Recent reviews by theStitchpanda

Feels unfinished.

It's buggy, there are typos, the mechanics aren't explained properly, the gameplay is clunky and it gets repetitive very quick.
The artstyle is cute but that's about it.

Don't waste your time and money here, go play Slay the Spire or Monster Train instead.

[No Spoilers]
My full play-through was about 80hrs, since I spent some time trying other races and classes to see what fit. After finally beating Veilguard I have some opinions. I Love this game, but I did give it a "no" for a reason.

TL:DR
- Story was great but hollow
- Feels disconnected from previous titles
- Romance was barely there
- Gameplay feels nice but repetetive
- Graphics are beautiful
- Need Golden Nug (NG+)
- Excited for the future, if they learn from their mistakes.

I've played DA 1&2 plus their DLC to the point of memorisation since I was a little kid on my PS3. Hundreds of hours of many play-throughs, poking at every nook and cranny of those games. DA3 I only played a couple times and felt satisfied but overwhelmed with the massive open world style, but overall loved to be back in the world, and experience the awesome story, lively NPCs and in-depth romances. I hold all 3 in highest regard as my favourite series and will defend them to my dying breath. Veilguard felt like it intended to take all that made the past few games great and do even better... but wasn't given any of the love and attention it needed, much less deserved. It feels like a pile of bones of what it could have been; the bones are beautiful and pristine, but the are still a pile of bones, not the finished piece.

The Story
Only four of your choices from the previous titles mattered; who is your Inquisitor, their romance choice, if the Inquisition was disbanded or given to the chantry, and if you swore to stop Solas or save him. Because of this, anything that would have had one of your choices change its state, they avoided or were vague about, not matter how massive of an impact they should have. They did this by saying the south was completely overrun by blight because of the Evanuris, and only your Inquisitor is fighting to keep everything together. No matter if your heroes from the previous games are alive or not. All of this just shown in codex's and letters.
Away from that, I liked what there was. The true story-line of the past games was revealed, giving power that the story of this game was meant to be conclusive, but because of the previous gripes, I didn't feel as invested, relived or satisfied just... starved. I did tear up at certain parts, but I know that if it had been done better I would be a blubbering mess like the past games had made me. This game, given more love, could have beaten DA1 on story, but it doesn't come close to the past three at all when, given the weight of the content, should blow all three out the water.

The Romance
A big part of play-throughs were the romances, in past games they weren't just some extra flavour, but often affected the story as a whole and had their one dedicated story arch so you felt connected to your partner and cherished your time together or were scared when the dangers of the story put them in harms way. But in Veilguard it's just a few lines of dialogue and a fade-to-black before the finale. Nothing much extra than just the basic companion quests, and even those feel like not enough. My romance choice just had us kiss once... just once after hours and only a few chances to even flirt (You can't even speak to a companion without them having dialogue waiting for you). I felt myself just wanting something, anything more, but was met with disappointment. A big part of replay-ability is romancing every choice, but It doesn't feel worth it in this game, there wouldn't be enough that set them apart.

The Gameplay
As someone that favoured the DA2 gameplay more than DA1 it was really fun to play this game, and the smaller maps felt much more alive and had the right amount of exploration to an almost metroidvania type degree, requiring companion abilities to unlock certain doors/puzzles, or just having to wait until later chapters to unlock the rest of the map. Climbing on rooftops, searching back alleys, petting animals, I loved it. The combat feels like a combo of DA2 and DA3 in the best ways, you run around in cramped arenas or massive combat pits, hurling abilities and switching between ranged and melee combat as you see fit. But the companions don't really seem to scale the same as you. I played on underdog difficulty, and was dominating in combat alone, whilst my companions weren't even effective meat-shields, having only two instead of the usual three certainly didn't help. My biggest issue was that the game heavily focuses on ability combos, combining two abilities that matched would cause a detonation, making the enemy slow for a couple seconds and explode to deal damage. Late game I was spamming these combos just to have them do a fraction of my own damage from regular attacks, and the game has all skill trees built around getting these detonations and dealing effects to enemies with them. You can't even have your companions do them independently, you have to manually tell each companion and/or yourself to use their skills to cause the combo.

The Graphics
I spent way too much time in this game just going around in photo-mode, as you may see on my profile (some spoilers). It's amazing to see the world I fell in love with on PS3 become this beautiful fantasy world that captured my heart, it feels magical, it feels real, and that's playing on medium graphics. This game has performance issues, won't deny, my 4070 was overheating to the point of crashing, peaking at ~100 degrees on higher graphics. but it was worth it. and I can only hope they optimise it with future updates. The sound on the other hand, has balancing issues, crackling and sometimes it just cuts out, forcing me to reboot just to have combat music. The song choice for the final credits definitely didn't feel as heart-tugging as DA1 and DA2. The costume design for the armour is also great but the headgear were kinda ugly if you wanted a lighter look, and wearing a helmet would muffle your voice during dialogue. That being said, having to run around, spend thousands of gold, farm for loot and run around maps finding multiple obscure vendors just to unlock maybe half of the cosmetics for this game feels disheartening when your realise that they didn't give you a way to carry these into your next play-through. The Golden Nug wasn't there on the release of DA3, but when they finally did it felt great and gave me motivation to hunt for them and play the game over and over with new outfit choices. You think they would have learnt from that, but I guess that could be said for the rest of the game.

The Future
I've heard rumour that this is the final DA game, which I certainly hope is not true, the ending alone teased more to come. Ans with this plot line kinda wrapped up it would give them the freedom to explore much more potential in Thedas and beyond (also teased in game). I love Dragon Age with every part of my soul, and I do believe that, given they learn from their mistakes, listen to the community, give the games time and let the super talented people that work on these games put their passionate souls into their creation, the future could be very bright. Let our choices in the past games matter, let us touch the worlds and make them our own, get invested in the lives of the characters, fall in love with your world. Reward those that played the past games, give a world full of wonder for new players, encourage building up the community. The Dragon Age Setting deserves so much, please please please don't let it die!

Beat it in just over 1 hour. Needs an endless mode and maybe a DLC to support the dev

An alright game for a bit of fun, I'm really bad at it so can't offer much to late game. Just note that there are no permanent upgrades you can bring between runs, it's just play, die, try again.

Can't transfer over your existing account without transferring files manually, and then the achievements wouldn't apply if you did.

Plus, it's a buggy mess. Just download the online launcher.

Was excited to finally have time to try this game out for the first time. Heavily disappointed.
Just booting the game took a while, booted straight to character selection without being told any context on how the game would play and whether the characters would be customisable classes or characters with unique stories. Turns out it's the latter. I chose Angelic Gunner. Also weird the game prompts you to "name you character" when the character already has a name and their own story, so you can't RP as yourself like I thought you could from the promo.
Then you're locked into a long ass story dialogue (fully voiced by well experienced actors tho) and have no access to any game settings for the entire duration. The story was nice actually, and I was getting invested, which usually doesn't happen for me in MMOs. So by the time the story intro was finally done I was excited to start playing. And then it came to a screeching halt.
I was bombarded by UI I had no idea how to use, and I spent a hot minute just trying to get the options set up to make the game actually look good. Using your RAMs full potential should be set to default. Then I finally set out to get moving and play... I can't move... I did pick the QWERTY layout option, so why can't I use WASD? Oh the game uses arrow-keys to move and there is no way to change it, at all (BTW, I have a 60% keyboard, so can only use IJKL as my arrow-keys when holding Fn simultaneously.
I noticed there were "joy-pad" options but using my controller did nothing, I saw online that other people were using controllers to play this game so I looked up how they were doing it, despite the "No controller support" Steam tag. "Use Big-Picture mode a community controller layout" Alright, I did that, but still it didn't work. And no matter what I tried nothing seemed to fix it.

I'm really disappointed, for a game that seems to have had constant updates for over a decade and in-game purchases to boot, it is very outdated in terms of both UI and UX. It seems like it would be a great game to rival my highschool Elsword addiction, but I couldn't even play it past the tutorial. Even if it's just that I need to download some 3rd-party program or something, it shouldn't have to be the case in the first place. I spent over an hour in this game, and none of it was spent in gameplay.

"Your NAT type is too strict"

"Oh really? How do i fix that Ubi?"

"Hmmm try port forwarding? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"

https://steamproxy.net/app/470220/discussions/1/3735205432031225326/

Pros:
Cool graphics, cool concept.

Cons:
Buggy and repetitive.

Amazing, I am often stopping just to look at the awesome graphics of this game! The slimes are adorable as heck too!
Also, the mechanics that frustrated me about the first game are so much more fun in this sequel, especially the fabricator stuff.

If you liked the story from Doom 2016 and wanted to continue that awesome saga, then don't buy this game. It cuts 2 years into the future, with no explanation as to all the many many things that happened. Gameplay isn't even that fun to warrant missing out on the story aspect.