A fantasy role-playing game of astonishing spectacle. This is the best Dragon Age, and perhaps BioWare, has ever been.
There are moments in Dragon Age: The Veilguard where 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 gawp. I hold my breath. I have never been on a BioWare ride like this.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard reviewDeveloper: BioWarePublisher: EAPlatform: Played on PS5Availability: Out 31st October on PC (Steam, Epic), PS5, Xbox Series S/X
But around that is a game of surprising breadth and depth, one I hadn’t necessarily expected. 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. It’s as filling as any Dragon Age game before it and every bit an RPG, and yet, it’s also more.
By pushing towards action game territory like Mass Effect before it, The Veilguard has realised a physicality and immediacy we’ve never seen in Dragon Age, and it’s a freedom that’s exhilarating. It pulls us closer to the world and the world-shaking events of the game – and what events they are. 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.
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We pick up events in The Veilguard 10 years after the story of Dragon Age: Inquisition ended, following new hero Rook on the path of our old frenemy Solas, the Inquisition companion revealed to be an ancient elven god at the end of that previous game. He’s trying to tear down the barrier he created (the Veil) between the waking world and the dream world (the Fade), and in doing so cause a right old cataclysmic mess, so we’re trying to stop him. You’ve seen this prologue in gameplay trailers before: Tevinter’s capital Minrathous at night, in the rain, and a breathless descent down through the city as demons hurtle from the sky and chaos erupts around you.