Long and hard are the roads of The Descent. Bioware and EA bring another added story to the ever-expanding universe that is Dragon Age. When mysterious earthquakes start showing up in the underbelly of the Deep Roads, your team of warriors is called in to help clean out things. Banding together with two dwarves, Renn and Valta, the team descends into the Deep Roads and learns a bit more about Dwarven culture, especially its warriors. If anything, the story sets up the atmosphere for the impending adventure.
While the story may not be the most compelling or memorable (helping dwarves clean out their tunnels and discovering a horrible evil), the challenge of trying to survive is the main theme for this Dragon Age DLC, and its difficulty is somewhat a refreshing change of pace. The first part of the gameplay has loads and loads of repetitive Darkspawn (enjoy those orges) finding their way into your path as your team heads down below.
Once you get beyond the first few fights in the upper levels with the large and small Darkspawn (again, enjoy the orges), the game starts finding its footing and blooms a bit. You get introduced to some badder enemies, the descent to below gets more intense and the trip really begins to make sense in terms of challenges. I don’t want to give too much away, but the DLC does end on a good note, though an open-ended one. Just prepare yourself for the fights, pace yourself and strategize before you run into an area and make sure that you’ve got your team equipped properly. This isn’t a DLC that forgives you for your battle flubs.
In terms of design, while I’m not crazy about Bioware throwing needless amounts of enemies at players (I always felt like that is cheap, but it does help extend the gameplay time), the actual descent into the Deep Roads is breathtaking and entertaining. The area is big enough to include a war table of its own (separate from the usual war table) and indicates the possibility of more missions for the Deep Road, though I can’t confirm that right now — just an assumption.
Anyway, the atmosphere is established so well in this portion of the game. The story helps to push that, as it feels like you’re really descending into something vicious and ominous (and you are). Bioware did a great job with setting things up and making sure that if you haven’t explored the Deep Roads yet in pervious DA experiences, you will understand its importance in the scheme of things.
Overall, this is a worthy DLC of your time and money, though the difficulty from the endless amounts of enemies makes the game less than perfect.
