DesLife wrote:SUPEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEER MEAT BOY !
Damn this game is hard. I should get 100% soon I hope.
So you already started the nightmare levels, I assume?
:devilish glare:
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Okay, fine. I finally finished the Dragon Age trilogy last week. 'Twas a heck of a journey...here is my "little" review of the third one, freshly released during November 2014.
Dragon Age: Inquisition
(or why BioWare should change its engine for the next ones).
This is the third game of the Dragon Age series, a series of games taking place in the medieval world of Thedas, where "classic" fantasy elements (elves, dwarves, elementary magic, knights and castles, etc...) meet some other stuff (the parallel world of the Fade, The Chantry, the Qunari and their Qun...).
Uh, it's a bit too long to sum up, let's get a move on...
Here is the current situation beofre the third game starts: the people of Thedas is shaken by a war between the previously repressed (and now rebelled) mages, who can't bear the sanction inflicted upon them for their "natural" gift (or curse), and the templars, the order created by the main religion in thedas, The Chantry, to keep people (and mages) safe by restricting mages' movements to towers called Circles of Magi placed here and there in the different countries.
The main personality of The Chantry, Divine Justinia V, asked both factions to meet up with her in an assembly called The Conclave, in order to try to find peaceful solutions. But while everyone is gathering there, the place suddendly blows up and gets completely destroyed, while a breach between Thedas and the Fade, where demons and spirits live, is opened into the sky.
From the ashes, nobody survived. But, in a spark of green light, you, the main character, reappear in the middle of the ruins. You don't know what happened to you. But one thing is sure: you are the only who can fix all this freaking mess before the sky ends up on your forehead...
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First, for those who like fantasy: don't miss it, Dragon Age, and especially, Inquisition, is a great series of games if you want to discover a whole new universe. While certain elements remain, others seem bread new and very cohesive in your environment. Not as big as The Elder Scrolls', but it is a bit more recent (besides, how many universes did Bethesda really create? They prefer to focus on one...).
In terms of "in-fight" gameplay, however, a big, BIG downside:
DO NOT PLAY WITH A KEYBOARD.
I hope you have a pad with you if you want to paly it on PC, because controls are pretty awful with a keyboard: they are even less intuitive than in Dragon Age 2. It's even worse if you have played DA2, actually: instead of pausing the action to make tactical decisions, you are jumping, and autoattacks are skillshot moves...
YES...if you want to play a warrior or even a rogue, the first few hours will be a PURE NIGHTMARE. The AI for targeting is pretty lame. And you do'nt have tactical trees anymore, so you can't stop your teammates from launching crowd-controls moves, even if it's for two little wraiths.
This point can really wears you down during the first eight hours or so (if you don't rush it, a good run takes up to 60-65 hours), as the options proposed by the Inquisition at that point are not really great either. However, once you pass your first encounter with the bad guy, things start to ramp up: you can still manage operations from your war table and craft gears, but now you have a big castle to customize here and there.
This is VERY important: Skyhold is really well done as a base of operations. The amount of rooms is gigantic, and the place where it is located is amazing! I won't say more, because it will spoil you all the fun...
About exploration, BioWare tried to create an opened world with incredibly large zones. Between 10 and 15 regions await you, with a few dungeons here and there. The design of the regions and environments is simply beautiful: I've never seen a desert looknig so dry or a forest so lively in a video game. You could spend at least 20 hours simply walking around, picking up plants and rocks, discovering caves and mountains, and sometimes trying to fight a dragon (and getting roasted by it because you are low level...). The travel system is okay.
The story is very nice. What's important here is that you feel you have a bigger impact than in the second game on your environment, way closer to the first one which was already good in that aspect (aside from the manichean plot). What I regretted is the ending, because, eh..., it just...kinda...comes right into your face. There is no real buildup.
To sum it up, at the end of the second game, when you were starting the final event, you would have a big chunk of talk, one boss fight, three packs of enemies, and then the final boss fight. Although I admit the final boss was very hard and challenging, there was no real building of tension during the last part of the game...kind of meh.
In Inquisition, same stuff...but without the packs of enemies. Two big boss fights, and that's it. You come back from a big plot mission in the south where you retrieved something from the villain, but the importance of it for yourself is not big. It's just keeping it away from the bad guy. Then the bad guy gets angry and ends up doing a kind of "1v1 me bruh" act.
That cliffhanger though...now I gotta wait for a fourth game. DAMN YOU BIOWARE!
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Overall, if you can get passed through the clunky key bindings for keyboards, the first few hours of gameplay, and the almost non-existence of plot twists (where Mass Effect was really better than Dragon Age), Dragon Age: Inquisition will be a really good game for you. There is even a multiplayer mode, although it's a bit disappointing considering how much time they have probably invested into it (kinda like: you start a character level 1, and can't finish the first dungeon you do unless there is already a dude playing reaver lvl 20 with a big-ass two-handed weapon he crafted after a hundred of games...jeez').
(End of half-rant).