A fantasy role-playing game of astonishing spectacle.
This is the best Dragon Age, and perhaps BioWare, has ever been.
There are moments inDragon Age: The Veilguardwhere all I can do is stop and gawp.
To see a fantasy adventure brought to life around me at such scale and with such drama is astonishing.
I keep expecting the illusion to falter and for the game to tire but it never does.
Always, the ante is upped and the centrepiece grows.
I hold my breath.
I have never been on a BioWare ride like this.
I feared it shallow but there’s crunchiness to the role-playing systems.
I feared it narrow but there’s a magnificent world that yawns open as you play.
The Veilguard makes the Dragon Age games that came before seem trivial by comparison.
The series has evolved.
Dragon Age has never been this good.
Scripted missions with designed routes can deliver incredible bombast.
But can the rest of the game keep it up?
Yes, in spades.
Huge bosses, huge moments, surprises, drama.
And the ending of the game is an all-timer; it left my jaw on the floor.
It trumps anything BioWare has done before, and that includes the renowned ‘suicide run’ fromMass Effect 2.
There’s a generosity right across the game in this regard.
Much of this is to do with the divisive new graphical style.
The exaggeration helps enhance facial gestures and draws out the inherent fantasy and emotion in scenes and environments.
It’s gross; it’s beautiful.
But the champion of it all is the lighting.
One thing that surprised me about The Veilguard was how open its world turned out to be.
They also house pick-up, incidental quests, but don’t worry, lessons from Inquisition have been learned.
I never felt short-changed or that my time was being abused or not rewarded in the game.
There’s lots of thought and consideration, and experience, permeating through the game.
Let’s get onto more juicy stuff.
In many ways it is a game about them, your companions.
I flirted with everyone for hours before committing to Taash, but no one was giving anything away easily.
The companions in a BioWare game have never been so consistently present as a group as they are here.
In other words, it can come for you.
Levelling up saves it.
I love the trend of games doing this.
On top of that, there’s surprising build-depth lurking among your equipment.
Then there’s temporary rune buffs you’ve got the option to activate during battle for situational power-ups.
Start mixing all of that together and building around it and you’ve got fireworks.
There are some hard decisions to make.
The villains themselves - Ghilan’nain and Elgar’nan - are a delightful pair too.
Or trio, depending on how you class Solas, whose true intentions never quite seem clear.
As an admirer of the series' lore, I feasted.
There were moments I squealed at what was being revealed.
It goes there; oh it goes there.
Then that ending, the all-timer.
This is among the very best of them.
The answer is yes, emphatically.
The Veilguard is spectacular.
A copy of Dragon Age: The Veilguard was supplied by EA for review.
