‘Dragon Age: The Veilguard’ Review: A Well-Aged Dragon

I believe context is important when writing reviews, so up front I think it’s relevant you know that…I do not really like Dragon Age.

While BioWare’s Mass Effect remains one of my all-time favorite single player series, I have bounced off Dragon Age several times. I didn’t like the first game and didn’t get very far in. I think I beat the second, but I can’t remember really anything about it since it was 13 years ago. And after 15 hours in the Hinterlands in Dragon Age Inquisition, I called it a day.

So, am I a bad choice to review Dragon Age: The Veilguard? If you want to know what it’s like for a series die-hard, sure. But Inquisition was ten years ago, and the idea is no doubt to attract at least some portion of a new audience. And as a person who hasn’t loved it in the past, I will say that I really liked Dragon Age: The Veilguard. While anything I say here may run counter to the “but they changed this from the other games!” commentary, I can only review it for what it is. And I enjoyed it.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard deals with the aftermath of the traitorous elven god Solas attempting to tear down the Veil which will destroy the world. Not great, but Solas says he will minimize the damage and it will be better in the long run, trust him. We do not trust him and stop his ritual, but in the process accidentally free two even worse imprisoned elven gods who now want to infect and rule our world. Oops.

The central “Veilguard” refers to us, you guessed it, assembling a team to take them on and save the world, with our character “Rook” being sort of a nobody, but thrown into all this by a working relationship with Varric, and all of this takes place ten years after the last game.

Unfortunately, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is one of those games that takes a while to warm up. I’m talking like 8-10 hours, but in the scope of my 65 hour, full run of the game at about 80% completion, yeah, that is technically just the start.

Combat was initially hard to get used to (parrying in this game is bizarre) and I wasn’t really vibing with the early team members. But as the game progressed I got to know everyone, and started working on an actual character “build” for my slashy poison Rogue through skill points and gear, everything felt better, both narratively and through gameplay.

Combat is the polar opposite of the famed Baldur’s Gate 3, which will be an unfortunate comparison point for Veilguard as no, of course the overall game is nowhere close to that good. While Baldur’s Gate has extremely technical turn-based combat, here, things have gotten very, very arcade-y with splashy combos and rechargeable moves/spells for you and your teammates. You’re always controlling Rook, but can issue spell commands to them for “primer/detonation” combos. You can queue up moves while pausing combat but I rarely saw the point of that at all, as it was mainly just spamming detonation spells, damage or healing when I needed it. I know at least this is a significant departure from past games.

I’d say for about the middle 30 hours of the game combat felt good. It was more involved than the clunky start, but the last 20 hours or so it just got really, really repetitive with not much enemy diversity and a reliance on a small handful of combos that were miles better than anything else. No boss fights at all gave me trouble in the end and I couldn’t go below 80% life most of the time. I could have upped the difficulty further, I suppose, but I didn’t feel the need to spend much extra time in these encounters with so much story to experience.

Level design was something else that opened up in time, as it initially feels extremely linear to the point of boredom, but the more you play the more these zones keep widening and widening with something like 140 gear chests to find, as well as health upgrades and skill points. Some were readily accessible, some were utterly maddening puzzles I never solved. But it was a varied landscape that grew on me over time and avoided the often wasted space of a fully open world.

BioWare seems to understand the central draw of their games, the team experience and getting to know each member, be they friend, rival or love interest. So much so that I would say a solid 70% of the entire game is some form of companion quest. This is not Mass Effect’s do one big mission, go on one hangout type stuff. Five missions, five hangouts? Yeah, that’s closer. Sometimes this feels like a bit too much as did I really need to fast travel to a forest to walk ten feet and have a three-minute conversation with someone? Repeat that about 20 times.

Probably the character I liked best was…me. Rook, who I thought was a well-designed custom protagonist in terms of personality, and one not relegated to total silence like we sometimes see in the genre. And the character customizer was great. Anyone who is making “ugly” characters in it, as previously complained about, is just bad at it. And overall yes, I did like the art style that may not have come across as well in trailers. I don’t think hyper-realism is always necessary, and no, I wouldn’t call it “Fortnite” either, as that seems too reductive.

Over dozens of hours yes, I really did end up liking my team quite a lot, albeit I did regret my romance choice. I won’t say who, but by the time I figured out I wanted to switch, two teammates indicated they were into my two other romantic prospects and well, I didn’t want to be a jerk. If you’re wondering if this is a game where “choices matter,” I can only speak to one playthrough so it’s a bit hard to say, but there is one clear very, very big choice early on affects the bulk of the entire rest of the game, and is probably worth a second playthrough on its own. And it’s not just “should I do the good thing or evil thing.” You really cannot be evil in this game. Not really even a jerk. Just sort of…blunt.

On the larger scale, even with my limited knowledge of Dragon Age lore, there are some big, big reveals about the nature of this universe by the end of the game that were genuinely interesting to me. I found that more interesting than the central “kill these bad gods” plot, which led to what I would consider a somewhat by-the-numbers final mission that if you’ve played a Mass Effect game, the format is familiar and a little forced.

Is this the game Dragon Age fans have waited a decade for? I have no idea. Maybe not. But for me, someone who couldn’t get through any of the other games, I often couldn’t wait to play more of The Veilguard. It could have used some editing, more gameplay complexity and maybe some sharper writing in parts, but it did many things well and I enjoyed my time with it quite a bit.

Score 8.5/10

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.