The Golems of Amgarrak sees the Warden babysitting Rogue McDwarf, Warrior McDwarf and Relic Golem -- no, not Shale, just some golem -- on a ridiculously ill-advised expedition into an abandoned thaig in the Deep Roads, its goal being to locate experiments that attempted to recreate Caridin's work -- because that went so well last time we tried it.

If the problem with Awakening is that the things it does peter out, Golems of Amgarrak has this issue where it doesn't even get anything started in the first place. A short, handwave-y intro gives way to a standard Deep Roads romp. Less than one hour in, after one (1) puzzle that turns out to be simpler than it seems at first, the party stumbles upon the final boss. And that's it! Everyone turns around and goes back home empty-handed. Good job. Leave your PSN wallet credits at the door.

At the very least, I appreciate the challenge in that final fight after breezing through Awakening on Nightmare, but I can't give it full points because most of it stems from the dwarves having horrendous builds -- they spend more time being dead than alive over the course of the DLC -- along with the boss being able to randomly summon extremely powerful Elites to aid it. Because of that, the only way to win is to grind good RNG -- hopefully, you have some bows in your inventory and/or an OP Dex build to speed up the process.

Someone on the DA team was on a Zelda kick, thought the whole dual world approach certain games had was sick, and convinced everyone that DAO should attempt to do the same with the dungeon crawling aspect. Unfortunately, this results in every bad aspect of the game's dungeon design being at their absolute worst. Peekaboo enemy encounters? Check. High level enemy types that soak up damage to waste your time? Check. Tides of AoE talents being spammed that pummel and/or stun your party ad nauseum, almost certainly leading to death unless you utilize cheese tactics? Check. Meandering room-to-room searches where the only way to move forward is hitting an object of importance? You got it. The studio's stupid tendency to throw waves of baddies upon you as a way to feign the sense of challenge and strategy? Obviously!

The whole "changing landscape" gimmick doesn't even go anywhere, all it does is do the barest minimum of "now you can unlock this door/chest to move on!" while it throws up different color filters, which is both super lame and super annoying. There's no sense of progression or escalation, just go here, do the thing necessary, listen to the expository dialog of a group of people Fucking Around Then Finding Out, die because you're swarmed with so many golems and spirit entities, reload then chuck your items around without a care, rinse and repeat until you hit the Harvester boss which might just be one of the worst bosses I’ve ever faced in an RPG of this era. Calling this a war of attrition wouldn’t be accurate cause that implies it’s on the same level of fights that incorporate this state effectively, it’s just an abysmal slog of precise positioning and “aim attack at Big Bad while swarm of Generic Goons hit your tank” fronts while you pray that your intake of specific salves and friendly AI tactics are enough to carry you to the end, a far cry from the bouts that were actually invigorating in the Ultimate Edition package. About half of my time was spent just trying to down the damn thing, pushing this thought some gamers have where intentionally decreasing the difficulty just to complete a task is bad design. And it’s asking you to beat this on Hard (my preferred difficulty for Origins, btw), or god forbid Nightmare, just for an achievement and an item to use in the base game? Jesus, just look up a way to insert it into your game elsewhere, it’s not worth it.

I don’t want to sound like I’m completely infuriated, but it’s jaw-dropping how far below quality this is compared to everything else I’ve gone through, cheap in both difficulty as well as budgetary senses. I knew it was gonna be bad considering talks of it online, but I thought I could walk away with some positive thoughts like I did with some of the lesser add-ons. Darkspawn Chronicles also has some trite combat encounters and broked friendly AI, but at least there the gimmick was enough to carry it both mechanically and in a narrative sense, and it never truly became an immense chore. Warden’s Keep is a rather whatever scenario, but at least it expanded on the Gray Warden’s dubious morality and “by any means necessary” mantra along with giving a boon of a party storage chest with some great equipment. This? Uh… well I think some stuff gets reused for DA2…? Er… the lyrium incorporation was cool…. Can I talk about the item reward High Regard Of House Dace which is an incredible amulet for rogues to have? No? Then yea, nothing of substantial praise to say. The absolute lowest point of not just DAO, but all of Bioware’s DLCs that I've dabbled with and can recall, only rivaling ME2’s Overlord for the most bottom of the barrel sludge to suffer through.