Recent reviews by Zerowen

I have played a good chunk of this game, and so feel like I've given it enough chances.

However, I cannot recommend it. It is a bland, generic fantasy game that is very sanitised compared to past Dragon Age games.

The writing is full of exposition for about 15 hours which ruins the flow of most of the dialogue. Then, you have the companions. They talk mostly about food, and their problems. Rook is essentially their corporate manager with the most boring pep talk dialogue I've ever had to sit through. You can't challenge any of the companions or even say you do not care about their usually meaningless opinions, you have to smile and nod and listen to your character say something you would not want them to say.

All tension, drama, politics and moral ambiguity in the setting has disappeared, with it being a dull good versus evil fight. Most of the companions are the blandest creatures alive. Even the man who is a literal assassin, from an awful faction that takes orphans and essentially enslaves them to a life of being a highly trained assassin, a faction that kills you if you fail a contract, is a boring man. His whole thing is 'ooo I like coffee and also I have a demon living in me but we won't actually do anything interesting with that'. Why can't I question him about how awful his faction are?

Another thing is that, unless a companion wants to talk to you, you can't say anything to them at all, so they will all talk together, Rook walks in, and they stare lifelessly at you once they are done talking amongst themselves. So much of the lore and backstory came from these character interactions. Rook does not feel like a friend of basically anyone, but a distant corporate manager who everyone is on good terms with, but doesn't really care about.

The main villains are pretty dull, just generic evil nonsense after years of being built up as something interesting. I'm surprised there isn't more shock when you meet characters and tell them about the literal evil 'gods' destroying everything as well. When you recruit someone or work with a faction, they automatically trust you implicitly and you just accept that as well. OK. Rook and their group are a ragtag gathering of not very important people with not much standing in the world, and yet everyone accepts what they say with no questions asked. Evil gods? We're in!

Half the lore of the world seems to have been forgotten. I thought the dominant faith of Thedas would have something to say about all the elven god stuff, but they are barely mentioned at all. Tevinter, the magically enhanced slaving empire of which there is a literal faction dedicated to freeing the slaves of, barely has any actual slaves. I see far too many elves just casually walking around, and you yourself can be an elf and no one bats an eye there. You can walk around as a qunari, their main enemy, and no one cares. OK.

It's a soulless, lifeless game with no care or thought put into it.

Oh, and there's the issue of the events of Origins and 2 being ignored completely, and even Inquisition, which this game feels like a direct sequel to, seems to get stiffed as well. We went from interesting threads at the end of Inquisition with Solas and his agents all over Thedas, to those agents seemingly not existing, and you accidentally ruining his plans and beginning the more boring plot of this game.

Veilguard feels like a soft reboot, which does not work when it is a direct sequel to a previous game, and also when it literally ties up plot threads going back all the way to Origins.

The combat is fun, until you get bored of fighting the same 4 enemy types every faction seems to have. Shield, ranged, quick stabby one, and normal one. How exciting. Also, your companions basically have no reason to exist in combat outside of an ability combo every 20 seconds or so. They do ♥♥♥♥ all damage, the enemies will almost completely ignore them and go for you (which is especially annoying as a non-tank class like a rogue or mage), and they also seemingly don't take any damage, so they are just there.

At least it looks pretty. Congratulations to BioWare for forgetting the important of the writers who built their company to what it was and having such poor leadership that the game restarted development like 3 times, but managing to have a competent art department.

It feels like it was written by an 11 year old who has never seen humans interact before. A gruff barbarian woman would not say "I kicked their butts!!!!!" Many sentences just don't read very well, like they were partially put through Google translate.

Lots of class choices though, that's cool I guess.

What other game lets you fly to an ocean world, then starve to death in a cave far beneath the ocean?

Fallout 2 is almost 20 years old yet it holds up well. Not only is the art style pleasing, it also offers more variety and choice than any of the recent games, even New Vegas. You can get a car, become a porn star or be forced to marry someone at gun point, all optional and based on your choices.

Stellaris allowed me to create the friendliest war mongering, interstellar empire I always dreamed of creating. Although later on in the game, the amount of things you have to micro-manage can be a bit daunting, blowing everyone up with massive fleets never gets old.

Edit: Over 6 years since the original review where I had only played for 63.6 hours, I have played many more hours, blown up worlds, befriended aliens and repeatedly screamed "WHERE HAVE ALL MY CONSUMER GOODS AND FOOD GONE!?" I'm also now convinced I'm a god of empire-building.

Yes, Steam, yes I do recommend this very awesome game.

It has been 10 years since I originally wrote the above review. All I feel now is pain.