Game 20 of 2024 - Dragon Age: The Veilguard

Dragon Age: The Veilguard

Developer: BioWare
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Platform: PC
Genre: Action RPG

Difficulty: Moderate
Hours: 52

Finished: Yes
Final Rating: 8.3/10

DA:TV is fine. Sure, it's a pretty bog standard paint-by-numbers fantasy story, the dialogue ranges from mediocre to downright embarrassing, and none of the characters are all that interesting, but there is a lot of fun to be had.

Let's start with the positives, I guess. The world is beautiful. Every corner of every city and cave and forest seems to be carefully designed, and it shows. 

 

The battle set pieces are something else, as well. There's some great setups here that lead to some dramatic fights (some annoying ones, too, but we'll get to that later).

How am I supposed to fight that thing?

The combat is also a good bit of fun, if a bit weird. Gone is the grim, bloody combat of the original games; this is some full on comic book shit. I chose to play as a mage, and you might think of mages as squishy back line characters but nope. My Rook was mostly a melee mage, shooting lasers and magic daggers and all that shit. Teleporting all over the damn battlefield chucking fireballs and lightning storms was a good bit of fun. And it's not just the mages that get lasers, the rest of your party gets them, too! They are constantly shooting glowing arrows from midair, breathing fire, and summoning firebombing griffons or whatever the fuck was going on there.

Ok, so now some of the negatives. Exploration is mostly fun, but for some reason there are some jumping/platforming segments and they suck. Awkward as shit. Also, fast travel is prevalent in this game thanks to some magical mirrors. While that saves a lot of time and that's appreciated, it kinda makes the world feel, I don't know, small? 

Combat? Like I said before, it's pretty fun. However, enemy variety kinda suffers after midgame. You're encountering the same groups of guys over and over again, and when BioWare wants a particularly difficult battle, it just adds more monsters. It gets boring, especially when you're just trying to get from point A to B and you have to bring down the same old armored-up HP tanks over and over again.

Speaking of combat, let's talk about dragons. It's in the title, after all. The first dragon fight is kind of exciting and all that, but they quickly grow tedious. Dragons have huuuuuge health bars, as expected, so they are already a time-consuming fight. Remember when I said there are some impressive set pieces? Well, for dragons, they're pretty much all the same. Big open arenas. Kinda has to be, I guess.

Also, some of the dragon attacks are hilarious. In addition to it's breath weapon, dragons also kind of just face plant at you. I guess they don't like using their teeth and claws to fight close quarters?

Veilguard scratched that fantasy action itch for a time, at least for me. It's certainly got it's warts, but overall I had fun.