Star Wars: The Old Republic has a seperate tab for quest items, many of which are usuable, both from the inventory and and toolbars. It's also HeroEngine based.

Is there like a free or cheap version of HE or something?

HeroEngine has a Free Version for Indie Developers (Well Free for Development, Once you go live if you get to that point then they take 30% of profits. They use a percentage of that 30% to pay for the Server Hosting and if it takes more then that percentage to run your game then you have to pay for the rest of the server hosting)...