What we see in Dragon Age 2 is a distinct loss of the necessity to plan attacks, you really can play it as an action-RPG. The demo made this immediately evident when we tried to adopt the pause-play style – it was just not practical. The reason for this is because combat is paced much faster and the only really viable way to play the game is to button mash. Any tactics like using the right spell at the right time are made obsolete due to the lack of friendly fire (apart from Nightmare mode) and spells that recharge almost in the blink of an eye. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with button mashing, I actually enjoy it, but this is simply not what I want from Dragon Age!​