THIRD TIME REALLY IS A CHARM
Dragon Age: Inquisition
Bioware’s return to gaming after the Mass Effect 3 debacle heralds a return to form for both the company and the Dragon Age series. It’s pretty impressive to see the massive retooling BioWare has done here, pulling the series from the pit that consumed the second instalment.
Inquisition has an epic story that weaves past Dragon Age games and cast expertly into the narrative. If you’ve stuck by the series from the beginning, here’s where it all pays off. Of course, that’s a double edged sword. In catering to the faithful, BioWare has alienated newcomers. They’ve done an admirable job to ease newbies into the world of Dragon Age but with so much backstory and material to cover, it was never going to be enough.
Fusing both real time and turn based systems might seem like a bad idea, but it works superbly well here. Combat’s unforgiving this time around, especially on higher difficulties and is a tad unbalanced but is fun enough that it never becomes overwhelming. That is unless you play a Knight Enchanter, then you’re unbeatable.
The biggest flaw in Inquisition is inventory management. It’s archaic, stupid and the interface makes everything a chore. If you have to spend time figuring out whether a new equipment piece is better or not, that’s a bad thing. Worse still, there’s not even a sort option to reorganize your items. Whoever did the UI for the inventory systems should be shot.
Of course, what’s a BioWare game without glitches? Inquisition suffers from its fair share of bugs. Be it conversations that don’t trigger, freezing issues and even corrupted saves, Inquisition has it. To Bioware’s credit, the game’s been patched numerous times since release and most (if not all) of the game breaking bugs have been squashed, but if you’re playing on a console with no internet connection, the experience might not be as pleasant as you’d expect.
In fact, Inquisition pretty much requires an internet connection (though it’s not mandatory). With internet access, you can connect to Dragon Age Keep, a service that lets you manually create a backstory of the world based on past games to your liking. It might feel like a cheap hack since there is no compatibility to import from past games, but most importantly it works.