Dragon Age Inquisition Review This Is the One Youve Been Waiting For
Scouting the rain-hammered shoreline of a coastal region in Dragon Age Inquisition, one of my companions spies a giant with tusks thick as logs trading blows with a dragon. "Badass," he says, chuckling. And I stop to watch, because it is badass, like so much else in this alien otherworld the sun flaring like a UFO in a forest of trees tall as redwoods skies that look by turns cerulean or bloomy or haunted or storm-wracked phantasmagoric landscapes with deranged rock cities and archetypal motifs out of a Jungian nightmare dragons spitting fireballs like meteors. Which is strange, because you could argue the Dragon Age games up to now have been the opposite of impressive, with pedestrian visuals, anticlimactic battles, fiddly interfaces and narrative non sequiturs. Theirs were societies saved not by long-slogging armies or international diplomacy, but scrappy squads of godlike activists. Bioware's best known for the latter, devotedly tilling ground popularized by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in the 1970s. The Canadian studio's second game in the late 1990s was a licensed Dungeons  Dragons homage, which begat a minor renaissance in computerized DD-play. But the studio slaved itself to that system's ideas, and when Dragon Age Origins arrived over a decade later, we were still, in essence, replaying Baldur's Gate a choose-your-own-adventure bricked together by peripatetic exploration, reductive arithmetic and relentless conflict resolution.