14 DAY TRIAL // For the first five or six hours of Dragon Age: Inquisition I refused to push T on my keyboard in order to activate the Tactical View, even if the game quickly explained what it had to offer and how it would affect my long-term experience in positive ways.
I wanted to play the hero with my dual dagger wielding rogue, getting in behind enemies occupied by my fighter and relying on Varric and mages to deliver destruction from long range once I backstabbed my way through battles.
The approach was successful for a while and I like the dynamic nature of Dragon Age: Inquisition, although there are moments when the action moves a little too fast for my taste.
And then, I encountered the Fade rift that features a Greater Terror for the first time and I lost my party two times before I resigned myself to using the tactical view a lot, controlling all my characters and trying to make sure that their various powers worked well together.
When playing on the normal difficulty level, Inquisition is not a very tough game to progress through, but there are some battles that feature difficulty spikes that even an overhead look and time freeze cannot easily overcome.
Hitpoints and healing potions
The best decision that BioWare has made for the combat system is to limit potions, eliminate healing spells, and share the basic resources among all party members.
Re-supply is only possible at camps, which can be far between, and that means that once level 13 to 17 enemies start popping up, it’s very important to make sure that stamina is well used and that combos are activated as often as possible.
Battling giants, pride demons and their escorts, and finally dragons poses some unique challenges as the characters need to be kept away from some powerful special attacks, and careful management of resources also plays an important role.
Unfortunately, towards the end of the single-player story, BioWare can no longer challenge players by introducing new enemy types or more powerful attacks and it gives opponents massive amounts of hitpoints to compensate, which leads to long fights that are not particularly exciting.
Actually, the most interesting combat sequence in the entire title for me took place much earlier, involved only human opponents, and forced me to significantly alter my tactics and my party composition in order to deal with a powerful enemy front-line fighter.
