Dragon Age: Inquisition review – a truly monumental game

Electronic Arts; PC (version tested)/PS3/PS4/Xbox 360/Xbox One; £45; Pegi rating: 18+

A few hours into Inquisition, my party staggers out of a bandit camp on the Storm Coast to the sight of a giant hurling a boulder at a charging dragon. “Can we watch?” asks Sera, my elven archer accomplice, with a giggle. We sure can.

For several minutes the behemoths hammer at one another, hemmed in by ancient dwarven ruins and columns evoking the Giant’s Causeway. Lightning strikes sporadically, the accompanying thunder barely masking the roar of the wounded dragon, which eventually thinks better of the battle and retreats, leaving the battered giant standing dazed upon the beach.

My level-five party are potion-less and barely breathing, but this is an unmissable opportunity to claim a prize that would usually be beyond us. Our chief weapons are surprise, fear and a Ferelden axe, which is fatally delivered to the Giant’s skull by eye-patch wearing Qunari warrior Iron Bull. “Today is a good day, a very good day,” he beams.

This moment represents all that is great about Bioware’s latest fantasy adventure offering: player-driven epic encounters across vast settings, backed up with memorable characters, all rendered in a stunning new engine.

Inquisition marries the spirit and scope of Origins with the flashier approach of its sequel. The first area you venture into after the linear opening is bigger than the whole of the first game – and it’s crammed with things to do. Side-quests are usually presented and dispatched with minimal fuss or moral dilemma, but completing them earns you power which can be used to access new areas or standalone missions. You select these from the war table at your fortress, which is customisable right down to the choice of drapes, and the whole of Orlais and Ferelden is your playground.

Crucially, the compromised combat of Dragon Age II is jettisoned along with its recycled environments. You can choose to play third-person – switching between characters at whim – and at lower difficulties you can largely let the AI handle your accomplices. For tougher fights, however, pausing the game and rolling the camera back becomes a necessity. Experimenting with different strategies is a central part of the game, but I never tired of having my rogue stealth around the battlefield, dropping mines next to foes who were promptly taunted to step onto them by my warrior. Also: shield-bashing enemies off ledges.

There are issues. Yet again your mage’s attacks can’t hurt your side, which undermines the treatment of magic in Dragon Age lore as something to be respected and feared. More practically, the camera frequently misbehaves, which can leave you lunging towards thin air; I also longed to be able to zoom out further for better tactical oversight. There’s a pleasing splattering of blood to the melee, but when battles become larger, it can be tricky to follow the action.

Place and plot

You’ll want a better view too because the locations are so darn pretty. The settings sound generic – forest, desert, temple ruins – but Bioware is good at giving tropes new twists and packing locales with incidental detail. So when you ride along a desert path and stumble upon a green oasis, you should dismount and study the objects scattered around. Read the note by the lute and examine the nug teddy; you’ll piece together a story.

Inquisition’s narrative works best when it thinks small like this. The opening dumps an avalanche of lore on you (newcomers will be baffled) and the overarching threat of an expanding rift hole in the sky and an ironically one-dimensional villain never truly cohere into something memorable.

Walking the tightrope of how people perceive you remains enthralling, however, particularly given the mage vs. templar war and the fact people think you’re the Herald of Andraste whether you want them to or not. Cue Life of Brian-style hilarity imprinted onto Dragon Age’s racial and class politics. You can choose to be human, dwarf, Qunari or elf, but it’s only the latter that will see you given a broom by mistake the first time you visit the blacksmith.

There’s no visible morality meter in the game and you intuit your standing by how your followers react to your choices. The quality of writing and voice acting makes this a joy, but it’s the way characters can say as much with the curl of a lip as they could with ten lines of dialogue that truly impresses.

Cutscenes are sharp but intermittent, wedged amongst spiralling dialogue trees that occur between static characters. This isn’t helped by bugs: occasionally I couldn’t skip lines with the space bar, instead my character jumped on the spot like an impatient child. The cast are well worth chatting to, nevertheless, including familiar faces like Varric. My favourite is Tevinter mage Dorian, full of knowing winks. “It’s the same old tune,” he remarks wearily about your enemy. “Let’s play with magic we don’t understand, it will make us incredibly powerful”.

The set-piece missions that further the plot are fantastically varied. They range from leading a siege that rivals Helm’s Deep to playing “the game” of court rivalry at a ball in the Orlaisian capital Val Royeaux, a dangerous mix of Downton Abbey and The Wire. You must step away from the festivities to investigate sinister manoeuvres, but stray too long and your absence will be noticed and your reputation diminished.

These grand escapades sit alongside fetch quests for 10 pieces of ram meat, of course, but if you think such things beneath you then ignore them. The war table is always flush with intriguing missions for you or your agents. It can feel overwhelming at times but this isn’t XCOM and failure is literally not an option. Quests come with simple suggestions of what level your character should be, and I suffered no critical blowback from any of the daft decisions I made in the course of the adventure.

Inquisition gets under your skull like red lyrium. Objectively, you know your followers singing the theme music to raise morale after a great loss is cheesy, but you still find yourself humming it on the way to work. Then you spend all day at work thinking if you can find 20 elfroots you can improve your potions sufficiently to beat one of the 10 dragons. That truly will be a good day in what is a truly monumental game.