Recent reviews by SMDbasher

What Andromeda was to Mass Effect franchise Veilguard is to the Dragon Age franchise. Gone are any recognizable elements of the previous three games. This is an awful Dragon Age game but is a pretty fun action RPG.

The combat is going to be hit or miss. It feels more akin to something you might find in Final Fantasy 7 Remake. They finally commit to the action approach, but most of the customization comes in the form of passive stat buffs. If you’re a skill tree geek you’ll probably enjoy it, but it is disappointing that the way you play does not fundamentally change. This will be most impactful for folks who play mage as you’re limited to 3 skill slots and you don’t get enough mana to do more than one spell in a row:

The character creator is the best BioWare has ever had. This will be another polarizing one as some folks seem to love it and other’s hate it. The redesign of elves and Qunari is disappointing as now they just look like humans with extra bits, but this was likely to make ensure every race could be fully costumized. One thing I think everyone will agree is that the hair is the best I have ever seen in a videogame.

There is a nice variety of biomes and areas. The level design is linear for missions like Inquisitions was, but the hub worlds are much more paired down. Sadly this doesn’t make them feel anymore alive.

The writing is serviceable. The overarching story is nothing special, the villains feel like Corypheus did. The dialogue ranges from cringe to decent, but the tone is completely off. A character will say something dark and brooding and then immediately follow it up with a quippy comment. Any time there is any tension between characters it is quickly dismissed or ignored. Even when the dialogue itself is fine, the delivery is off like the VA’s weren’t given clear direction. There was a lot of potential here and with competent writers it would have excelled. The characters are all likelable but they don’t feel very different in their world views, perspectives, or speech patterns.

If you like action RPG’s and don’t compare it to previous Dragon Age games there is a lot to like. I don’t regret my purchase as I’m enjoying my time with it, but is in incredibly disheartening that writing is the weakest element of this game (typically BioWare’s strongest area).

Overall a fun metroidvania with some cool ideas.
It started off a bit slow for me, but once you start getting access to actual customization it really opened up. You can "equip" up to three transformations that come with their own attacks and abilites and three default form attacks, and then stat modifiers with more options becoming available over time. I really enjoyed one of the first monsters you can acquire which shoots a boomerang ball weapon. They really nailed the aesthetic (feels like a scifi Hollowknight / Ori). It wasn't until I got past the first section that I realized just how big the map is (originally I felt it was quite small).

There are some minor gripes as well. The map's lack of details can be frustrating. Sometimes one "room" might have multiple levels, but you can only access those parts by entering from a different room (there's literally a ceiling) which made it confusing. For completionists, the map only tells you if you cleared out a room so you have no idea what you're still missing.

And there is a ton of backtracking once you get to an obstacle and realize you need to equip a different transformation. I understand why they don't want you to be able to swap into all of them on the fly, but it was a little annoying getting somewhere only to realize I would have to go back several rooms to equip something different.

Some of the monster transformations had very limited use case, which was disappointing. Many of the transformations were only useful for one particular obstacle in one small part of the map.