3/5 ★ – ChucklesBiscotti's review of Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard is one part Final Fantasy 16 and one part Guardians of the Galaxy mixed in with just a dash of Hogwarts Legacy (and some of the sickest hair tech around). For me, having never really played any other Dragon Age games, I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing for huge fans of the series, but the mixture worked for me. It's an open-world game, but you're not really in an open world. You go to instanced one-off spots, and then there are various cities/hubs you can return to for missions/collectibles/and so on. You retreat back to two other hubs that act as your home bases so to speak, and they have their own secrets/missions/discovery points. This is where the Hogwarts Legacy and FF16 comparisons come from for me. The combat and interplay between the characters is where it's more of a serious version of Guardians of the Galaxy in some respects, albeit still maintaining some of that FF16 DNA (though I do think you can make this game much harder than FF16). In terms of BioWare games, I think this one tracks closest to something like Mass Effect 2 because of how the companion system plays out over the course of the game, but I would think a healthy number of BioWare games fall into this category to some degree. You build up relationships with factions and companions, and your choices and the amount you put into those relationships builds and builds towards the finale when everything is on the line. It weaves this together with multiple antagonists with conflicting goals to create a complex mixture of stories. This complexity in the main story lacks depth at points because there is a lot going on (I ran through the main story in 25 hours or so, but there's likely 30+ hours of side content here that I'm mostly saving for my second playthrough). To keep things relatively in check runtime-wise, you sometimes get those Star Wars prequel moments where Obi Wan just tells Anakin (but really the audience) "hey remember when we fell into that nest of gundarks" to sort of build up a prior relationship or push the plot along. It's an off-screen moment where it can come off as a lazy way to say "no no, see they really are friends" or "we didn't have the budget to show this thing or the runtime, but we're going to the next part of the story now, let's go." I think BioWare mostly pulls it off without it seeming too "lazy" or anything like that, but it can make the plot feel stilted at moments. I'm also assuming some of the lack of depth with portions of the story is because some context is implied/unsaid from old DA games I have not experienced. Regardless, it's when the game does decide to slowdown for moments where a lot of the best character work and writing can come through. The interactions with Solas are brief but always worthwhile because you are making these micro-decisions that ultimately don't matter a ton (sort of like most of your choices in older Telltale Games) but they're impactful enough that he can play off what you said in a way that feels more like a real convo as you learn more about him. (This game is also very player-friendly as they make you auto-saves before every major decision you make, and you have 100 manual save slots as well, so you should always have a place to go back to if you want to change something. That said, there is no post-credits return to the state the game was in before the finale, so if you want to keep playing your save, you'll need to return to one of those saves anyway.) The companion quests also seem like they're main quest adjacent as the one set of quests I did do for the one companion were very impressive and did a lot to make me care much more about that character and the backstory. In other words, I think there's plenty here I still haven't even touched yet that I'll be impressed by in a subsequent playthrough. But I wouldn't want to play any game again just for the story. The gameplay here is what I would call clean and straight forward. I played as a Rogue who was more interested in parrying/dodging and then pulling off FAT ranged damage mixed in with my abilities that I would build up through dodging/parrying and quick combos. Outside of some issues with the targeting system at times, I really don't have a ton of complaints. The parrying was way more impressive than I expected (and challenging), and there's plenty of optionality if you want to make specific portions of combat easier/harder. It's not doing anything really unique with parrying/dodging, it's mostly just doing the Batman thing without a combo meter that ticks up, but it's very fluid, my frames never dropped, and I think I had one combat glitch the entire playthrough. I would appreciate a little more enemy variety, and a couple more big boss fights (this game actually handles large enemies much better than most action games so it feels like a missed opportunity not to lean into it more), but the enemies that are here are memorable enough in terms of look that you remember their strengths/weaknesses, which is a major positive. There's tons of problems with a game like Suicide Squad, but for me, one of the more unforgivable ones is an art style that doesn't make the enemies memorable enough that you remember how they fight because you don't want to have to be reaching to remember that sort of stuff when you're fighting those mobs many times throughout the gameplay loop. So you can play this almost entirely like an action game and succeed, but then you can also stop combat all the time to give your companions their marching orders, select the abilities you want to use, and so on. I have some doubts that it would be as engaging to play as a Mage if only because I don't think there's a ton of systems in place to stack damage and so I feel like you'd just be in the quick-actions menu more often to just do more spells, but I haven't messed around with that class so I'm just guessing. However, I think that might be the case because the biggest "combo" stuff you tend to do is using these primers (think of them like lighter fluid) with one ability and then using detonators (the match) to create combos. Outside of that mechanic, there's not tons of stuff where you stack one thing on another. In addition, I don't think this combat would be nearly as interesting if you're trying to play it as a slower RPG with faux-turn-based combat that is closer to something like FF10. To me, this is an action game with RPG fixins (again, FF16). I may do a Warrior on my second playthrough for this reason, but my guess is I'll still do Rogue again because there's still so much of the skill tree I did not experience, and you even get to become specialized within your class to make it a little more unique (you can only pick one specialty). But much like the rest of the game, it's very easy to reset the skill tree and re-spec your character if you don't like the gameplay style you're using. All in all, it's not that there isn't depth to the combat, it's just more about being good at the raw mechanics and then as you master those, you get to use your more powerful abilities more often. So if you master "the basics" then you get to hit dingers all the time (that analogy makes sense, there's plenty of baseball in DA if you just don't think about it at all). Bringing things back to a broader scope, as a BioWare fan coming to this series with the one real blind spot on my BioWare resume being Dragon Age, I didn't know what to expect as I didn't follow this game at all pre-release and have no real connection to prior DA lore. It won over this BioWare fan and turned me into someone who would scope out another DA game. I'll be fascinated to see how the true DA freaks receive it now. But no matter their opinions, there's a race to say BioWare is back (baby), and I think it's true that they mostly are, but the race to say it in part probably comes from the fact that it still feels like we need BioWare. We have Larian Studios with Baldur's Gate 3, and we hope a company like CD Projekt who can hopefully stay on the right path and return to the heights of Witcher 3, but I think you need a studio like BioWare creating these sorts of games on a semi-regular basis to fill out the landscape. I never want to see once-great studios simply lose all their juice, and regardless of the developer turnover and everything else, BioWare remains an important studio for many folks out there, and BioWare desperately needed this win to find some semblance of normalcy once again. Now, let's see if Mass Effect gets the same treatment...