I have the game. I've put somewhere in the ballpark of 60 hours into it.
The Kotaku review is a sales pitch, as are many of the other professional reviews. Yes, the game is impressively large and content packed. Like Origins, the dollar/content ratio for Inquisition is very good. The voice acting is also very good and the graphics are excellent on each of the platforms. Unfortunately, that's where the success ends and failure begins creeping in.
The story is unoriginal. I won't give spoilers, but outside of a few "that's it?" moments, nothing in the main story or any of the side quests (including most of the lore you find throughout the game) is remotely new or interesting. It is generic save the world stuff. There are also some inconsistencies with lore and how members of the game world interact with one another.
It is abundantly clear that Bioware or EA made the decision to make the game diversity compliant. What I mean by this is that there is no semblance of humanity in the human race. It has a distinct utopian feel wherein nobody shows any type of group preference outside of some rather bromidic aristocratic political infighting. Meanwhile, all of the bad guys are exactly the opposite. Consequently, the game wreaks of political tokenism and demands a fair amount of suspension of disbelief.
The combat system is terrible. Quite literally, combat consists of holding down the primary attack button and DPS spamming special abilities as their cool down timers expire. There is no strategy, there are no tactics (the "tactical" camera is merely a fancy way of pausing the game), there is no thought in combat at all. It literally boils down to watching animations and special effects until someone's HP bar is depleted. Contrast this with Origins, where you could design entire battle strategies from the tactics menu.
Most of the non-story quests and challenges are unoriginal, both technically and conceptually. There is a lot to do in Inquisition, but it's all things that have been done a million times before. Go here and find this book; find all of these special artifacts; close all of the oblivion gates rifts; kill the rogue templar; reassemble this sword by clearing the dungeon; collect this many resources to complete this task; so on and so forth, ad infinitum. Quite simply, it doesn't do anything new or interesting.
The facial animations are also poor. I generally expect this from Dragon Age, but the polish elsewhere in the game really makes it stand out in Inquisition. Origins looked like garbage, so the low quality animations were fitting. Here, they are conspicuous.
Even with these issues, the game is still fun most of the time. On a scale of utter failure to masterpiece, it weighs in at decent. Reviews that skew far to the left or right on this scale are bias, authored by people with a bone to pick or sales to push.
