Dragon Age: Inquisition - Review Roundup # 4

Inquisition is clearly balanced with the third-person perspective and real-time play in mind. So it’s a shame that the third-person is sort of a poor man’s Dragon’s Dogma with an even worse camera and no sense of grip or weight. By the middle of the game, an AI-controlled sword-and-board warrior will be almost immune to single-target damage, and you’ll let them tank everything in real time as you mop up whatever enemies the computer hasn’t already killed for you. If you want strategy, go back to Icewind Dale.

And yet I played Inquisition much more than I had to. I killed eight dragons. I reloaded conversations to see every branch. I restarted long missions when I realized I’d forgotten to bring a character who might change them. (Take an elf to the elf places.) I keep hearing the score in my head—the big stupid parts, not the subdued ones.

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For all its mythical trappings, at its heart, Dragon Age: Inquisition presents us with the most intoxicating fantasy at all: That we will be loved, respected, and followed to the ends of the earth. That we will be able to make time and space for everything and everyone that matters to us. That even a world as vast as our own can be saved, if we only work together.

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If anything suffers as a result of this wide-reaching, impressively large amount of content, it's the fact that a game has a diluted focus. The potentially world-ending threat of Dragon Age: Inquisition doesn't feel to have stakes as real even as the relatively enclosed story of the second game, for instance, and many of the characters don't quite shine quite as brightly as those in Bioware's other titles - in large part because they are no longer the star of the show - that title now belongs to the excellent world of Thedas and the complex, fascinating politics that dominate it.

By offering such a breadth of content and then giving the player great freedom, Bioware greatly risks overwhelming many players - but that risky scattershot approach has, I feel, paid off here. If you're the type of player who loves that kind of freedom, you're in for an incredible treat. It's certainly the best Dragon Age has ever been.

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