Dragon Age: Inquisition is a very well written game, that still has some issues. I will try to keep it clear and short. I won't talk about all the features, but rather about my impression of the game. I will also be talking from a PC and Mage PoV (female, human). My play time at the moment of this review is 45 hours with one character.
The World - Visual Impression
What's good:
I myself am running the game on a suboptimal machine with an AMD FX-6100 processor, 4 GB Ram, a GeForce GTX 550 Ti on a Win8-64bit OS. So naturally I did not expect it running so well. However, the custom settings the game set for my machine were almost optimal in manners of performance. The game runs mostly on medium and low settings, except for textures, which I left on ultra. And it looks still beautiful. The mostly vast areas you visit look amazing and set a well designed atmosphere. The game clearly wants to emulate the feeling of free roaming like Skyrim and partly accomplishes that, especially when compared to previous DA games. Animations are mostly smooth and look natural and the visual effects - mostly in combat - look intense but not over the top.
What's not so good:
Well... first I almost never ride a mount. Because the whole animation looks ridiculously lazy. It feels like they though of mounts in the last 2 weeks of development and implemented it in a rather "quick and dirty" way. Also sometimes the placement of repeatable objects in the game is weird. Like a group of stones, that is actually designed for a flat ground, is laying on top of a small sand dune, causing some of the stones to be sitting in the air. Also invisible barriers and sometimes oversized collision boxes take away the feeling of a natural surrounding. Even if there are some elements of the Skyrim freedom, you soon will realize the limitations. Each area is its own instance limited by natural barriers (like sandstorms, water, rocks, cliffs, ...). This wouldn't be that bad, if there weren't those invisible walls, which annoy the hell out of me. Also that you cannot swim is a rather cheap way of limiting an instance for the player. Also I recommend you to play the game on a wide screen. On a normal screen some of the elements on the side are simply cut off. That is especially annoying at the war table, making it impossible to access some of the missions without changing the game window.
Gameplay - how does it handle?
What's good:
The tactical view is back. That is a good thing. Giving commands is easy and indicating the walking path of each character with a move command helps you predict and plan. Combat is smooth and is fun. There are also some options to make it more difficult, if you don't want the hack and slash of the normal difficulty. Playing on nightmare and with friendly fire activated offers a considerable challenge and requires not only tactical thinking but also strategic planing of abilities. The handling of conversations follows the standard bioware mass effect decision system. There are also often indicators for the character or source (like when you are a mage, you sometimes can say other things than a warrior for instance) of conversation options.
What's not so good:
That AI is damn stupid... why are they always standing in the fire... WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY?!?!?!?!?! Also the tactical camera being an adaptation from the console version makes it weird and requires some getting used to. Most annoying is that often you have a better overview of the battle when you are not in tactical mode. Often there are trees, rocks or other obstacles, that block your view and make it hard to impossible to reliably see what you are doing. The normal difficulty is laughable easy and I really don't see why there is even an easier mode...
Story progression - What are you actually doing?
What's good:
The story so far is amazing. And I barely can wait how it continues. It is very engaging and tackles some deeply philosophical (and very real) issues of religion, spirituality and faith. Also the integration of your previous DA characters and choices causes an unique immersion in the world of Thedas and its lore. I do not know how the game ends yet, but so far it is very interesting and the interpretation of the events is very much dependent on your own interpretation and fantasy. Here is where bioware managed to create a game, that walks the delicate balance between telling you a story and letting you influence it. Not only influencing it by interpretation, but by choice, by action. And your actions carry in some sense over to later missions on the war table.
What's not so good:
I only say: Harathi Hinterlands. It is the first area, where you are free to roam. It is easy to get completely lost in the vast amount of (loosely connected) quests. I myself was completely confused after the first hours of the game. Not knowing what I am doing and why. For a completionist it also tempting to collect every herb, mine every ore. If you do that, you will not progress very quickly. Resources and enemies respawn after each time you use map travel, which can make going from A to B very annoying. So the first hours can be critical and are (so I believe) also the reason for some rather harsh reviews. Leaving the hinterlands and doing some of the main progression helps break up the seemingly endless cycle of new quests and give you some perspective on what the game actually is about. But it is where the game fails to guide the player at the beginning and introduce itself to the audience.
What else - is happening?
What's good:
The game has a nice sense of humor, depending on which characters you take with you. One conversation I overheard yesterday between Solas - an elven Mage - and Sera - an elven, not so elvish Archer - was particularly funny (they don't really like each other). It wen't something like this:Sera: "Hey Solas, what does 'sorry' mean in elvish or something?"
Solas: "In your case:" [says something in elvish and explaines something afterwards, expecting real interest from Sera at this time]
Sera: (cheeky) "Thanks, now you know: When I don't say it, its on purpose."
Overall the game runs very stable and I had until now 2 bugs, which were fixed after loading a safe game or just ignoring them until the next cut scene fixed it^^
What's not so good:
Well, there are some awfully long loading times when transitioning between areas. But this can be also due to my limited hardware. I also play in windowed full screen mode. I don't know why, but with normal full screen it takes ages to switch to another tab and talk to a friend on Skype for instance. With windowed full screen the same process is way faster but barely causes performance loss within the game itself. Other than that there might be some minor issues with the game, which I don't remember atm.
Summary
All in all the game is very very good. If there just weren't those issues with the tactical camera, stupid AI, screen cut off on not wide screen resolutions and the occasional feeling of walking in a "fake" Skyrim (hitting invisible walls, being cut of by calm water from places where you clearly could go otherwise)... Also the overflowing with seemingly endless and trivial quests at times diminishes the game experience a bit. But the story telling, fluent fighting, the wit of the main story and immersive lore make this game well worth its money.