Mini review (no story spoliers):
I enjoyed it enough to finish it and it does some things really well (like the cinematic set pieces) but after finishing it I really didn't feel like I needed to do another playthrough. This is usually not a strange thing for a game but Bioware RPGs (or any good RPG) tend to leave you wanting to explore all the things you missed or couldn't see due to your choices.
That feeling of wanting to explore all the choice paths just isn't there for me in Veilguard, no choice feels like it's really making any big impact on the outcome of the game or even the characters. There are some big choices but they're obvious once you finish the game so it doesn't feel like I need to replay it to experience slightly different variations on the same thing.
If you're all about combat that might be different, there are a lot of class variations and companion combos that you can explore in different playthroughs but I feel the combat does get quite samey after many hours even though it's definitely serviceable and quite enjoyable at times.
I just played on the regular difficulty and I had some instances where I felt there was way too much of a gulf between the difficulty of boss battles and regular roaming NPCs. The bosses sometimes have huge HP pools and you it can get tedious at earlier levels, I tried to lower the difficulty one notch but then the regular combat encounters are far too easy. What I ended doing was just leaving it on the normal difficulty and avoiding the bigger boss battles until I was at a higher level.
I really enjoyed how they put focus on the companions and their stories although I didn't really find any of the characters all that likeable or relatable. All the characters lean heavily into being very specific archetypes and it makes them feel quite one dimensional. The companion dialog can quite often be quite boring and at times cringey so it doesn't help at least make these characters any more interesting. The game is also light-hearted in its dialog delivery for the most part but fails any time when humour is attempted. The game does explore some dark themes quite regularly which sometimes feels quite at odds with the way the characters talk.
Feels like I'm complaining a lot but I feel it could have been a much better game even though I did have a good time with it.
As for technical aspects of the game, it ran really well on both PS5 and PS5 Pro and apparently runs brilliantly on PC too. Visually I think the game looks amazing, the stylised look of the characters takes some getting used to but I think it works for the most part. Some characters like the Qunari still look odd though.
I think I'd give it a 6.5 / 10.
