Dragon Age, Inquisition: Our chief weapons are...

Bioware's fantasy forces in fine fettle

Magic moments

Consistent with Dragon Age II, I controlled a generic party of four characters, Mages, Rogues, and Warriors. Each class has multiple skill trees: Warriors have great weapons or focus on tanking, brandishing a shield, Mages get four schools of magic and Rogues can dual wield or use ranged attacks.

A game of skills

During dialogues, you get multiple options of how to respond – gaining approval or disapproval from your party. I controlled the combat of all four characters by pausing the game to manually issue orders to everyone; it can be tedious but it’s essential.

Other games, such as Divinity: Original Sin, have done this more efficiently. Indeed, games that use action points in combat are tactically more satisfying than games that pause time. It would be remiss not to mention that the only part of this game that doesn’t truly deliver is the combat.

When shall we three meet again..?

Dragon Age: Inquisition’s multiplayer is all about BioWare's D&D origins and is basically a co-op dungeon crawler – luckily, I have just put plenty of hours into the new Gauntlet. As a party of four, it’s a dungeon rush for gold and loot.

A word to the wise: watch out for those darn microtransactions... and praise Andraste that there’s no paywall. This Qunari chick won’t be spending her real world paycheque on Platinum any time soon. That said, I can see the addition of multiplayer is an excellent way to extend the game's lifecycle after the campaign, if 85 hours just isn’t enough for you.

The magical Northern Lights? Surely not

The Reg Verdict

Dragon Age: Inquisition is stunning on PC and an early Christmas pressie for those with next-generation consoles who will never get to experience Divinity: Original Sin. This rambling, magnificent open-world RPG is a deeply satisfying experience, full of exploration and depth to keep even hardcore adventurers content.

There’s the scope to lose silly amounts of hours in this game with a huge amount of content and locations present on release. The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies isn’t out for at least another three weeks, so until then I know where I’ll be getting my fantasy fix. ®