Dragon Age: The Veilguard Review - Return To Form (2024)

Each new entry in the Dragon Age series is always transformative, so it's not uncommon for a fan to really love one of the entries but feel lukewarm about another. 2009's Origins played like a spiritual successor to 1998's Baldur's Gate, while its 2011 sequel took the series in a more third-person-action-game direction, and then 2014's Inquisition opted for gameplay that felt like a single-player MMO. If anything, the one constant to a Dragon Age game is that you can expect that each new game will be different from the last. At first, it looked like Dragon Age: The Veilguard was not going to surpass my enjoyment of past games, existing as no more than a safe return to form for developer BioWare instead of a bold step forward for the franchise. But inch by inch, The Veilguard has wormed its way into my Inquisition-loving heart. Is The Veilguard as complex and nuanced as past Dragon Age games? No, not at all. Instead, it delivers an action-packed romp through a fantastical setting with good friends.

The Veilguard leans into real-time action-based combat, building on the formulas already established and iterated on in Mass Effect Andromeda and Anthem to push Dragon Age toward something more frenetic. Utilizing a system of setups and detonations to pull off explosive combos, The Veilguard encourages you to lean into strategically utilizing weapon attacks and magical abilities to pull off deadly dance-like patterns. It's tricky to find the rhythm at first but figuring out the pattern rewards you with an incredible sense of flow. Large skill trees and three specializations per class let you curate the experience to your satisfaction, and I never grew tired of pulling off clutch counters and delivering severe magical beatdowns despite The Veilguard's massive story length and large assortment of optional side missions, most of which see you fighting even more enemies.

The mage is the one true outlier here. Early on, the class is easy enough to play, but as the story goes on, enemies get both more numerous and hardy. Your own attacks become grander and more explosive in response, leading to the screen filling with visual clutter. As a result, it can be frustratingly tricky to see the indicator for parries (which is already harder for the mage in comparison to the rogue and warrior), and oftentimes dulls the combat to a repetitive slog of flinging magical explosions, running away, locking back onto a target, and repeating--a step down from the far more satisfyingly strategic means by which the glass-cannon mage operated in past Dragon Age games.

It certainly doesn't help that The Veilguard's lock-on mechanic is awful if you distance yourself too far away from enemies, which is where you want to be if you're playing mage. It regularly unlocks from foes whenever they escape your vision by leaping, burrowing, or teleporting toward you to close the distance you're creating--the exact moments when lock-on mechanics are most useful for a glass-cannon class. This means a great deal of your time in a fight as a mage is spent accidentally firing off an attack at nothing, trying to dodge an attack you can hear but can't necessarily see, or scanning the arena in search of your foe. This can lead to frustrating deaths, especially on higher difficulties or against bosses who summon minions to help them.

These issues do not pop up all that often with the warrior, and I've never had them with rogue. The experience is night and day in comparison to the mage. The lock-on keeps pace with enemies thanks to the more reactive nature of the warrior and rogue's movements, the rogue's bow and arrow and warrior's Captain America shield toss snap to targets more consistently than the mage's arcane beam, and it's significantly easier to see the parry indicator without your own magic clouding your vision. The Veilguard is clearly encouraging you toward fighting up close and personal, and the mage is just not built for it. It does have a specialty known as spellblade that increases its utility in a close-range fight, but the mage's primary abilities are still best suited to fighting at a slight distance, limiting the effectiveness of the specialty. This is a significant problem in The Veilguard, where a significant factor of whether your protagonist can seamlessly fall into the desired flow state of the combat is decided at character creation with no means of changing your choice beyond starting the story over. You at least have a 2/3 chance, but every class should feel satisfying to play.

Worse, it feels like BioWare has even acknowledged that the mage struggles in comparison to the other two classes, giving it an ability to "switch" styles from a spell-slinging staff to an arcane dagger for close quarters, and although the dagger does handle a lot better (especially if you opt for the aforementioned spellblade specialty), it's still clunky to aim and use.

Most of The Veilguard's missions loop through the same formula of talking to an NPC, going somewhere, and fighting a lot of enemies. That can get repetitive when you're also dealing with the obtuse handling of the mage, but it remains consistently enjoyable with the more melee-oriented rogue and warrior that can easily lean into the parry and sword combos and experiment with how they're cutting through the different legions of enemies.

Combat isn't the only way Rook engages with the world; it's just the tool they use most often. The conversational pillar of The Veilguard is a rewarding cat-and-mouse game of building alliances, exploring boundaries, unearthing trauma, and grasping at secrets. Exploring each locale gifts you wonderful visuals and captivating lore that draws you into the world--even if you opt for mage, there's still fun to be had. I haven't run into any major story missions that can be resolved without fighting--there doesn't seem to be anything like Inquisition's delightful Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts mission--but your choices carry narrative weight throughout. One choice early on has drastic consequences for two of Rook's allies as well as their homes (which can be Rook's home, too, depending on which faction they pick at character creation), determining which optional questlines they can pursue in the second act. The effects of that choice are felt for a long time, and even if not every decision carries the same level of importance, it reinforces the notion that any one choice can alter the immediate direction of the story and have unforeseen longer-term consequences. I love an RPG that gets me to put the controller down and pace back-and-forth for several minutes to mull over a choice, and The Veilguard delivers on that, even if not as regularly as past Dragon Age games.

The story itself follows the titular Veilguard, which is led by your playable character, Rook, and tasked with stopping the machinations of the Dread Wolf--believed to be an ancient elven god of trickery, responsible for leading a rebellion and sealing away the other, more evil elven gods. Things don't go quite as planned during your first mission, leading to the once-sealed elven gods escaping their prison and seeking world domination, a threat more severe than the one the Dread Wolf posed. The story follows the typical structure of a BioWare RPG: recruit a team, befriend the team, fight some baddies, do some missions to increase your team's loyalty to you, get your smooches in, work step-by-step to reach the big bad. It's familiar but in a nostalgic and comforting way--it's a nice place to return to after what felt like an eternity away.

The anthology nature of Dragon Age means there's a new hero at the helm at each of these games, and that hurts The Veilguard more than the others. Rook is boring and, even worse, feels out of place in the story told in The Veilguard. Previous Dragon Age games have made tremendous arguments for why the player character is the one burdened with the responsibility of stopping the evil of their respective games, with Inquisition's Inquisitor even leaning into the "chosen one" trope, wielding a power never-before-seen that made them uniquely qualified for the threat at hand. No such considerations are made for Rook beyond the initial leader of the Veilguard saying that it has to be Rook and they're the best one for the job, despite all evidence to the contrary. I've spent most of my time with the game wondering why I'm even playing as Rook, especially when so much of The Veilguard's story feels like a continuation of the Inquisitor's tale.

Beyond feeling entirely out of place in comparison to the rest of the Veilguard, Rook feels somewhat aimless relative to their party companions, with not much in the way of an arc to pull the player in. Early into the adventure, there's a poignant moment where the Dread Wolf asks Rook why they feel they're ideal to lead the charge against the elven gods, and it feels telling that none of your available responses are especially good or convincing. Rook's situation becomes all the more perplexing as the game goes on and party members or important NPCs put tremendous stakes into Rook's opinions. It doesn't make much sense. Even if you argue Rook is a tool to make the game more approachable to newcomers to the franchise--as they carry no history you have to remember from a past game--it doesn't change the fact that The Veilguard's story doesn't seem to make a compelling argument for why this one person is important to Team Veilguard.

Even if Rook's position in the story is suspect, the level of customization options available to build them is fantastic. The numerous options in the character creator do tend to favor the more humanoid humans, elves, and dwarves, but I'm impressed by how much control you have over your appearance, regardless of their ancestry or gender. Your choice of background, ancestry, class, and gender can inform how your Rook engages in roleplay by unlocking unique conversation options, too. This is the best character creator I've ever used in a single-player RPG, and I'm eager to see how the different choices you make for Rook at the start can inform key moments in the story in multiple playthroughs.

The heroes who Rook aligns themselves with all present aspects of the culture or lore of Dragon Age that we've either never seen before or previously thought to be impossible. I found Harding's story deeply intriguing given the power she unlocks in the game's early hours, and uncovering the past about Bellara and Neve or learning more about the unique allies accompanying Davrin and Lucanis was a frequent narrative treat that left me eager to return to the Lighthouse hub between missions to talk (and flirt) with the colorful collection of heroes that evolved into somewhat of an oddball family. This isn't my favorite RPG party, but The Veilguard reminds you why BioWare is held as one of the undisputed kings of making party-focused RPGs. This is an incredible group of characters.

Like past Dragon Age games, The Veilguard's story is primarily choice-driven, and the cast of NPCs squirm their way into your heart one conversational consequence at a time. Crucial decisions that influence the companions' fluctuating opinion of the protagonist don't seem to pop up in The Veilguard as much as in past games, as I found it too easy to game the system to keep everyone happy over the long haul, but the RPG answers this shortcoming by making the fluctuating nature of the party makeup more prominent than previously. Your decisions can see your favorite characters needing to take a break from the action (and Rook) regardless of their overall perception of the protagonist, and there are numerous missions that force you to take a specific team member along, restricting how you build your party. In this way, The Veilguard injects strategy and reactivity into its combat, as your perfect team might not be available to you depending on the choices you've made during roleplay. It's very cool.

Thanks to The Veilguard's art direction, the environments look gorgeous. The game is filled with tantalizing visuals, ranging from artifact-filled forests of verdant greens and golden glows to canal-dominated cities of deep blues and evocative purples. This is an incredible-looking game, even during moments when it's trying to be scary. The music is tragically hit-or-miss, sometimes crescendoing to a level that manages to lend an important moment some much-needed gravitas but more often than not the music is drowned out by the combat or lacking enough emotional punch to be even noticed.

All said, none of my complaints detract from the fact that The Veilguard is a mostly sound game that works when you're playing as a class that can take advantage of its combat. I haven't run into any glitches or game-breaking bugs. No side quest feels too obtrusive or too fetch quest-y. And now that I've distanced myself from the mage, each combat encounter is snappy and avoids feeling too tedious or frustrating. The Veilguard feels like BioWare making a good BioWare game again, and that in itself makes me extraordinarily happy.

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