[Gabrielles blades]

I liked it.
Most of what you said is true, but that seems to be the direction bioware is headed. It takes less effort to do voice acting for everyone if they dont need to say *exactly* whats written so i can understand why they decided to mass effect the dialogue.

As for the action, i think that if you put the difficulty level up higher you will end up having to use much more in the way of tactics. That being said, the game does play itself if you write up custom tactics for all of the characters well enough, but that was true of DA:0 as well, i ran a few playthroughs of that with the dog companion just sitting in a corner and letting the tactics win all battles.