The short answer is yes. If you trust me and my reviews, feel free to bounce right now and go enjoy yourself. If you still need convincing, then I’m sure I can manage that. The game doesn’t do a great job of selling itself unless you’re already on the Dragon Age train and looking for your next destination. After all, most trailers for it showcase grand, sweeping events that are mostly exciting as references to past games and older characters (and sometimes things that were specifically avoided in these past games). If you don’t already know who Solas and Varric are, you might not care much about seeing them in opposition. If you haven’t followed the Dragon Age games for their decade and a half run, you might not have a reason to care about the arrival of what might be some Elven gods. Sure, it’s all tons of pretty typical fantasy and RPG type stuff, but most of it doesn’t really make an impact without history or greater context (which I can provide for you). Still, it’s a pretty good video game, taken on its own merits, and absolutely worth your time on that front alone. If you’ve played other Dragon Age games and just aren’t sure you want to continue? Then it is worth your time even more so.

Not only is this another great installment in the Dragon Age franchise, it is a return to classic BioWare form and a game that puts a fitting capstone on the franchise thus far, all without sacrificing the potential for future games and some kind of continued story. It carefully and cleanly wraps up the various dangling plot threads of the previous three games while weaving in a few new ones into it’s delightful plot tapestry that is strong enough to stand on its own and full of delightful information for those who are familiar with the series and Thedas in general. We get to visit often-mentioned but never seen locations, deal with some of the more interesting and thus-far ignored factions, and get answers to not only all the questions that have been lingering for over a decade, but also to questions we didn’t even know we wanted answered! It’s truly a great piece of storytelling that will work for players new and old and does it through a strong focus on character development, storytelling that is always advancing the plot even when it doesn’t seem like it, and not a single wasted bit of narrative text. While individual pieces of the story or character writing might feel a little cliched or on-the-nose, all the pieces are so masterfully woven together that you will find yourself not only not caring about the cliches, but happy to see them as they help land the emotional beats of this game.

The game’s action and combat are carefully measured out. While there are definitely some longer combat encounters or even strings of combat encounters, spaced out as you run through some area that you can only ever access as a part of the quest you’re on, they are set up to never feel too overwhelming or onerous, unless that’s what you chose for yourself by setting the difficulty super high. Most of the difficulty settings just apply to your part in combat by increasing how much damage you take or how precisely you need to time the various blocks, dodges, counter-attacks, and combos. There’s even a difficulty “setting” that allows you to move these individual parts of the game’s “difficulty” up and down to create the gaming experience you want. Outside of that, though, there isn’t a huge variety in the types of enemies you face, though the more granular specifics of them tend to vary. Each enemy faction has their own versions of each type of enemy and each of these sub-types has their own style of movements and attacks. Veilguard is very good at avoiding too much of the same type in a row, as each successive mission usually sees you facing off against a different enemy faction. As you progress through the game, these enemies unlock new moves, are harder to kill, and you fight more of them per encounter, forcing you to rely on the passives, abilities, and combo moves you unlock with each level up. That said, there’s a cap on the number of skill points you get, so you need to pick a combat style and build towards that. Never fear, though. You can, at any point other than while you’re in combat, remove and reapply your skill points as you’d like. And since there’s no limit on gear storage, you can swap your combat abilities and weapons around between each fight if you’d like. The game even encourages it a little bit, by giving the enemies you’re facing various damage resistances and vulnerabilities, pushing you to do something other than rely on the weapons with the highest stats the whole time.

All that said, the combat can still feel a little lackluster at times. Not as a result of it operating on its own merits, though, since I never had a period where I didn’t enjoy a fight. I always got to either tackle a difficult challenge or feel satisfaction as my build performed at its peak capabilities. Still, it left me wanting just a little bit more. It’s difficult not to draw a comparison to the most recent two God of War games, given that the combat in Veilguard seems to be drawn from the same vein. While the general pacing and speed of combat is superior (not even the warriors have the heavy and sometimes sluggish responsiveness of Kratos), Veilguard’s combat lacks the weight and feeling of satisfaction on delivering hits that I felt while playing both God of War games. Both I and my enemies were frequently able to strike through each other’s blows and launching an attack at the right moment seemed to, at random times, push back an enemy. I was never able to figure out any pattern to this while I was playing my mid-to-close ranged Mage, despite how often I’d experiment with different timing and moves. My second character, a Warrior, has a better feeling of give-and-take during melee exchanges, but they still lack feeling of weight and force that I enjoyed so much in God of War.

As far as downsides go, this game is striking in that the above is the only thing I felt was actually a downside. I mean, Veilguard left me wanting more and it’s difficult not to say that it didn’t give me enough (despite spending some seventy-plus hours on my first playthrough), but I think that I could play Veilguard for two hundred hours, easily, without getting board, so I can’t really hold that feeling against it. I wish I’d gotten to spend more time with the various characters you meet along the way, as your player character (Rook) builds the titular Veilguard, but I can always replay the game to spend more time in the world and with its characters. I can’t help but want to keep playing it, maybe without even changing much, just so I can settle back into this world of characters I’ve grown so attached to over the last month. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I don’t think I’ve gotten this attached to a cast of characters in a long time and while it would be easy to lay the blame for this fixation on the state of the world and/or my need for escapism, I feel that it would be unfair to lay all the blame for my feelings on the state of the world. I genuinely haven’t enjoyed a crew of video game companions this deeply since I don’t even know when. No game has tugged at my heartstrings quite so thoroughly and effectively based on the characters and story alone in my memory. The only other games that have close only managed to get that effect by invoking my own emotions or a sympathetic response by resonating with something within me. This time around though, in Veilguard, it was the characters alone that made me so emotional.

Is this a perfect game? I can’t say so. I can say it was fun and still remains fun after beating it. I can say that it was deeply affecting, both on its own merits as I met and came to know a stellar cast of characters with great writing and even better voice acting behind them, and as the conclusion to the past four months of playing Dragon Age games. I can say that I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to spend fifty to one hundred hours on a single playthrough of a game that will make those hours fly by. I can even recommend it on the way it handles issues like PTSD, grief, gender, identity, and trauma without needing to actually use any of those words to talk about them. Hell, I can even recommend it based on the nuanced look it gives at the difficulties of rebellion and fighting authoritarianism or fascism. It’s not perfect, but nothing is. There’s always something it could have done better and, solitary criticism about the weight of combat aside, I don’t know that there’s another game out there that would do this much stuff this well. Because not only is it a great game to play for all the reasons I’ve already given, but it’s also just great to play as a game. The experience of moving through it as a player who exists outside the game is smooth. Every single gripe I’ve ever had about this style of game has been answered. Sure, sometimes that answer means interactable objects glow with a light that is annoyingly similar to certain warm light reflections, but anyone working in development will tell you that sometimes things just have to be a certain way that isn’t great because every single other way they could be is worse. Regardless, it is still a fun and smooth gaming experience that addressed every single UI and gameplay gripe I’ve ever had with this style of quick-moving action game. Honestly, just across the board, it was a delight to play. I genuinely kept expecting something to fall flat or to wind up becoming onerous to do and it never did. I never had a moment where I felt frustrated with the world or my gaming experience like I frequently did in Inquisition and often did in Origins and DA2. The people that made this game knew what they were doing across the board and I genuinely can’t wait to see what BioWare does next.