I’d love to have received an advance copy of Dragon Age 2 and finished it by now so I could discuss it in full today, but since I put my pants on one leg at a time and pick up games at midnight on launch day like everyone else, I’ll have to limit my scope to the opening hours of the game. Keep an eye out for a full review as I get through it!

The most palpable change Dragon Age veterans will notice is the elimination of auto attack for basic attacks in favor of simple, repeated button presses to cycle through an attack combo sequence. Much has been made about how this concept fixed what many thought to be a sluggish, cumbersome target-and-attack system, and resulted in more responsive action. I’ll agree that the new controls have altered the “feel” of combat from a somewhat detached point-and-click to a more active and console-friendly pow-pow-pow. Your special spells and talents still occupy the other three buttons, just like it was in Origins.

Instead of Origins’s auto-attack, you’re really just mashing one button repeatedly. For awhile, the cynic in me felt the need to point out that the aforementioned “feel” of combat is mostly an illusion for the sake of consoles, but I’ve since decided that the button mashing serves a purpose. The biggest complaint about the combat in Origins had to do with targeting and how one would frequently be glued to a particular target, making it difficult especially for melee types to move away to a different one. With the use of the button for basic attacks, it’s easy to just stop swinging and move to that guy who just ran by you to go start clobbering your healer. The overall effect is that movement and combat feel much snappier and faster-paced, even if the rest of how combat works has changed little from the previous games.

BioWare is really onto something with the writing they provide to these RPGs they do. I suppose, then, that my expectations were a tad high for the characters who would be my party members. But no one I’ve met yet has gripped me with humor and charisma the way both Alistair and Morrigan did in the opening hours of Origins. It’s no doubt unfair of me to be overly critical of that at this point, considering I’ve only met five of what I assume will eventually be a whole platoon of brothers-in-arms. One of them is even a familiar face, although his personality is markedly different and not nearly as likable as he was. Here’s hoping I get some more crew that entice me to wander around town just so I can hear their dialogues with each other, like I so frequently did with Oghren.

Bottom line: Dragon Age 2 is by and large more of the same, with a few tweaks. These tweaks give the illusion of more extensive change than there really is. And that’s not a bad thing at all; I hope to be knee deep in glorious fantasy carnage within the hour.