Dragon Age: Inquisition (PlayStation 4) review "If I started my own inquisition, I can guarantee its goals would be nowhere near this altruistic."

For the majority of my time with Dragon Age: Inquisition, things were pretty awesome. While it might not have matched the standard set by the first game in the series, Origins, it was way more fun than Dragon Age II and its obsession with repetitive cut-n-paste dungeons. The only problem was that things faltered down the stretch — which, for me, included its three expansions.

Why? After some deliberation, the answer was obvious. But first, let's get into why I enjoyed this game long enough to feel let down by it during those final hours.

Inquisition starts out with a bang. You control a character representing one of the game's various races and who battles as a warrior, rogue or mage. At the onset, you're under the watchful eye of Cassandra, a Seeker for the Dragon Age world's church, due to being a suspect in a massive explosion that took place during a historic summit — a matter not helped by how you don't seem to have a clue as to what happened. However, due to minor details such as a large assortment of monsters being in the vicinity, she and Dragon Age II character Varric allow you to tag along in a bid to fight through the enemy.

And, lo and behold, you find out you have a very special power. At the end of this tutorial area, you'll battle a massive Pride Demon and, upon killing it, your hand glows green and you seal the dimensional rift that beast and its lackeys came through. This marks the beginning of a massive quest in which the three of you, as well as a number of other allies you'll come across, start up an inquisition in order to venture from one land to the next in order to close rifts that have been popping up everywhere, solve the mystery of just what happened at that summit and how you were involved and wind up taking on a variety of powerful foes, including the powerful and evil magister Corypheus — a being you'll be pretty familiar with if you played all of Dragon Age II's DLC.

This game's world is pretty huge. It's divided into a large number of regions that can be accessed from a map, with each of those places having an assortment of plot objectives, side quests and massive numbers of goodies you can collect. When not exploring and getting into fights, you can hang out at your home base and both converse with party members, as well as visit your war room to have your advisors solve various problems around the world. Some of those missions lead to additional places to explore — all of them do a great job of illustrating that you and your party aren't the only people trying to save the world.

After finishing the tutorial, you'll venture to a place called the Hinterlands. After doing a bit of plot advancement there, you'll get the option to side with one of two rival factions — the mages or the templars charged with keeping those folk docile. The one you pick will be an ally; the other will be snatched up by Corypheus to serve as adversaries throughout the game.

Regardless of who your allies and enemies are, you'll gradually explore region after region in this game, with the the occasional plot-important mission popping up to let you know there are more important priorities out there than simply exploring dungeons for treasure. The variety of locations you'll find yourself in is pretty impressive. If you're a series veteran, you'll get to re-visit the Fade — that mystic dimension where all the world's demons originate. You'll go to such vacation destinations as a deserted village located next to an undead-infested pond, a war-torn battleground and a vast desert spotted with ruins. Your party members will banter with each other and you'll be able to recruit specific NPCs to serve as war room assets. Due to your rift-closing abilities, you'll even wind up the face of your inquisition, directing it in its endeavor to save the world from the beings threatening to unravel it.

The larger variety of places to explore automatically made this an improvement over Dragon Age II, but this might have been a truly elite game if it had returned to the Baldur's Gate inspired combat system of Origins. Alas, it didn't and what you'll get is a somewhat improved version of the second game's battling. Regardless of your character class, you'll program a number of special attacks into your controls and use them as often as possible, resorting to regular attacks when everything else is on cooldown. One nice addition is that, after expending a skill point to purchase those moves, with a number of them, you'll have the option to expend another point in order to enhance them in one of two ways.

As per my norm, I was a melee fighter — using a sword-and-shield approach, as opposed to two-handed, in order to have a bit better defense. With one of my attacks, I was able to purchase an improvement that allowed me to utilize it constantly as long as I wasn't the character drawing that foe's attention. So, I made sure the warrior Blackwell, who specializes in attracting enemies in order to protect comrades, was in my party at all times. He'd get their attention and I'd be able to use that move extremely often, as it wasn't common that the opposition was focused on me.

Another way I made combat go by more smoothly involved equipment crafting. This is something I don't really delve into in that many games, as it's usually pretty easy to obtain comparable and even superior stuff from treasure chests, enemy drops and quest rewards. Here, though, if you can collect high-quality materials — either by harvesting them or harvesting the monsters that drop them — you can easily make amazing armor that offers great protection against both physical attacks and at least one form of magical.

Sadly, this played a role in why things faltered a bit down the stretch for me. Turns out that with a few notable exceptions, such as the final boss of the game's The Descent expansion, creating really good armor can go a long way towards mitigating the damage done by enemies. And that's about when you'll discover that whether you're fighting mandatory bosses or optional ones such as all the dragons scattered throughout the land, those guys often are damage sponges capable of holding out forever, even if it's quite unlikely they'll be able to exterminate my party. Making matters worse, if anyone did fall, it was likely my mage and rogue characters and their array of quite lethal attacks. Blackwell and I could hold out for nearly forever, leaving me with a lot of fights where, despite the two of us never really being in danger, I would be tapping buttons for an eternity while the enemy's life bar was depleting so slowly I was unsure if my attacks were actually having any tangible effect.

It's kind of a double whammy when you're playing a game and find that you're usually not in any real danger of dying against tough foes, but their durability ensures those fights take forever — the sort of thing that can easily take me from loving a game to just wanting it to end. And that's a shame, as I felt that, overall, Inquisition was a fine return to form by BioWare after the missteps made with Dragon Age II. The combat system might have only been a slightly evolved version of II's, but this game did a great job of giving me a variety of large maps to explore that were loaded with quests to do and things to find. The sort of world that I could lose myself in and have to tear myself away from any number of off-the-beaten-path adventures in order to advance the plot a bit. The way my enthusiasm faltered as I got closer to the end of this lengthy game doesn't mean it's bad; it just means it fell a bit short of true excellence.

Community review by overdrive (August 18, 2023) Rob Hamilton is the official drunken master of review writing for Honestgamers.