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Some missions, after scouting out the area, you will take on yourself, for example: the Storm Coast you need to go and meet a mercenary group lead by Iron Bull who you can then have join your Inquisition if you so please. This in turn makes him available to add to your party and other perks involve an exchange of information between himself and his council. The reason for heading out to the Storm Coast, initially, was rumour of Grey Wardens in the area and your spy operative wanted you to check it out. Completing these side quests grants you extra power and levels up your Inquisition experience as well as character. The Inquisition levelling grants you 1 point per level and you can then spend the points on perks, these perks range from better combat, better social skills for diplomats and the likes. You will also gain power points; these are needed for some of the missions you can send your operatives out. Everything ties in together; if you decide against doing side quests you will have fewer points and may find that you cannot send someone out on a mission.
The world itself is split into large areas, you will head to these areas to complete side quests, close rifts and progress the story. Here you will come across various small story arcs like the one I mentioned about the watchtowers. The thing is though these areas are huge, when you set up camp more icons appear on the map giving you even more to be doing and exploring. It can be a little overwhelming at times. The first main area (Hinterlands) I decided to do everything available and explore a bit. One section of the map was too high a level for me involving a Dragon so I had to revisit it later after levelling up, there is also a closed off keep which I had to revisit later along in the story. So far in that area and after completing the tutorial area I had already spent around 9 hours playing!
Combat tends to work better as a 3rd person ARPG: you hold R2 on the pad after locking on with R3 to keep doing the basic attack. Extra more powerful attacks get assigned to the buttons on the fascia and R1. There is also a switch where holding L2 lets you access another 4 skills that you can assign. You also have the option to pause combat and assign specific attacks and movement to party members. In most cases though this option isn’t needed and feels a little tacked on. So far, I have only really needed to use it when hunting animals. Set your mage to cast ‘freeze’ to slow the creature down so your other party members can then catch it for melee damage. I also don’t like the fact that you cannot appear to zoom out when using this tactical mode – a zoom would be handy here for you to survey the battlefield to find best places to put characters and see enemies etc.
Unfortunately, during combat and accessing menus, I have found that there can be a bit of controller lag. When pressing start, for example, to bring up the ‘Hero’ menu where you access the map, inventory, character sheet etc, it doesn’t instantly appear. The same goes for selecting items within this menu. During combat, when a lot is happening, I have also noticed that additional actions don’t immediately respond to controller input. This is usually the additional attacks you assign to your standard buttons.
Go to page 3 for more thoughts on the game.
Retro at heart and lover of all things ’80s, especially the computers, the music and the awesome movies and TV shows! Crazy huge retro gaming collection spanning the ’80s and ’90s with hundreds of tapes, discs and carts for various machines on top of a 600+ strong Steam library that is ever-growing. No I am not a serial hoarder, just a dedicated retro gamer!