[Introduction]
Inquisitor is advertised as an isometric action roleplaying game.
Put simply, it's a Diablo clone. It does pretty much everything Diablo does. The perspective, the controls, the skill trees, the loot, the item quality, the hordes of enemies... the only exceptions seem to be the absence of item durability, an open world and a compelling story.
Let's begin.
[First Impressions]
I expected Inquisitor - Martyr to be... okay. Not great, but okay. The devs had previously made The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing, which was also okay. Unfortunately, my expectations of a "not great but okay" game kinda went down the drain pretty quick. The dialogue isn't very good, the gravitas of the situation falls flat as soon as you begin crushing enemy resistance like crunchy leaves and the story immediately raises more questions than it seems ready to answer.
[Development]
Developed by Neocore Games and announced in 2015, Inquisitor - Martyr was released in 2018.
I haven't been able to find much else pertaining to development, but it feels as though it was rushed. I don't know that it was, so take this with a grain of salt, but based on the final product, my assumption is that the development cycle was either cut short or something somehow went wrong somewhere.
However, it should be noted that it was much more of a buggy mess at release. Following the 2.0 total overhaul update in 2019, it became far more tolerable.
[Game Mechanics]
Before anything else, it should be said that Inquisitor - Martyr feels a little unpolished; there's a jank to it that makes it feel like an early access title in some regards.
Now, the game is ostensibly about an Inquisitor's investigation, but you'll be doing exactly 0 investigating, which strikes me as a tremendous waste. It makes me wonder: why even have us play as an Inquisitor? Considering that the gameplay is entirely focused on combat, you'd think it would make more sense to have us play as a space marine of the Adeptus Astartes or a Tempestus Scions stormtrooper.
Additionally, there's a distinct lack of a retinue. Ordinarily, an Inquisitor would have a number of companions with him on his investigation. Soldiers, psykers, bureaucrats, assassins, people who provide some service or another useful to the situation.
Instead, you're on your own. Not that it matters, because you're not really going to be needing a whole lot of help. Lorewise, there are Inquisitors who are combat monsters, but those tend to be the likes of Tyrus, who single-handedly banished a daemon prince, or Hector Rex, a literal giant who defeated the greatest of Khorne's Bloodthirsters by himself. Seeing how you're apparently not even important enough to warrant a retinue, it just feels out of place to be the deadliest person in the sector, despite the presence of space marines and greater daemons.
Naturally, seeing how you'll be killing thousands of enemies, you'll also be picking up an absurd amount of useless trash items. Fortunately your inventory is quite large and there's an option for auto-pickup, but you'll be selling or scrapping something like 95% of what you pick up.
This is in part because many of the items you acquire will have modifiers of questionable usefulness. They also appear to be entirely randomized by an automatic loot system, so you'll also come across items that have modifiers that appear to be more well-suited for an entirely different class to boot.
I'm also not sure why quality is even a tracked item stat. It never seems to be relevant And there are a whopping 8 item rarity levels. Ironically, uncommon and rare items are anything but, and you'll be acquiring a substantial amount of them, to the point that common items become rarer than both of them.
As for skills, there are a lot of passive skill trees (some of which must be unlocked?) and some of those passive skills feel like padding more than anything else. 5% extra move speed when wielding heavy weapons never seemed particularly relevant, especially when you can just swap to a lighter weapon at the press of a button. At least you gain experience at a high enough rate that you're unlikely to feel as though you can't fill out the skill trees you desire.
Glaringly, the world isn't open, which is a weird choice for a Diablo clone. Instead, you go back to the bridge of your ship between missions, where you can choose where to go next. I think the intention was to provide additional replay value or extend playthrough time by providing randomized missions from this hub, but there's little difference between randomized missions and story missions insofar as they play exactly the same.
There's a crafting system, but it's exceptionally grindy and the results are very RNG reliant. You get useless items out of it so frequently that you may as well not even try, thanks in large part due to the aforementioned randomized item generation and questionably useful modifiers.
Weapon variety is solid, but some seem redundant... sure, you can bring an autogun, but why bother when you can equip a bolter instead? Sure, the autogun is great for mowing down lightly armored groups of enemies, but... the bolter can fire frag rounds that blow up entire crowds at a time. Choosing between what amounts to a 21st century assault rifle and a .75 caliber automatic rocket launcher that fires exploding bricks made of zeal and spite, it's kind of a no-brainer.
The game also isn't very hard, and even special challenge missions aren't particularly challenging; the tarots that add mission difficulty modifiers in exchange for extra rewards don't do much in this regard either. Chances are, if you die, it's more likely to be due to some poorly telegraphed attack or post-death explosion than anything else.
The cover system has omnipresent notifications but is largely pointless, which ties into the aforementioned UI clutter. At least you can turn off half of the notification, but it will retain an indicator for some reason. Surely if I turn off the cover notification in the options menu, it's because I don't want to see a constant reminder of where I can take cover.
The cover system is completely useless to boot, although it should be noted that you can destroy enemy cover. As enemies frequently take cover (due to the player being a self-propelled instrument of destruction) it's pretty neat that some weapons will affect cover in various ways. Satisfyingly enough, bolters will actually visibly chew through cover. And other objects.
Most objects, really. Even the floor, although you can't fall through those holes. If nothing else, they certainly did the bolter justice. Sometimes it'll cause your brain to enter Ork territory and you end up just shooting stuff ineffectively because it looks and sounds cool. At that point, if you kill something, it's a happy accident. That, I can appreciate.
Some mechanics occasionally don't work as intended - for example, alarms will sometimes still activate, even though you destroyed them. Voice lines during gameplay also occasionally drop in quality and start stuttering, although I have no idea why.
There are attempts to spice things up with vehicle sections, but they feel like an afterthought and neither the game's engine nor controls seem particularly well-suited for their implementation.
Oh, and at least one mission failed to load and just froze the game. One of the Drukhari missions. I'll never know where it was going.
[Graphics]
Not bad at all; the scale of 40k is on point. The actual scaling of some characters and objects seems inconsistent, however, but that's a minor gripe. Similarly, some character design choices are weird, such as the tattoo eyebrows on one guy.
Generally speaking, it's a visually satisfying game. It might not be particularly realistic looking, but realism isn't what you really want in a Warhammer game. That said, the areas can be rather bland, so if you're expecting a wide variety, you might want to temper that expectation. Whether you're in a hive city or aboard a ship, there's gonna be a lot of muted colors and a lot of metal.
Also, for whatever reason, subtitles for other characters appear next to their Space Webcam feed in the top right. In contrast, subtitles for your own dialogue appear at the bottom of the screen, which just seems like a weird UI decision. It necessitates that you move between two separate locations to keep track of dialogue - three, if you also count the dialogue that appears above characters' heads.
Really, the UI is generally quite cluttered. It can be annoying to navigate.
[Story]
You play as an Inquisitor, although it's never specified which Ordo you belong to. You're on a mission to discover the truth regarding another Inquisitor, Uther Tiberius, and what occurred aboard the Martyr. Near as I can tell, it's some class of cruiser, perhaps Gothic, but it doesn't matter. According to the game, it's a Fortress Monastery.
Now, if you know Warhammer 40,000, then you probably know why this is a... questionable designation. If you don't, then let me explain: Fortress Monasteries do exist in the setting. The issue is that they have nothing to do with the Inquisition, but are the headquarters of Space Marine Chapters.
Anyway, you shuttle from your own ship to the Martyr to begin your investigation. I'm not sure why the developers insisted on using a valkyrie transport for this purpose, considering that the valkyrie is an atmospheric transport. The Imperium has dedicated transports designed for use in space, and they even have existing models that are very detailed.
But I digress. You make it to the Martyr, and the hangar defense turrets immediately open fire on you. Fortunately you survive both the plasma fire and the crash, but no one else aboard does, and so you're left alone. This is also questionable, because ordinarily an Inquisitor would have some kind of retinue, but not us.
The rest of the game is a sequence of "investigations" - by which I mean you fight your way through missions until you reach a bit of dialogue at the end, at which point the mission ends. In other words, there's no actual investigating going on.
The story is, frankly, a mess, and not a very interesting mess. It's ostensibly about an Inquisitor's investigation, but is actually just a string of weak dialogue whose only function is tying together sequences of effortlessly killing a staggering number of enemies.
The voice acting of that dialogue is, for the most part, subpar. Sometimes it doesn't even match what's presented to the player on screen. For example, there's a moment where the player character remarks on the presence of dead bodies, but... there are no dead bodies in sight, just a bit of blood on the ground.
There's also a very real chance that bits of dialogue will get skipped if you keep moving around while it plays out, because if you trigger new dialogue, it overwrites the old dialogue. So on top of the story already playing fast and loose with a lot of Warhammer lore and not being particularly good, you might also miss out on important parts of it.
Throughout the game, you also make a number of "Morality Choices" as part of your investigation, which could be an interesting element. The hard choices Inquisitors have to make are an integral part of their profession and a key reason so many people fear and hate them. That's why it's so unfortunate they really don't do much and are based on the barest explanation of a given situation.
There's no further investigation and all gravitas one might apply to the situation is effectively moot, because it doesn't matter. Even the characters involved in the decision barely react in any way beyond the simplest of responses.
I will also confess that by the end of it all, I'd forgotten most of the previous story elements leading up to that point.
[SPOILERS]
You find the Alpha Pariah and she destroys a Greater Daemon.
She doesn't banish it. It's not reforming in the Warp after being killed on the material plane. It is fucking GONE, permanently, which means a fragment of a Chaos God has been obliterated. This ups the stakes a lot; I cannot overstate how significant it is that a small part of Nurgle is now just gone forever.
So where do they go with this from there? No idea. That's where the main story ends, and I'm not paying 25 bucks for the standalone DLC. Supposedly the Alpha Pariah just ends up flying into a Warp rift and closing it while saying something about how the immaterium must be ruled.
[Pros]
- Mowing down enemies can be fun
- Bolters feel like bolters
[Cons]
- Mowing down enemies is pretty much all you'll be doing
- Tremendous wasted potential; this game could have been so much more, and so much better
- The story is fairly uninteresting
- Lore accuracy is wishy-washy most of the time
- Lootboxes
[Conclusion]
It's mediocre Diablo clone with good bolter portrayal at best. I really don't have much else to say.
Wasted potential is one of the saddest things in the world. Moral compass optional.
/DUX
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