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Premise: You are a Christian Inquisitor who is tasked with investigating a murder in a remote village. You’ve been called as there appears to be some talk of heretical magic being at play in this whole ordeal.
Good:
- A very unique setting and premise. The whole “Inquisitor” thing is legit, as you actually have a promotion mechanic that allows you to advance in ranks in the Inquisitorial Order. The promotions make a minor difference to your gameplay, they let you arrest & pass judgment on suspects w/o needing explicit permissions from senior members of the order. The promotion impact is different for each class. I played the Inquisitor/Priest. There’s also Baron (Thief) and Paladin, both of them have their own set of promotions. For example, Baron apparently gets an entire village upon getting the appropriate title/rank.
- Adding on to the previous point, the game features torture. You can torture suspects until they crack (& even after they crack). The novelty wears off quickly when you realize just how bare-bones it is. Suspects can’t accidentally die under duress, there’s no variety of having suspects being susceptible to one form of torture more than the rest.
- There is variety in your missions as an Inquisitor. The devs did the smart thing of giving you more “heretic hunting” missions beyond the main one. Although, the investigation mechanic is pretty bare-bones.
- The art direction is absolutely fantastic. The churches, the pits of corpses around execution sites, the choice of font, the act introduction text etc. The health & mana bars are the most unique I have ever seen in a game. Each class has a unique health/mana bar (They’re still mechanically the same).
- The OSTs are amazing and really complement the world nicely.
- The world takes itself seriously. You won’t be taken out of it by frequent pop culture references.
- There are some very innovative side quests.
- A lot of effort has been put into item descriptions, lore and dialogue (This last one is both good and bad).
Bad:
- The combat is absolutely horrendous. Melee isn’t satisfying and lacks diversity. The skill system makes it feel like the entire game was made in mind w/ one class (Priest) as even Paladin & Thief end up using the same spells as the Priest. They don’t have a whole lot of spells that complement their own styles. Even as a high ranked priest, the combat isn’t fun. Kiting and applying DoT is the best strategy. When I say “DoT”, I literally just mean one spell, which also happens to be the strongest AoE spell in the game. Also, even the strongest spells have a high chance of missing. And I don’t mean the animation missed because the enemy dodged, nah. The spells can literally fail to cast.
- Enemy designs get stale very quickly. A lot of enemies don’t really fit the setting. From the premise, you’d expect to encounter demons, imps and other types of hellspawns. But, you actually face a lot of Ents, Ogres & Orcs in Act 1 and a fair bit of Lizardmen in Act 2. They do have Vampires and Werewolves, but I don’t think they take away from the setting too much, so those two monsters feel fine to me.
- Speaking of enemies, it’s not just their design, but also their mechanics. Every enemy can apply a status effect. The status effects in this game are horrendous to deal with, even at high levels. They’re annoying because they last anywhere between 60 - 120 seconds in real world time. The bosses also heavily rely on apply status effects. There is nothing creative about their moveset. Kiting and applying a DoT is the least painful way of playing this game. All of this is made worse by the fact that enemies don’t have a visible HP bar.
- The itemization is just plain bad. The game has plain items, magic items and unique items. The unique items are unique in name only. They don’t have a unique design and their attributes are completely randomized. Meaning, you can have 2 different set of attributes from the same unique item in two different playthroughs.
- The skill system is decent, but very limited if you want to truly role-play. For example, I’m trying to play as a “Pure” Inquisitor. Yet, I consistently use a spell called “Dark Mass” as it is the strongest AoE skill in the game. None of the “order” spells have such a good AoE. Conversely, the strongest single target damage spells are in “order”, so that impacts your ability to roleplay as a bad boy.
- The level design is good for the most part, except for when you hit a dungeon. Then, it’s the worst thing ever. Act 1 has the longest dungeon, with 6 full levels and 2 side paths. Now, this might not seem bad at first, but when you realized that there’s no fast travel (Town Portal or Waypoint), it feels like a nightmare. So, if you get a full inventory on level 5, you need to walk all the way back to level 1 to the edge of the dungeon and from there teleport to the town. They do have a pseudo-quick travel in the form of genie boxes. These are expensive items that let you get out of the dungeon from wherever, and also offer emergency vendor services. But, if you quit a dungeon, you;d still need to travel all the way back from where the genie teleported you because the genie’s teleport only works one way.
- The game’s quest log is a nightmare to follow. It uses a journal system similar to Sacred: Gold. But unlike Sacred, the quests aren’t neatly divided into separate sections, but rather are indistinguishable paragraphs of text.
- There’s a “karma” bar. I’m not really sure how it works though and about what benefits it has.
- The enemies respawn mechanic is similar to Sacred: Gold. So, if you walk a few meters away from a point, the enemies there will respawn (but not all of them).
- The leveling up is brutally tedious. Enemy XP returns dry up the higher level you go, and the XP requirements skyrocket at higher levels. The problem is, there’s a huge skill gap b/w level 25-30 and level 45, which is when you unlock the strongest spells in the game. This might not seem so bad until you realize that to comfortably clear Acts 2 & 3, you need the level 45 spells.
- You can destroy quest items. YUP! The game has a mechanic to destroy objects, which is neat and also comes handy in one of the quests, BUT there’s no restriction on what you can destroy. I actually ended up destroying one of the quest items accidentally. I temporarily ragequit, but then started fresh from another file.
- The game is also fairly unintuitive. It will take you ages to figure out how to learn spells and how to experiment with alchemy. On a side note, the alchemy stuff is really poorly implemented. A dedicated alchemy bench would’ve made crafting simpler.
- No voice acting. This isn’t an issue for most games but considering the amount of text in this game, a little bit of voice acting would’ve come a long way.
- No mod support. A lot of the issues in the game could’ve been solved by modding, but the devs haven’t provided any support for it.
- Red blob of death. There’s a weird glitch in the game that can corrupt your save file. Red blobs appear on the UI, at that point you need to kill the game process.
- The walk speed even when maxed out is horrendous, and it makes tracking back in the game very tedious.
Neutral: - I appreciate the effort put into the story and descriptions, but they really could’ve worked a little bit more on the story structure. It’s usually very predictable. Even in the main quest, you can easily figure out who the culprit of the crime is very early in a questline.
- The dialogue trees while extensive are ultimately not that great. I don’t being able to get thoughts of every named NPC on every quest. Diablo had that, but the NPC thoughts were short & witty OR the NPCs added some nice lore/context to the quest. In Inquisitor, NPCs provide lengthy explanations for each dialogue option, but they often repeat information. Which gets annoying very quickly.
My Thoughts:
The bad+neutral points outnumbering the good points should be hint enough that I didn’t enjoy this game. The game has soul and that’s why I stuck with it till the end. It would’ve been remembered a lot more fondly had the devs launched mod tools. Most of the game’s issue can be fixed by modding.