It’s not just an awesome flying lizard RPG, it’s got some of the best of everything.
Forget the disappointment that was 2011’s Dragon Age II. The latest game in the RPG series – subtitled Inquisition – is an impressive return to form and just about surpasses the excellent Origins. Developer BioWare has basically taken all the best bits of its Mass Effect, Baldur’s Gate and previous Dragon Age games, and made them better. The result is an astoundingly huge game which delights on every level. What’s it got? What does it have to offer?
Here’s a quick rundown: Huge, sprawling open world to explore that’s jam-packed with sidequests, interesting characters and unexpected dungeons? Check. Competing factions, fleshed-out religious beliefs, a pantheon of gods and a mature fantasy storyline that avoids feeling overly clichéd? Affirmative. Console-friendly controls, combat that’s neither too easy nor too overwhelming and a large number of combat abilities to unlock? You better believe it.
You play as the Inquisitor, someone who appears “chosen” by the world’s gods to save it. Through mysterious circumstances, you are the sole survivor of an attack on the peace talks between Thedas’s mages and Templars, emerging from the ruins of the sensitive talks with the magical ability to seal the “rifts” that began to appear shortly after the attack took place. Rifts are massive tears in the fabric of reality separating the physical world from the metaphysical realm of the Fade. In addition to the primary rift that’s expanding like a black hole and threatening to consume Thedas entirely, smaller rifts are appearing all over, bringing with them demons and malevolent spirits that cause chaos and destruction.
The main story revolves around reestablishing the Inquisition as a political and military force to be reckoned with, and to do that you must make allies, gather supplies, find and learn about your enemy and essentially prepare for the inevitability of war. Along the way you must level up to unlock new combat abilities, find magical artefacts and craft weapons and armour to make you as strong as possible.
Fighting, as in the other DA games, is central to the world-exploring and quest-solving that you’ll spend a lot of time doing. Blessedly, the combat controls are spot-on perfect. Like any major political figure in the real world, there’s a team of people behind you organising things behind the scenes. In Inquisition’s case, there’s a War Council made up of three other major characters, each of whom offers a different set of skills with which to address the inevitable political issues that arise. They come into play in the War Room, which presents a table showing the land of Ferelden on which you’ll see various “missions” pop up as the game progresses.
Each mission can be resolved by any of your three advisors, and their differing approaches lead to differing outcomes. Resolving conflicts and earning rewards is kind of satisfying, especially as it can sometimes lead to new mission areas. As the Inquisitor, you’ll also eventually unlock the ability to judge people you encounter in the world, and how you judge them sometimes opens up new missions on the War Table. Each quest you complete earns you Power, which can be spent unlocking story missions or other sub-missions on the War Table.
It forces players to see at least some of the world rather than letting them blow through the main quest like a Tasmanian devil in a hurry, adding some intelligent balance to the mix. As with any game of this ambition and scope, there are bugs in Dragon Age: Inquisition, but happily they aren’t the gamebreaking ones experienced by other highprofile recent releases. Instead, they range from party members glitching out and getting caught on scenery to levels being loaded right in front of you without a loading screen to hide them and falling through the floor on occasion, although to be fair that only happened to me once, and at a specific dungeon level.
There’s also quite a lively discussion on various forums about the game’s combat, specifically about how some abilities and status effects work or don’t work. Inquisition has a multiplayer mode, but it’s completely separate from the main game. It lets you and up to three friends take part in a dungeon crawl where you must take on four waves of enemies, and if you make it to the fifth, a boss. Levels are randomised every time, so while the setting may stay the same, the layout doesn’t. Objectives in each level range from “Protect that guy” to “Kill everything” to “Kill that one specific target”, and once you succeed, the level’s over and you’ll need to start another one.
Along the way you’ll collect XP and gold, which is used to upgrade your characters and purchase chests that have cool loot in them. There are only three character classes to choose from initially – Rogue, Mage and Warrior – but there are a total of 12 that can be unlocked through play. Chests spit out loot that can be used to upgrade your characters, but often they don’t give you anything useful.
These somewhat-useless items can be broken down and their parts used to craft better items, but the number of parts required is often ridiculously high, meaning a lot of grinding is necessary to get your character properly kitted out. Of course, this being EA, you could just pay to win. To nobody’s surprise you can buy Platinum, the multiplayer game’s currency, with real-world cash, which can be used to shortcut the whole “grinding for loot” thing by buying chests without putting in the effort.
In all, it’s kind of nice to play a Dragon Ageesque game together with your friends, and its bite-sized nature is likely the best approach BioWare could have taken with it. That’s because the main game is so ridiculously long that it’s unlikely you’ll be able to play it from start to finish with the friends in your party given how hard it can be to line up everyone’s schedules.
Even if you were to spend the full R899 on a next-gen console version of Dragon Age: Inquisition, it will still be the best value for your entertainment buck. In the end, this is a game I believe every fan of role-playing games will enjoy. It’s essentially the product of Electronic Arts putting its considerable wealth of talent onto a single project, and that level of sheer creative genius is on show every minute of every hour you’ll play. From the music to the graphics to the story and the world itself, Inquisition is a beautifully-crafted piece of digital art, and a game that you simply can’t afford to miss.
DETAILS
• Publisher: Electronic Arts
• Platforms: PlayStation 3/4, Xbox 360/One and PC
• The good: Everything that made the first game so good and then some.
• The bad: Microtransactions and an “open-world” that’s sometimes linear.
R599 for PC and R699 for console
