Inquisitor

I loved the game, spent at least 100 hours with it It is smart, but most of all doesn't insult the users with braindead quests and challenges. The art is amazing, the sounds are cool, you have a morality meter and a world influenced by it. The bad part for me was the combat that is really grueling. I feel the skills are not powerful enough. Another thing is the lack of choice - you always have choices, but not something that would fundamentally influence the game world If this would've come in the Arcanum/Fallout era, it wouldn't be such a big deal, but in this day and age, its a breath of fresh air, and it blew me away. So my final suggestion, play on easy and consider difficulty scaling like this paladin<priest<thief for combat. As for quests, pay attention to everything and DON'T DESTROY WHITE ITEMS

Inquisitor is getting a lot of love from people because it's "old-school." Ignoring the obvious fallacy in praising the game simply because it resembles older titles, the fact of the matter is that while it has beautiful 2D backdrops and a wonderful soundtrack, plus a lot of features older RPG players will love, it's simply a complete and utter mess of a game. Combat makes up about 75% of Inquisitor's gameplay, and it is horrendously bad. It basically plays out similarly to Arcanum's real-time mode, which you may know is pretty bad to begin with. Where things get even worse is in the game balance. Enemies in Inquisitor all have massively bloated hit points and take an extremely long time to kill. There are only a few worthwhile "tactics", like using magic to kill ghosts instead of physical attacks. The game is not challenging in the least, only tedious. If you have potions (be prepared to buy thousands of them, by the way, and devote 3/4of your inventory to them), combat is easy, but long-winded. If you have no potions, you will die. The only time combat gets in any way challenging is when you find a boss to fight, or a few especially cheap enemies. Bosses can often kill your party in one second flat, even if you have huge amounts of hit points, armor and resistances, and some enemies can stunlock you to death, where the only defense is to mash your potion hotkeys and hope you can break free. None of this is in any way exciting or entertaining. The second part of the game, its investigations into heretics, are generally much more enjoyable due to the focus on story and character interaction. There's often a good sense of mystery in searching for clues and evidence to crimes, and (very rarely) you have a bit of choice in how events play out. Side-quests are very neatly intertwined with the main story, which is quite nice to see in an era of FedEx MMO-style design. However, there is far too little of this in the game, and the actual processes for completing investigations rarely involve any decision-making, instead boiling down to simply clicking dialogue options until they disappear, then re-checking other NPCs to see if they have more to say after you have completed X or Y conditions. In short, it's under-developed, and it doesn't help that the text, though in copious supply, is not especially well-written or interesting. Sometimes a bit of personality or humour comes through, but for the most part it is fairly boring and standard stuff that you will begin to skim over after a few hours. The only real redeeming quality of the game (except for its visuals and sound, which again are top-notch for a game of this type) is the game universe. The fantasy-style world infused with Dark Ages-era European history and religion is original and interesting, and at first, a joy to explore. Unfortunately, after that thrill wears off, you are basically left with a horrendously awful combat grind, which is also prone to the occasional crash and save corruption just for good measure. In short: stay away. Nostalgia (and nostalgic people) might tell you to buy this game. It is not worth your time or money, unless you are willing to put up with patently terrible gameplay to reach the good parts. I love old-school RPGs, but the fact is that Inquisitor would have been considered terrible had it come out during the "golden age" when there was actual competition for it. Unless the game gets some mods or cheats to fix the combat, I cannot in any good faith recommend it.

Bottom Line: About half Diablo (in combat), half Baldur's Gate (in dialogue trees), with a pinch of the old crime-solver routines of Blade Runner or the Gabriel Knight series. If you really like these games, add a star, if you don't like EITHER of these games, subtract two stars. You'll spend too much of your time doing both of these things for you to hate either one of them. I would say I'm about a quarter through this game and feel like I have a pretty good sense of what it has going on at this point. Story: Alright, so Baldur's Gate this ain't, but I remain interested in what's going on up to this point. There have been enough twists, betrayals, and interesting side quests to keep me occupied, and there are no "collect ten demon gallbladders" or "kill all the rats in the basement" wastes of time that you often get in games like this. The sheer amount of dialogue rivals Planescape Torment, though it's nowhere near as interesting or philosophical. Generally speaking, you get a sense pretty quickly of which conversation items you can skim through and which ones you need to pay attention to, and the journal is exhaustive in cataloging things that matter if you ever get lazy and skip something you shouldn't have. Translation: The English dialogue can be a little stilted and doesn't sound quite right to a native speaker's ear, particularly at the beginning, but I stopped noticing and settled in with it after a little while. Graphics: Odds are you're on GOG because this aspect of the game isn't as important to you, but I'd agree with the first reviewer here---pretty artwork and bad animations. The map is hilariously drawn. Combat: Very much Diablo/real time action. You don't get much of a chance to think through what you're gonna do. It's mostly just click and shoot, click and slash, click and cast, and so on. I'm playing a thief on Easy and not having too much trouble, but your melee combat meat shields will go through a LOT of your hard earned potions. Save often. Crime-solving aspect: This, in my opinion and based on what I've played so far, has been overblown in the description of the game. There's certainly a proof collecting aspect of the game, and there's some questioning that relates to that, but this is a very minor aspect of everything. At this point, the "crime-solving" parts haven't been more than 5% of the game. Don't get this game if that's what you're really looking for. Some people treat 3 stars as if it's absolutely terrible, but that's not what I mean here. This is a totally fine, perfectly playable game, and I don't regret buying it at all. Just make sure you know the influences it's drawing from before you put down your 15 bucks.

I respect what the creators tried to do here. They tried to go down the Planescape path, and in that regard, it works. There is a lot of dialogue, and investigating. You're going to spend a lot of time talking with people, and the fact the game keeps notes for you is a HUGE help. I love investigating and putting together the different pieces of the story. I love how everything, at least in Act 1, is interconnected. Can't speak for the rest of the game as I haven't gotten past Act 1. So what don't I like? The combat. There is no polite way to say this: they screwed up royally. It's not the difficulty, it's the way the handle things. Any form of combat uses up stamina, whether you are a thief or a priest. When you are out of stamina, you can't do anything. You can barely move, AND you can't fight. Stamina regenerates slowly, and only when you are standing still. I often ran out of stamina mid-fight, and actually had to stand still and wait for stamina to recharge AS I'M UNDER ATTACK. Baldur's Gate series was never that hard, nor was Planescape's that asinine. Oh but wait, it gets better. Everytime you get hit, you lose stamina. So you can very realistically get into a situation where you die before you can even get a shot off. Of course that can happen in an RPG, but it's the fact they kill you slowly and can't do anything about it that makes it even more frustrating than getting one-shotted by a creature you have no chance against. So why in the world would I give it 4/5? Because of what they did right. The story, while fictional, is somewhat grounded in history. If it were taking place at a real point in time, it would be in the era of Tomas de Torquemada, who I named my character after. His name was associated with torture, but he actually brought reforms. You can't just randomly arrested people and burn them with no evidence. You need at least 3 different witnesses to a crime to arrest someone, and torture is to be considered a last resort. If you are the type of person who doesn't mind a LOT of heavy reading, if you like using logic to put pieces of a puzzle together, then you are going to like this game. If you want to play a game that balances story telling with balanced combat, however, go play Baldur's Gate II or Planescape or any of the other 'old school' RPGs. My memory might be a little screwed up, but I NEVER thought old-school meant frustrating.