So, I just finished SoU and it was a weird experience, let me tell you. No wonder I don't remember this campaign at all. First of all, Bioware are deathly afraid (and rightly so) of leaving their comfort zone of "find 4 McGuffins" because they tried it with the second chapter of SoU and it was bizarre. The first thing they defaulted to was an MMO-style kill 10 mobs quest and that's worrying. Dragon Age Inquisition doesn't seem so shocking and surprising anymore. Second of all, the "dungeons" in Undrentide (the city) were some of the most awful and confusing ones ever put in a video game. All of them had these gimmicks that were either circumvented by using a single item or needed a bunch of reloads because they require luck more than anything. They tried to be all quirky with them too, like the talking rat and the literally pointless fire elemental in the cage (like, seriously, what was that about?). Third of all, the city didn't feel like a city outside of some street names that popped up here and there. It also didn't feel like we are flying, it almost felt like we were underground for some reason. Heurodis was a Saturday morning cartoon villain with incomprehensible motives and plans, it wasn't clear at all what she was doing or, more specifically, what she hoped to achieve with it.
The balance was all over the place too. Most of the time you are breezing through encounters, but then you get one that is a huge step up from everything else (Shadow Lich, Heurodis) that requires a bunch of reloads to get right and it never felt like it was entirely fair. It seems like it's expected of you to use the consumable items the game gives you, which is great and that's the way it should be, but since everything else is so easy it's almost as if they fucked up the balance rather than it being a deliberate design decision. What I had also forgotten is how much the game expects you to spam healing kits, so much in fact that it feels like a crutch, but I distinctly remember it being this way whenever I played it. I never minded it that much back then, but it bothers me now because of how much it feels like cheating. Healing kits don't trigger attacks of opportunity, unlike potions, and they heal a lot more than potions even in combat, so it's inelegant at best, combat-system-ruining at worst.
There are some other nitpicks I have, like the golems you have to kill 10 of being immune to magic, so unless you are metagaming and know about the ring to deactivate them, you are potentially fucked if playing a spellcaster with Xanos as a companion. Speaking of companions, they don't have much content. You speak to them each time you level up and they kind of go on their own tangents and find their own solutions to their own problems. Xanos is a perfect example. He was sort of arrogant but in a fun way at the beginning, you talk to him a bit, he decides you are his friend and totally changes his perspective of himself because of it. I kind of get what they were going for with him, but the execution is a bit lacking and the events which lead to his 180 personality change fall flat. Wow, the dwarf mentor dude you've talked to for a single paragraph before he fell unconscious is dead, oh no, such a tragedy, he meant the world to me (even though I talked shit behind his back constantly) and now he's gone, etc. etc.
All in all, I wouldn't exactly recommend SoU. It's not particularly bad, but it has weird pacing (it starts off as a mundane adventure and it escalates to epic proportions in the blink of an eye) and it's somehow short yet drags on for too long at the same time. The devs just didn't have a clue what they were doing with this story and just threw every idea they had in there. If I'm allowed to be a bit controversial, I'd say the OC is more memorable than this. Not that I'd recommend playing the OC over SoU, SoU still has the better gameplay and pacing in its first chapter, but it goes downhill very fast after the interlude.
