When I was young, I didn’t have what people would call “a friend group.” Sure, I had friends, but they were scattered across various bits of my life. There was no “let’s all go do a big thing together!” stuff.

BioWare games have always kinda provided that fantasy, though. Be it classics like Knights of the Old Republic or big standbys like Mass Effect and Dragon Age, the archetypal BioWare experience is “here’s me on a snarky, death-filled road trip with my friend group of extremely damaged disaster bisexuals.” There are recent exceptions, but in general, BioWare titles have extremely strong “get in the car, loser, we’re going to Mordor” energy.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard, a long-awaited addition to one of BioWare’s core series, is a return to the “friend group” form. This review is going to mention things like the plot, the combat, the graphics, and all that, but it is vital up front that we establish: This is a game about DAV’s protagonist Rook and their traveling Deep Roadshow of trauma-drenched weirdos (complimentary). That is BioWare at its best, and while the game takes a bit to get properly rolling, by the end it fully had the hooks in.

Veilguard opens in medias res on Rook chucking someone out of a bar and demanding to know the location of Neve Gallus, whom savvy readers will recall as one of the game’s set of new party members. Right away, you’re presented with two options: charm the info out of the smarmy bartender peacefully, or beat the absolute hell out of her cultist bodyguards.

Now, I’m a Dragon Age 2 veteran and fan — a follower of the One True Protagonist, Sarcastic Hawke — so of course I opted to beat everyone senseless and joke about it afterwards with Varric, longtime series narrator, who shows up mid-battle. I don’t know if this choice set Rook’s portrayal on a specific path, like early dialogue choices do in DA2, but I do know that for the remainder of the game, my Rook was effectively like The Boss in Saints Row: a well-meaning dumbass who will leap face-first into danger and think about the consequences later. The game helpfully gave me a little Telltale-esque “Varric notes you like to solve problems head-on” pop-up when I chose to clear out the bar, so I imagine it did have some sort of formative impact.

Either way, the game’s opening hours focus on the tutorial mission to stop an apocalyptic ritual being performed by Solas (a former Dragon Age: Inquisition party member who makes a heel turn in that game’s final DLC, Trespasser) and the resulting fallout when stopping said ritual makes everything, as Varric would say, go utterly to shit. Sure, Solas is stopped, but now two angry elven “gods” that are even worse than he is are out in the world planning to take it over. It’s up to Rook, and whatever team they can throw together, to stop said gods completing their Evil Plan.

As with previous Dragon Age installments, dialogue choices for Rook have a central icon in the de rigueur BioWare “decision wheel” that indicates their tone: a thumbs up for friendly/helpful, a comedic mask for humorous or sarcastic, a clenched fist for angry/violent, and so forth. Early on, though, I kept slamming that comedic mask option, wanting Rook to start delivering the punchy one-liners that made me love not just DA2’s Hawke, but also DAI‘s Inquisitor, who could be quite the snark machine themselves. The results were usually not what I was hoping for. Instead of Sarcastic Rook I appeared to be getting Somewhat Goofy Rook, which isn’t quite the same.

At the same time, my early companions — Harding, the Inquisition background character promoted to the main cast; Neve, the smooth urban mage detective; Bellara, the quirky elven artificer; and suave Spanish Antivan assassin Lucanis — were frankly too damn nice to each other. Previous Dragon Age installments were pretty heavy on party members who simply Did Not Get Along on some level: Alistair and Morrigan, Aveline and Isabela, Solas and Literally Anyone Else.

Rook’s crew, by contrast, are really nice and supportive to each other for most of the early game, and I hated it. The inter-party conflict in other Dragon Age games might not be for everyone, but it provides two useful things: some heat to draw interest in the characters, and someplace to go for the relationships between them. In the case of Veilguard, some of that tension would have been useful, since the early plot doesn’t provide much of it, either. With the escaped gods existing as looming off-screen threats for most of it, I was grasping for stuff to care about to keep me motivated.

Blessedly, by the time the game presents the first Big Event set-piece and Rook begins filling out their party, the writing team hits its stride. Your final three party members — pragmatic Gray Warden Davrin, dragon hunter and Qunari refugee Taash, and prim professor of necromancy Emmrich — are brought in thanks to a series of story events that really up the stakes of the plot.

Once the full group is together, you start to see some fractiousness that points at the potential for developing relationships, a sense that there’s somewhere to go for these people. At the same time, your existing party members start to get embroiled with complications of their own that shake things up for them as well. It’s a shame that sharing details would reveal spoilers, because I think these conflicts really help to sell the characters. Taash and Harding were probably my favorites, with storylines that spoke to me directly, but I suspect every player will be able to find someone who resonates.

Of course, a fuller party is also more opportunity for another Dragon Age staple: party banter. While it doesn’t trigger as often as I would like, and in the early game much of it suffers from the overall lack of heat or tension, as you add personalities (and as progressively worse things are happening in the story/world) it all starts to get considerably more fun and interesting.

Perhaps most importantly, around the game’s 30% mark, Rook’s “humorous/sarcastic” dialogue options really started to come into full flower, too; my Saints Row Boss-esque picture of Rook really solidified at this point in the game. Hearing her shout “You can’t caffeinate your way out of this!” at a party member actually forced me to pause the game from laughing.

Disappointingly, some of the game’s funniest and sharpest writing is buried in the Codex, where it can easily be missed. The Codex is how you find out about your party having a book club, for example, which is deeply funny, but wandering the player’s base at the Lighthouse, I never encountered it or anything like it. I was put in mind of Marvel’s Midnight Suns, in which there was an actual book club to attend. I feel like some of the “discussions” that take place between DAV characters in what amounts to liner notes would have had much more impact if they’d been things the player, as Rook, could actually sees or hear happen instead. Take this advice to heart: Keep up with the Codex, as tedious as that can sound. There are some great hidden gems you might miss otherwise.

I’ve spent so much of this review talking about these characters and their interactions because that is, to me, the essence of Dragon Age, even more so than the fantasy plot of evil gods and impending mystical disaster that’s driving the story. A BioWare role-playing game certainly seems to live or die by the quality of its companions; the more memorable, rich, and emotional their portrayal and stories are, the more those characters live in our heads like phantom friends. Once Veilguard really gets rolling, the companions are weird and idiosyncratic in the best ways. I cared about them, wanted to see where their stories went, and agonized over potentially upsetting them… all the hallmarks of success of previous BioWare games, both in and out of the Dragon Age series.

As for the rest of the game’s aspects: they work, to varying definitions of “work.” The game is graphically gorgeous, and I think the choice to sacrifice photorealism for a more stylized approach was the right call. There were times when the contrast or lighting became an issue — in a handful of places I had to crank the brightness up to 100% so I could see in an underground location — but otherwise I think the game looks great. There is surprisingly little music, but what songs I do recall fit the game’s fantasy heroism mold well enough. There were certainly no moments for me where the soundtrack felt jarring or out of place.

Atypically for a modern BioWare game, character generation gave me control over not just my Rook’s head but also their body to some extent, with a “built/thin/fat” triangle slider that is becoming more common. Thus I was able to craft my typical busty, plus-size redhead in a way that previous DA games did not necessarily allow. No character creation options are “gender-locked” or even gendered; you choose your Rook’s pronouns (he, she, they) and gender ID (man, woman, non-binary) separately from both their body and from each other — a simple thing, but a nice alternative to the current common practice of presenting gender as simply “body shape.” For the curious, there are conversations where a non-binary Rook can make dialogue choices that refer to their gender identity, but I never felt “ambushed” by the topic. The level of narrative focus it has for your character is entirely voluntary.

The non-narrative meat of the game is exploration and combat, both of which are serviceable. While there are some large zones in Veilguard (Minrathous and Arlathan Forest are particularly big), none of them presents the sort of daunting sprawl found in Dragon Age: Inquisition, and the side quests you find in these zones also avoid DAI‘s open-world pitfalls. I was asked to make almost no Wal-Mart runs for isolated peasants in DAV, thankfully, though by the game’s closing hours I was Extremely Over looking for vaguely hidden interactable items in little glowy circles on the mini-map. Your companions offer side quests that advance their personal storylines, but each zone also has a sort of ongoing set of loosely connected storylines that progress alongside the main story.

Puzzles in explorable zones have a limited number of forms, but thankfully none are too distracting or frustrating. Rook is often tasked with moving power cells from one elven artifact to another to solve traversal issues, blowing up a series of magical crystals to break down mystical barriers, or using their party members’ various exploration-related abilities to reach new locations (and, typically, treasure). In another nod to usability, once a party member has joined, Rook can access their party ability even if they’re not in the active party; with a party size of two companions and Rook, that’s a necessary change, as your party can only be changed at fast-travel points that might be a bit far from where you find a specific puzzle piece.

Combat, on the other hand, is hit or miss. The game has a more combo-based, dodge/parry/block-focused, 3D brawler feel to it, compared to previous DA games. You can still bring up an ability wheel to use your party members’ skills or direct their fire, and by combining “primers” and “detonators,” you can set off combos in the vein of DAI or the Mass Effect games, though the combo system here is less complex, and every type of detonation appeared to be the same. Healing is handled by potions Rook carries, and there is no real need to worry about your party’s survival; to the best of my knowledge, unlike Rook, party members can’t die or take damage.

Even if they could, however, enemies — all enemies — focus on Rook with laser precision unless temporarily pulled away by the taunt-like abilities that Davrin or Taash possess. Since most fights are a horde-mode scenario with multiple enemies, including both melee combatants looking to swing a sword into Rook’s jaw and mages or archers pelting them with projectiles, this started to get old in a hurry. I enjoyed the flashiness and even the action combat qualities of DAV, but I feel like its encounter design was not terribly enjoyable on the default difficulty. This was further complicated by the fact that side quests can sometimes drop you smack into a fight you are thoroughly underpowered/underleveled for, with no way of knowing you should avoid it.

Around the halfway point in the game, I cracked and took the combat difficulty down from the default preset to something a bit lower. The game offers some granularity in combat difficulty, letting you either use specific presets or create custom settings (which is what I did, turning enemy health and damage down somewhat, and giving myself more forgiving parry timing). This isn’t the first DA game I’ve done that with; I’ve even referred to setting Dragon Age: Origins’ combat to “easy” as “turning combat off” and I have no qualms about doing so. As I’ve said, I don’t think the meat of this series is in its combat; the combat is something to do, to get you from story beat to story beat, companion interaction to companion interaction.

Dragon Age fans will already have made up their mind to get Veilguard, I’m sure. I can reassure those series fans, however, that I think they’ll enjoy the game. It corrects a number of the mistakes that plagued the otherwise enjoyable Dragon Age: Inquisition, while retaining the elements of the series that make it what it is in the first place. For newcomers, starting this late in the series is not without complications. Veilguard takes place far away from the southern part of the game’s world, where the other games in the series were set, but Dragon Age is a series with a tremendous amount of lore and official material on the periphery. I think it’s possible to enjoy Veilguard on its own merits — there’s no need to know series minutiae to get what’s going on — but many of the Big Plot Reveals™ will feel more impactful if you know the DA universe well enough to understand their implications. Either way, don’t let the slow start fool you. The game’s cast of lovable weirdos will give you what you’re looking for.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard will be released Oct. 31 on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on PlayStation 5 using a pre-release download code provided by BioWare. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.