Dragon Age: Inquisition, Online Review

Dragon Age: Inquisition’s multiplayer can’t hope to match up to the single-player campaign in terms of story, dialogue and interaction. even if you’re talking to your friends via voice chat, they’re unlikely to regale you with tales of their daring escape from imprisonment or the time they made out with a demon. but that’s not to say it’s not still worth your time it has its own charm, even if it does suffer from worse repetition than a Justin bieber song.

The basic premise is similar to that of Mass Effect 3’s co-op effort: you gather a gang of up to four pals, each with their own class (limited to archer, warrior and mage at the beginning), and try to explore, and survive, five randomly generated locations within a chosen building.

The first two destinations are simple enough, as waves of enemies come at you and you slaughter them all, but it gets progressively tougher with each room. optional tasks such as ‘rescue the informant’ and ‘protect the important books’ require a slight shift of tactics, as you’ll have to cover certain members of your team and lure bigger enemies elsewhere, but otherwise it’s pretty much more of the same:enemies come at you, and you must make them die.

“Your team of four’s task is to survive five randomly generated areas”

there’s quite a lot of juicy loot scattered around hidden behind magic barriers, in jars or by the golden nugs (a creepy pig-rabbit) that tries to scarper before you get the chance to kill it. this loot is then used to buy chests,which contain potions, weapons and tonics but very rarely will you actually receive anything you want. Playing as an archer means that you’ll invest a lot of time and energy into levelling them up, but it means that every time you spend your hard-earned dosh on a chest full of useless battleaxes, you'll feel reasonably cheated.

Thankfully, salvaging unneeded weapons spits out handy crafting materials, which can be used to upgrade or create weapons and armour. crafting certain types of armour will unlock new, far more exciting, character options but we haven’t managed a single one yet, because it’s tough as nails to actually achieve. or could it be that EA wants us to spend money on microtransactional ‘platinum’ to fast track the process? hmm...

Disappointingly, matchmaking doesn't seem to exist you’ll be thrown into a lobby with level-one and level-18 players alike,and you’ll quickly find out who gets the most XP from the fighting. worse than that is the dialogue between characters, which at first seems sweet and funny but quickly grates after the millionth time you hear, “let’s go for drinks afterwards, because that’s what friends do!”

There aren't really any bad experiences to be had with the multiplayer just average ones. batting off waves of bad dudes is fairly mindless, made more so if you pick a non-melee character who never really gets stuck in. it’s worth a try if you’re exhausted by the campaign, but it’ll never be your true love.

7/10