more flair and style. During BioWare's own run-through, the demonstrator showed off a technique called "spell stacking" whereby multiple magic attacks are combined to form a single enchanted onslaught. One of these, branded Storm of the Century, seemed to result in the entire room being swirled around in a howling tempest of death (and increased elemental damage). It looked pretty impressive, and I'm looking forward to seeing more.

Having completed the main challenge of the demo, I decided to have a bit of banter with my other party members. From what I can tell it seems as if it will be possible for a romantic sub-plot to develop between you and the foxy Leliana. In typical BioWare fashion, it seemed as I was free to engage in a bit of relationship banter when chatting to the rogue after the fight - either affirming my love for her or explaining that I needed to "take a break". Seems all right to me - what better time to get serious with your girlfriend than right after she's helped you to murder an insane magician? There was something brilliant about how "aw shnookums!" the two characters were, given that they were both covered in blood. And they say romance is dead...

Dragon Age: Origins is due out on the PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 in the last half of 2009.