jgrayson_au

This review is going to be very subjective, and in fact, if I can sum it up entirely, I'd say watch it by yourself and fast forward the bits you don't like. Because by catering for "everyone" it means there's bits you're not going to like.

One of the things that they tried to do with this "celebration" was to show the importance of Shakespeare by how it influenced other works. Personally, I think it failed. The very first thing we saw was a West Side Story song and dance number. I can see what they were going for I guess, but I think it lost the point. It was a celebration of Shakespeare, not Shakespeare's cover band. It'd be like going to see The Beatles and instead having some pub band playing songs that they wrote because they liked The Beatles. We wanted John Paul George and Ringo.

Well, in this case, we wanted Shakespeare. And that's the rub. Between the ballets and the operas and the songs (done with varying degrees of success) the overall runtime left, in my opinion, more filler and less Shakespeare. It left me wanting to see King Lear or Hamlet or heck, the Complete Works of Shakespeare Abridged.

There were some great performances. Sir Ian McKellen was the stand out performance giving a powerful speech about immigrants. Sanjeev Bhaskar and Meera Syal (from Goodness Gracious Me) nailed Much Ado About Nothing in a fantastic comedic / tragic scene. And the stage actor, Paapa Essiedu, played an amazing Hamlet for the famous To Be or Not To Be.

It's essentially Shakespeare at the Proms. And there are good bits. You'll just need to either put up with, or fast forward, the boring bits.

Short review. Not as good as the first, not terrible. 6/10.

Long review. So, you've bought... you did buy it didn't you? You've 'bought' Dragon Age 2 and loaded it up. What to expect? Well first of all, you're a different protagonist. The Hero from the first game (IE you) is now a story told by bards and chatty NPCs. Instead you play Hawke, a male or female human only.

The first thing you'll notice is the lack of elf or dwarf. Sorry fans of ears and fat guys, you're outer luck. I chose a rogue. That's when I noticed the next thing. No hot-switching between ranged weapons and melee. If you want to switch between daggers and a bow, pause the game and change it manually.

Of course, that's assuming you're playing on an ATI card. If you're playing on Nvidia, you're likely to be listening to the audio pause whilst the game freezes for a second. First day bugs that were there in the demo months ago.

The plot is the saving... oh wait, it isn't. The plot is there, but it's weak. The side quests are actually more interesting then the main plot.

But luckily the combat system will take your mind off the plot. The combat is waves of bad guys. Fight a bunch of thugs, then just when you think it's all over, like a space invader a new spawn of bad guys appears. I guess then the only advantage is the game is a lot simpler in combat and not as many tactics. You get ample supply of tactic rules, allowing you to 'program' your NPCs for virtually any situation. And they removed the ability to hold from individual party members. Either all your NPCs hold firm or they all move freely.

Look, overall it's not terrible. I've played far worse RPGs in my days. But I've also played better. This feels like a consolised, simplified, rushed version. It feels more like a large DLC to DA:O rather then a sequel. I gave it 6/10 as compared to DA:O, I could probably give it 7/10 if it was a stand alone game, but expectations to RPG of the Year and Game of the Year do matter.

Here's hoping they don't stuff up Mass Effect 3.