Intro :
Here come my personnal review of the Xbox360 version. It is a pretty rare one, everybody making reviews for the next-gen and PC. English is not my first language so don't search some hidden messages or harrassements against one person or another : I'm a countryside guy and say what I must say.
Character Creation :
Choose a bald human male. With no beard. And with two weapons rogue as a class. All the rest is irrevelant. Females players get two straight backstab love interest, elves got two broken arms, Qunari had a poor hair customisation and no helm to protect them and the Dwarfs.... well, with the hunck of plastic floating near the jaw called "beard", playing a dwarf is a no-go. Same problem with the hair but fear not! Bioware included lot of different bald haircut! Why rogue with two weapons? To oneshot all the dragons of course.
Control and gameplay :
Probably good on other support, they are horrific on 360. Each and every skill you use had a great chance to backfire at you. The more usual is the fact that the skill doesn't trigger at all and you must press the button like crazy until the skill launch. The more troublemaker ones are the second list of skill : press LT and the second list of skill appear... after one second of fast loading time. Don't ever dream to use quickly a skill of the second list, you must wait one full second before trying one of them. The skills that make your character move will give you chills : you can jump down a cliff, move 50 meter away from the action, fall through the ground, climb a tree... Better do them with lot of walls all around to stop your movements or in a complete flat arena with lot of space. If you can't choose the place of the fight, just pray!
Allied AI is very variable : If you are a warrior, she is nearly perfect. If you are a long range rogue, she is terrible. Use the tactical cam when they begin to make things like mage tanking a big sack of HP!
Character management :
Like a lot of RPGs, you have some things to do at each levelup. Like the capacities tree that enable a growth strategy. You gain XP with regularity and some levelcap cut the possibility for grinding low level enemies. No, the problem lies in the inventory. Making a game with a huge amount of (non-respawnable) loot, limited inventory and no possibilities to stock turn the game into a micromanagement one. All the game long, you play like you only have a small team of adventurers fighting in the wilderness with no hope to rest or use a HQ. They have one, but they don't have the right to use any of his facilities like low-ranked soldiers.
Inquisition management :
War table missions... and it's all. You finish the game with 200+ power points without doing any of the Inquisition fetch quest. Here we are in front of a big game design problem. The gold is provided with limited quantity but enough to buy some of the best schematics or upgrades. On the other hand, all the Power is useless and you can need a lot more Influence points. Yeah, Influence skills are great, interesting and change the gameplay at some points. But it is broken. The fact that the war table mission are timed give me a pretty hard time near the end of the game. Lot of mission that need 6+ hours to finish and don't know if they will have an impact on the end. So I finish them all by the way Bioware want me to play it : Begin the mission and... cut the power off of the console. One set of 3 missions per day during more than a week... The more boring cliffhanger before a final boss I ever seen!
Story :
Looks great, need lot of lore to understand it fully... but don't have an easy access to all the lore. Very very little font at all the codex entries makes my eyes cry and really turn into a pain the fact to go deep into the lore of Dragon Age. After the first half of the game, I stopped reading it totally. Sounds like a lot of Mass Effect 3 (find allies for the final battle thing) with less implication : The Dwarfs, for example, are only joined by some letters and war table missions. You will only see one and only clan of Elves. Mostly human in fact, your allies are untrustfull and I waited all the game long a backstab that never happened. Against you, the strategy of your archenemy looks stupid and he made one and only one direct attack against you. Even the final battle, he seemed to hope you will never come. I missed the tricky Harbringer or the army-crushing Reapers...
Sound and music :
Big bad point here. The sound effects are bugged as hell. When you use close range weapon, you have the sound of cutting air with your blades even if you crush flesh and bones. Half of the time, your footstep sound disappear. The trigger of the radar may highlight something but you don't have the "ping" sound. The music is even badder : begin and fade with high speed, most of the battles are soundless or have bugged sound (three times, I even get the war table sounds during a fight...). Even against the dragons, the music can fade away and I waited until the final boss to have a music lasting all the fight! Forget absolutely some music in the wilderness or to present some characters, this game is mostly musicless. Big bugs with the bards too. Oh and the banters... man the banters... they are pretty enjoyable... on Youtube.
Bugs and bugs and bugs and....
Never seen so many bugs in so little time before. And I had most of the Windows versions! Re-pop of the textures, enemies vanishing in thin air, loot teleporting out of range, quest items floating out of range (a book of Varric and one of the text in the hissing plains), trees floating one meter over the ground, collectible ore so deep in the wall you can't have it, game freeze when you try to talk to your allies in the HQ, game crash if you try to make a Judgement, falling through the ground if you try to access your garden by the door (must access it by the wall to do the Morrigan quest)... I must stay vigilant on my toes at each and every moment of the game : the main danger for my party is not the mobs and the bosses, it is the game itself that will take every possibilities to corrupt my save file (5 destroyed so long) and every chance to totally block my progression. Must talk to an NPC to advance the main plot? Say your prayers because if it glitch, you can restart a full run!
Conclusion :
4/10
And I'm really nice. The maps are big and pretty. The small quantity of banters I get were interesting and/or funny. You find a lot of different items. For the bad points, see the list from above.
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