Dragon Age: The Veilguard review – is this the redemption of BioWare?

Dragon Age: The Veilguard – BioWare are back to their best (EA)

After 10 longs years of waiting, BioWare finally make a new role-playing game, with a stunning new entry in the Dragon Age franchise.

Set in the land of Thedas, Dragon Age’s fantasy role-playing franchise tells the story of demonic invasions from beyond the Veil, the flimsy barrier that separates reality from the realm of magic and gods. 15 years ago the first game, Origins, dealt with the emergence of the Darkspawn, and the venerable order of the Grey Wardens’ defence against it. It’s been 10 years since the last entry in the franchise but, just as importantly, The Veilguard also sees the return of developer BioWare, to the style of action role-player they’re best known for.

The Veilguard begins with the selection of your character’s species – elf, human, dwarf or Qunari (similar to Tieflings from Dungeons & Dragons) – as well as their class and faction. You’re also asked to pick the outcomes you had, or wish you’d had, from previous game Inquisition, with those events forming the world’s recent backstory.

It turns out the Darkspawn are back. A 1,000-year-old Elven mage has decided to get rid of the Veil entirely and, when your character Rook sets out to stop him, their actions inadvertently release two massively evil, previously imprisoned, elven gods into the world. Having let all that chaos loose, it’s your job to stop it, so you begin assembling a band of allies to do the impossible: killing two almost infinitely powerful gods, to cure the world of the blight they’ve unleashed.

The blight itself takes the form of tendrils of tumescent fleshy growths that don’t so much spread across the land as metastasise. Their luridly organic polyps form the basis of many of the game’s environmental puzzles. You’re regularly tasked with searching for and destroying their roots, so you can unblock corridors to get your group to their next objective.

This time the Grey Wardens’ leader thinks you’re an insane conspiracy theorist, dismissing Rook’s warnings and trying to have them arrested. You’re not quite on your own, but your band of seven plucky recruits needs to take on the bulk of the work, and the fighting, with only minimal assistance from the Wardens and the game’s other warring factions.

While your overall party is seven strong, you can only take two team members with you into the field, forcing you to choose which of your friends’ powers you want to bring on each mission. That’s meaningful because with four species, three character classes, and numerous factions to choose from, you also have a vast web of abilities to unlock, leading to hugely different strengths and weaknesses.

Levelling up, and activating special statues you find around Thedas, gives you skill points used to unlock nodes on that web, its extremities giving access to three deep specialisms, and the exceptionally powerful abilities that come with them. You’ll need to be at least level 30 even to activate those, and level 40 to get their most hardcore powers. You can also only have one specialism active at a time, although the game generously lets you refund and re-spend skill points at any time, so you’re free to experiment as much as your patience and natural curiosity warrant.

It’s a great system, and with a bit of perseverance you can acquire powers that completely change the course of battles. And what battles they are. One of the criticisms levelled at Dragon Age: Inquisition was that its fights lacked oomph, stuck in a no-man’s-land between individual swordplay and team tactics. Clearly stung by those accusations, BioWare have poured everything into Veilguard’s combat, and it shows.

With shades of Darksiders in its fast, stylish, combo-driven fights, you now only have control over your own character, but can pause the action at any time using a shoulder button, letting you unleash special moves from all three party members. Upping the ante still further, there are certain abilities that combine with each other, one priming the target, the next detonating them for big fireworks and even bigger damage.

Despite the number of powers at your disposal, the system for using them is immediately intuitive, and you find yourself fluidly spinning spectacular special abilities into the frenetic heat of battle, pulling off showy physical combos of your own as those powers land. It looks and feels fantastic, and as your team gains access to more skills, battles only get more involved and dramatic. You find yourself eagerly anticipating the next encounter so you can unleash another few rounds of destructive pyrotechnics.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard – there are a lot of dragons in it (EA)

The Veilguard’s environments are just as fully realised. The Lighthouse, your base, has an actual massive lighthouse magically suspended in mid-air, surrounded by rooms for your teammates, chunks of old buildings, pieces of masonry supernaturally floating around it, and for some reason giant tree roots. Whatever it’s all for, it looks great.

You’ll visit an undersea prison; a subterranean necropolis; Venetian-looking Treviso, with its canals and spires; the Lyrium Sanctum – a cathedral-sized structure deep underground in a cavernous space carved from blue crystal; and places like Arlathan Forest, that players of past games will have heard of but never seen. Everywhere you look there’s wonder and beauty, and the bright colours and immaculate art direction make everything look built for fun.

The voice acting is also excellent. Whether you choose a male or female voice for Rook, there are alternatives for both – an astounding feat given the length of the script. BioWare has once again gone out of its way to embrace diverse approaches to gender, but not in a way that feels preachy or overbearing. It’s just another small part of its world and the characters who inhabit it.

Conversational choices have ramifications, and the game is very fond of reminding you of the consequences of past decisions. Messages pop up to tell you when a character approves or disapproves of something you say or do, and when you’re experiencing the outcomes of an earlier choice, you’re explicitly informed about it. Whether you enjoy that degree of specificity will be subjective, but for a game with such an involved plot, you’re always completely sure of what’s going on and why.

There are volumes of optional side quests, some of which help grow bonds with party members, revealing more of their backstories and eventually making each a Hero of the Veilguard, unlocking their most powerful skill. You can also start romances with them, deciding when and whether to get serious, while the campaign missions create a palpable sense of crescendo as you get deeper into the war against the two gods. Boss battles are so massive and all encompassing, it’s dizzying to find out that what you’ve just accomplished is a mere waypoint on the journey to your final showdowns.

If you’ve recently been playing Larian Studios games, like Baldur’s Gate 3 or Divinity: Original Sin 2, this will feel a little more on-rails, the majority of your time being spent following destination markers. You can choose which story or side mission to undertake next, and what to say in conversations, but it offers less freedom than those games, preferring to let you express yourself in the action sequences rather than the deep tactical minutiae of Larian’s titles.

The fights are great though and so is the dialogue, even if over the course of well over 50 hours (if you get stuck into the side quests) it’s stretched a bit thin in places. The extraordinary number of times you’ll need to choose a conversational option, telling your teammate that you’re right behind them on their personal problem or vendetta, is unknowably vast. Of course, you could always pick the comedy dialogue choice, or the stoic one, but the reality of adventuring is that your journey encompasses many, many minor quests, and talking about them is bound to get repetitive.

The moment-to-moment reality of playing Dragon Age: The Veilguard is that it’s absolutely cracking fun. Its puzzles are challenging without being killer, its characters generally likeable, and its fights comprise some of the finest and most satisfying action sequences you’ll find in a role-playing game. It’s a vast, often funny, but always engaging battle against the forces of darkness, and the best of the series so far.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £69.99
Publisher: EA
Developer: BioWare
Release Date: 31st October 2024
Age Rating: 18

Dragon Age: The Veilguard – this bodes very well for the new Mass Effect (EA)

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