Since I'll be reviewing it in the next couple weeks most likely. Love the game, but am starting to get a bit tired of it. 150ish hours of something does do that.

1. Avoid Fast Travel when possible. I only use it to get back to base and/or collect quest rewards, but try to walk everywhere. The game's really attractive and immersive, but when you rely on fast travel, it really devolves. Which is why I'm still going strong after 150 hours. That walking takes time.

2. Most alive world I've experienced. Just the sheer number of quests you can get from just about everyone, as well as all the little randomized events that can happen as you're walking around the countryside.

3. If you play aimlessly with the purpose being to wander around and see what trouble you can get in to, it's near-perfect. If you play in a more regimented style, things kind of fall apart, as most of the game is based on a repetitive style. Get quest, go to dungeon, kill stuff, get item and/or kill boss, go back and get reward. If you're freestyling, you don't notice (or you notice, but don't care), but if you're planning to sit down and, say, knock off 4-5 missions for a guild or something, it kind of grates on you.

4. Even that's better than in Oblivion. Just because the dungeons look so much more varied. You might be getting sent to 30 different caves for fetch quests, but at least they don't all have the same general look.

5. Difficulty balancing is still an issue. Around when I hit the late 30s level-wise, virtually everything got very easy. It might have been because, thanks to smithing/enchanting perks, I massively boosted my armor rating AND added superior enchantments to everything. But, whatever, when you get to a certain point, it does get a bit depressing, as I went from needing to use stealth and guile in many situations to just being able to destroy everything with my fire-enchanted warhammer.

6. And by "stealth and guile", I mean "exploiting enemy AI issues". Hello, Mr. Bandit Marauder! You're a tough mofo, so how about I use sneak to peck away at you with arrows while you only make lackluster attempts to find me even though I'm only about 30 feet away! Man, I got pissed when I fought Movarth the Vampire, as he apparently regens health, so that strategy didn't work and I had to actually man up and fight melee style.

7. Gotten lucky with glitches compared to things I've read. Only quest that really glitched in any way was the Brotherhood quest where you have to assassinate a woman during her wedding in Solitude. Apparently, the town gets hostile and one of your DB buddies creates a distraction. Neither of those things happened and I also didn't get the reward for the perfect kill even though I did push the statue on her while she was addressing the crowd. The most annoying thing is that I did all three Bard's College fetch quests, but the special instruments never left my inventory, so I have 10-12 pounds of non-droppable quest items cluttering things up.

8. The inventory, for MISC items, is a bit glitched. Things don't always stack, which makes the list obscenely long. Also would have been nice if they created sub-menus for ores/ingots and soul gems and quest items. MISC just gets so long and cluttered.

The Bonus Board isn't permanent, though, as if an enemy whacks the character you're controlling with a critical hit, you'll watch a number of your bonuses dissipate. I had a knack for killing stuff with critical hits, so at times, I'd be getting at least an additional 100 percent experience. One of those hard hits against me and it was down to 50 percent and I'd have to build my board back to its former glory (or take another couple critical hits and have to start from scratch).

Unfortunately, that joy was often marred by frustration. The controls seem a bit loose, which can make precise leaping more trouble that it's worth. Your character is pretty versatile, using her tentacle arm to whack enemies, briefly hover through the air and swing from objects, but it got tricky to consistently pull off some of those moves, especially since the girl struggles with fundamentals like stopping on a dime.

The average enemy in this game seemed to come from generic lists of animals and undead. I found it somewhat annoying that the mythical Norse Yggdrasil's dungeons were loaded with hornets and termites instead of, you know, something suited for the game's theme.

You collect well over a dozen party members, many of whom have little relevance beyond, "Hey, uh, you're out to save the world, so let me help!". Many villains pop up, deliver a couple lines of dialogue, fight you and are killed. It kind of reminded me of the RPGs I played on the NES and SNES where characters would pop up and randomly join or fight you for no reason other than "I'm good; I like you!" or "I'm evil; I hate you!".

Meanwhile, you'll primarily be fighting the same stuff from Origins with a handful of new foes...and they just don't have the staying power to last through Awakening. In one dungeon, my guys were hacking down the formerly-feared Revenants like they were generic front-line infantry. Near the end of the game, a High Dragon attacks. The ensuing battle was a lot like when I fought a particular one back in Origins…except this time, I was the one kicking butt instead of the other ...

Don't get me wrong — I'm not saying the Darkspawn aren't a threat because they are (just saunter unprepared into an ambush of high-ranking ones for all the proof you need of that), but at least you know what you're getting with them — brutal, unreasoning aggression. That's a lot easier to deal with than the webs of half-truths and lies spun by the average member of Ferelden nobility.

As you play, though, you'll notice a dark side to the powers that be relying on The Score as their be-all, end-all source of guidance; especially when it's made clear than a number of huge tragedies were caused by man solely to keep things in line with The Score.

In over 1,000 years, he's seen people and kingdoms come and go and has had to find his own way to cope with being seemingly the only constant in a life where everything else is temporary. For much of his existence on this world, Kaim has alternated between traveling and serving as a mercenary — his life a nomadic existence where war is the only constant. No wonder he comes off as cold and antisocial.

This game finds a way to turn exciting-sounding historical events, such as the siege of the Croatian city Zara, into linear marches through static environments cluttered with a bunch of melee battles that all play out the same. This might not be the appropriate game for the quote "WHAT A HORRIBLE NIGHT TO HAVE A CURSE", but it fits.

With Front Mission Evolved, Square-Enix and Double Helix take virtually all of the strategy out of the title and leave us with a clunky third-person shooter with an uninspired terrorism plot featuring shallow, one-dimensional characters.