I haven’t played Dragon Age II since the last DLC was release and it was fun to get back into the game with the Mark of the Assassin DLC. The Mark of the Assassin story line focuses on an Elf named Tallis. She is a part of the Qun and is looking to recover a stolen gem. Tallis is voiced by, and looks like, Felicia Day. She plays the same character in the Dragon Age: Redemption web series that has just released episode 2. As the DLC starts we don’t get a lot of back story for Tallis, but we do get more as the story progresses. Without giving any real spoilers lets just say she is a lot of fun to have in your party.
While most of the DLC follows the general core mechanics of Dragon Age II there are a couple of stealth and puzzle sections which are a nice change of pace. You have the option of not bothering with either of them and just fighting everyone, but I actually really enjoyed both. A simple puzzle is incorporated into the main quest, but a much more challenging set of puzzles are a major part of one of the side-quests. It was fun to play through a section and not have to fight many enemies but still get rewarded with a lot of loot if you took the time to complete all of the puzzle sections. The stealth elements were not overly complicated and have frequent checkpoints so it was not overly frustrating if you got caught. For the stealth section a rouge would have been great since you could use some of their abilities to get through easily, but I was able to complete the whole stealth section with my mage without getting frustrated or caught too often in any single section. Hopefully if Dragon Age 3 is int he works we’ll see more options like this for completing areas without fighting.
OK, I’m going to discuss some of the story so if you don’t want any spoilers skip this next section, but I’ll try to keep them to things you could have noticed in the screenshots and trailers for the DLC.
The Mark of the Assassin DLC also brings some new boss enemies to fight. For the first time there are wyverns to deal with. Early in the DLC you face a small to mid-sized one and they teach you how to deal with their poison attacks. The final boss then is a huge wyvern. The fight is fairly long with multiple stages, but I did not find it overly hard. Maybe that is because my character is so highly leveled at this point, but it was still fun to face a new enemies that required some new tactics to safely defeat. The story ends with Tallis leaving but clearly leaves it open for her to return at a later date. I’d love to see her in more DLC or even in future games personally. I found her character to be a lot of fun to have in my party.
The DLC is not overly long, but about the length of the previous DLC if I remember right. If you enjoyed Dragon Age II and the past DLC then you should check out The Mark of the Assasin DLC pack.
A copy of Dragon Age II: Mark of the Assassin DLC for the Xbox 360 was provided to us for this review from BioWare.
