Dragon Age: The Veilguard opens with the Elven god Solas (AKA The Dread Wolf) in the middle of a dangerous ritual that threatens the entire world. Dwarven story fiend Varric puts together an elite team to stop him, and it's headed by player-character Rook. Unfortunately, Rook's victory has a cost. Solas is locked away, but his defeat frees two Elven gods from their confinement. If left unchecked, these two gods will unleash the dreaded blight onto the world and doom every living thing in Thedas. Rook must use f Solas' knowledge and their own skills to stop the gods by forming an elite squadron of fighters whose sole purpose is to do the impossible: kill gods.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard runs into the issue of trying to be everything at once. It's torn between being what is effectively the big climax to everything in the Dragon Age setting to this point, but it's also a self-contained Mass Effect 2-style "getting a heist gang" together game, and it ends up feeling weird. So many cameos, references and plot beats feel like they're intended for a cast of seasoned characters — not new characters — and some of the big, emotional beats will hit harder if you've played Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition. At the same time, Rook and their crew are entirely new and largely divorced from the previous events and have their own self-contained story. Ultimately, the game reminds me of hopping into Mass Effect 3 but played as someone other than Commander Shepard.

One issue I had with The Veilguard as a sequel is that it feels the rough edges have been sanded off. Everyone gets along extremely well, with little in the way of objections or clashes. As soon as a new character joins the party, whether they're a demon-possessed assassin or charming necromancer, they become part of the team and start cooking dinner and hanging out without so much as a sideways glance. It makes everyone feel flat when the only conflict comes from things that Rook does.

Likewise, the world setting seems to have backed away from the darkest political elements. There are still monsters and demons and violent death aplenty, but some of the more intriguing quirks of the setting have become more straightforward. This isn't necessarily a bad thing — every mage shouldn't be five seconds away from exploding into blood magic — but it does feel more generic.

On its own merits, The Veilguard's story is pretty fun. Assuming you're willing to accept everything as it is given, it's an enjoyable take on the Mass Effect 2 suicide mission formula. (It's rather blatantly almost the exact same thing, right down to choices in the endgame that end in different ways, depending on if you've earned your crew's loyalty and the choices you make during the climactic sequences.) The cast is largely likable and charming. My favorite was Emmrich, a Vincent Price-style necromancer who is a charming professor with a squealing skeleton butler. Most of the cast has something going for them, and I enjoyed following their stories to the end, but I feel like they could've used a little more drama.

Probably the weakest element is the villains, who are paper-thin cackling madmen. They don't feel like they have a cohesive reason for what they're doing besides being evil. The sole exception is Solas, who is easily the standout. He ends up being a Hannibal Lecter figure who's trapped and only able to offer advice to Rook. A back-and-forth series of conversations and peeks into his history provide some much-needed context and depth to his behaviors. He's so essential to the story and the tone that I question why the game was titled The Veilguard when the Dread Wolf is easily the star of the show.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard borrows quite a bit of basic structure from Mass Effect 2. Early on, you're given access to Solas' personal Fade hideout, the Lighthouse. This serves as your central hub, where you can talk to your crew. From here, you can use a magical mirror to teleport to various places in the world, either for missions or to explore. Missions are largely linear action set pieces, but the areas in between are more varied, allowing you to poke around and find hidden items and small puzzles. You're free to return to the Lighthouse at any time, and you can talk to your party to discover more about them and their history.

Combat has seen the largest overhaul from the previous games. Rather like Mass Effect, it's a full-on, third-person action game centered on your protagonist Rook. Combat has seen a significant overhaul toward action combat, with all of the familiar mechanics you might expect, like precision parries, perfect evades, combos, and more. You can't really build yourself as a tank or healer, as Rook is expected to carry the rest of the team in fighting. However, you can pause combat and select and aim certain abilities, so combat doesn't only consist of twitch skills. You can equip three skills at a time, and an Ultimate skill charges as you fight and can cause serious damage.

Rook can be one of three character classes: mage, rogue or warrior. Each class is exclusively geared for combat, with a variety of sub-classes to specialize. Mage can equip either a staff, which allows for long-range combat. or an orb and dagger, which allow for a melee combat style. Mage can be specialized into a Death Caller, who uses life-draining necromantic magic, an Evoker, who uses powerful AoE attacks, or a Spellblade, who focuses on melee combat skills instead of long-range spells. Each of the three classes also has unique resources to spend to use their skills. Rogue builds mmentum by attacking without taking damage and has a gradually replenishing selection of arrows, while Mage has a naturally replenishing mana pool but can stack arcane bombs or build staff charges to execute special attacks.

You build up your character by spending spell points on a Skill Tree, which gradually unlocks both major and minor boons but requires you to prioritize certain areas on the skill tree. If you want to be a Spellblade, you'll need to go deep into electricity trees and can't invest in necromantic spells. You might be able to pop over to fire trees to get some boosts, but you'll probably prioritize one or two abilities in addition to various options to power up basic attacks. The skills you prioritize vastly change how you play. Your equipment and armor primarily offer special passive boosts to your skills, and choosing specific skills allows you to customize them to your needs.

My chosen play style was the Spellblade Mage, and I focused on the arcane bomb skills. These function by building up arcane marks with regular attacks, and when they're maxed out, they can be detonated for massive damage. I began by gathering skills that would let me stack more bombs, increased the damage the bombs dealt, allowed my skills to apply bombs, reduced the number of marks needed to apply bombs, and so on. By the end, I was almost constantly applying and detonating explosives with every attack. In comparison, I could've gone all-in on a Fire build and stacked tons of elemental damage until everything was constantly ablaze. That could be modified to also apply electricity damage, impact enemies around my target, and more. The game heavily rewards specialization, and for most players, it will be about picking a single specific skill or ability and pumping it up to absurd levels.

You can bring up to two party members into combat, but they're not really in combat. Each party member fights alongside you and can be directed to target enemies, but they are immune to all damage and can't be downed or removed from combat. They're largely there to serve as a distraction and occasionally hit enemies. Every character can have up to three different skills equipped, which can be triggered from the menu — after which all skills for that character go onto cooldown. Davrin the Grey Warden can choose to Taunt and draw enemies to him, send his Griffon ally to strike enemies, or temporarily empower Rook. Each ally can also either apply or detonate a "primer" skill (weakness, sundered or overwhelmed); when triggered, a prime skill causes a wide AoE explosion of damage.

Companions play second fiddle in The Veilguard.The core problem is that the shared cooldowns devalue a number of the potential skills. The combat tries to emphasize primers and detonating them. In theory, this is neat and encourages thoughtful team composition, but in practice, the fact that all skills are on a shared cooldown drastically reduces their usefulness. Why spend two cooldowns to perform a detonation move when the alternative is spending two cooldowns to make your protagonist temporarily invincible and have them do more damage? Combat is so focused on your protagonist that boosting a side character's damage feels less useful than assuring that my buzzsaw of a protagonist can dish out more damage.

This is perfectly fine from a gameplay perspective, but it means that characters don't have a ton of personality in combat. Most of their skills have a lot of overlap, with several skills shared between two or more characters. These skills can be leveled up, but there are only minor variations between them. (One character may do ice damage when their Time Stop spell ends, while the other might do necrotic damage.) The necromancer can't summon zombies, the assassin isn't really an assassin, the dwarf with stone-controlling powers can't actually manipulate stone in battle, and so on. They're largely a selection of abilities with some quirky dialogue. Each character can trigger certain items in the overworld, but once they join, Rook gains the ability to use those abilities, so it doesn't make them distinctive.

This is a situation that works fine for the game as it is, but it makes it feel more like Mass Effect and less like Dragon Age. You're effectively playing as Rook and their support team, and Rook is going to be a primary DPS fighter. If you're like me and enjoying playing sneaky or support roles in the previous games, then that play style isn't represented in The Veilguard. There's a lack of non-combat skills in the game. You're interacting almost exclusively by fighting and occasionally choosing one of a few specific dialogue options. It's fine for what it is, but when you're comparing it to other modern CRPGs, it could've gone for some non-combat options.

At the end of the day, The Veilguard really feels like Mass Effect: Dragon Age. I like Mass Effect, but it feels like a departure for the franchise to something that's more straightforward. Putting that side, I did have quite a bit of fun with the game. It's consistently enjoyable, and there's a number of exciting set pieces and frequently amusing and enjoyable dialogue. There's some genuine tension and drama in choices, and more than once, I wondered if I did the right thing or if my choice would have a significant consequence at the end. The final sequence does a much better job of pulling off a "everyone you helped comes together and helps you" moment than Mass Effect 3 did. By the time the game was done, I had some pretty positive feelings. (That's an impressive trick, considering it took me about 85 hours to finish the game!)

One area of the game I'm not quite so positive about is the visuals. The Veilguard attempts to do a comic book art style for the characters while maintaining the more realistic visuals that Bioware is known for, and I don't think it works. Some of the environments and enemy designs are great, but some of the character models look weird; they're not quite realistic and not quite stylized. I would've much rather seen them lean further in either direction. The voice acting and the soundtrack are excellent. I'm used to great voice work from BioWare, but the soundtrack might be its best effort to date, with a number of fantastic songs that do a great job of setting the mood.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard is and isn't the game I wanted it to be. It's a rollicking fun story where you fight monsters, save lives, and lead your plucky team of adventurers against impossible odds. At the same time, it feels more like Mass Effect than Dragon Age, and since The Veilguard is the climax of a story, it might be difficult for newcomers to hop into. If I set aside my expectations, it's a pretty darn fun action-RPG that stands well on its own.

Score: 8.0/10