Mass Effect: Andromeda (2017)

I played Andromeda not super long after release but quit after few hours on the first planet as there was a bug preventing from me progressing and I wasn't feeling it so made it easy to quit. Well the Legendary Edition made me curious to give this another go (I have game pass so effectively didn't pay EA again). Well I've just finished the main game shy of 29 hours game time. My opinion is that this is still dogshit.

I didn't know where the series would go after Mass Effect 3 and it's evident that Bioware had fuck all idea either. I hope this team isn't working on the new game.

I'm a fan of the Mass Effect franchise, but not a die-hard fan. I've played through the trilogy twice, but I'm not someone who is going to simply buy a game just because it says "Mass Effect" on the cover. So when Mass Effect: Andromeda came out, I was intrigued, but the overwhelming bad reviews scared me away. So I wrote it off and never paid it any mind again until seeing it on Xbox Game Pass and thought "Why not?"

And while this is the weakest Mass Effect game, it's still a good game. The Mass Effect franchise hasn't made a bad game yet IMO. Sure, it's a little overly long and has a few lingering bugs (I understand the bugs were much worse at launch), but it's still a good game. I remember people talking like this was one of the worst major AAA games ever released, but it's still miles ahead of your standard copy/paste open-world Ubisoft title or the dozens of other generic open world titles out there that make tons of money and get decent critical reviews. Perhaps expectations were too high and when the game didn't meet them, the reviewers went way too far in the other direction? I dunno.

This game has terrific combat - and that's something it does better than any other game in the series. The trilogy didn't have great combat. It was only ever passable. You never really played Mass Effect games for the combat; you played them for the story, characters, and world. And this game delivers all that too, although it is the weakest story in the series and the world of Andromeda isn't quite the same. And the Nexus certainly isn't as cool of a central hub as the Citadel.

But the story is still good (not great). And I really dug the greater emphasis on exploration. That actually made the planets more memorable than most of the planets from the trilogy IMO. The decision to take the series to a new galaxy is an intriguing one (and one that makes sense given the story of the trilogy) and putting more emphasis on exploration was a great idea. With this story, I truly want to feel like a pioneer exploring a brand new frontier for humanity. This game mostly delivered on that, although I feel there's potential to take that even deeper. Of course, though, the stakes of this story are just naturally going to feel weak compared to the Reapers of the trilogy.

I was disappointed in the lack of new alien species. Just the Angara and the Kett (and the Kett look way too close to the collectors IMO). It's a big bummer to travel to a completely new galaxy full of new possibilities and only encounter two new alien species, especially when the initial draw of the original game was getting to encounter a plethora of new aliens and cultures. It also just makes Andromeda feel empty.

Overall, I really enjoyed the game. Not a masterpiece, but a solid experience. It was fun to jump into the Mass Effect universe again. If I could be a little more precise with my rating, I'd give it 3.5 stars. Even so, according to my ranking system, 3 stars is still a good score.

1 Star = Awful. Not worth playing.

2 Stars = Below Average. Worth playing. Some fun to be had, but some frustration and boredom you'll have to push through as well.

3 Stars = Average. But since I love video games, an average experience is still a heck of a lot of fun.

4 Stars= Great game. Not quite a masterpiece, but a really, really nice achievement. The developer should be proud.

5 Stars = Masterpiece. All-Time Great.

Coge todo lo que tenía la trilogía original y lo vuelve naif: relaciones con el escuadrón, tensiones políticas, sensación de emergencia y odisea, tramas secundarias, etc. Parte con buenas ideas y lo desperdicia todo para moverse por la mediocridad. A estas alturas sigue con problemas de bugs graves y las animaciones (que siempre han sido una basura en ME, no han mejorado mucho).

Sin perjuicio de lo anterior, se mejoró bastante el diseño de niveles, el combate se hizo bastante menos peñazo y se apostó (sin éxito) por la exploración.

I don't get what all the hate was about. Yeah, it wasn't as polished graphically as we expected from the progression of the original trilogy, but it still looked great. And sometimes the open world questing dragged on a bit too long and detracted from the narrative. But IMO, the characters, dialogue, and narrative were every bit as good as the original Mass Effect trilogy, if not in some ways better. And that's the most important thing.

It's a shame that they seem to have abandoned the game, because I think it would have benefited from a DLC or two to tie up some of the loose narrative ends, and definitely deserves a sequel.

I read people complaining about crafting, but I did very little crafting, spent no time gathering resources (was able to craft everything I needed with just the stuff I looted from normal running about) and still ran through the game on Hardcore with no problem. Might go back for an Insanity run and see how that goes.

Unfortunately the combat encounters are often not as interesting as they were in the original trilogy. I think this has to do with the open-world-ness... AI operates on a sort of structure of general behavioral rules instead of encounters being specifically scripted to the location they occur in, and this is less engaging and immersive. Not as big of a problem in the priority missions, loyalty missions, and boss battles, since those are in closed, scripted areas.

I'd have given it 5 stars but for the less-engaging combat encounters and dragged-out task missions with little narrative payoff (both I think can be chalked up to the execution of open world mechanics), and some of the graphical errors that should have been polished out more.

I wrote about Mass Effect: Andromeda on GamerFocus (en español).

https://gamerfocus.co/juegos/mass-effect-andromeda-dos-anos-despues/

It's not really a review, but an article about how the "animated gifs controversy" affected the launch of the game, how the updates and patches made it better and if it's still worth to play today despite some obvious flaws.

(Answer: kinda?)

Also, I love my space family and will die for them.

Mass Effect Andromeda broke my heart when it was released. A fresh, new galaxy to explore with untold wonders hidden within. A new start for the franchise which took a downturn during Mass Effect 3. And what do they do with it? They populated it with mean looking alien monsters with assault rifles, another new race that act 99.9% human, and a “mysterious” alien tech race which does nothing but shoot at you.

I admit that I played on launch for the first 2 hours and was so disgusted that I put it down for months. But it always bothered me that I never finished it. What if it got good at some point? What if I was missing out? The original Mass Effect is in my top 3 games of all time. I think I owed the franchise this. So I put the disc in my Xbox One and loaded it up again.

I'm here from the future to tell you that Mass Effect Andromeda is not a very good game. It's acceptable. "Good enough" for me to complete without putting much thought or care into side quests. It plays well, and adds some new spice to the combat and maneuvering with jump-jets and a new dash ability. Those were well done. I prefer the more micro-managing style of the original Mass Effect, but I know they had to divorce the game from its KotOR roots, and pull it in a more Gears of War direction. I accept that. Also, if you have played Dragon Age: Inquisition you'll notice a striking similarity with the side quests and maps. There's just too much. There's a billion side quests, it's almost MMO style. It leads to side quest overload. If you gave me 1/3 of that I'd do them all. But now I'm barely going to touch any. Weird how that works out.

Beyond these new action-centric enhancements, the game does not offer anything better (or even on par) with the other games. Characters are almost resoundingly flat and uninteresting (there are two party member characters I, quite literally, forgot I had on my ship until the end of the game). The story revolves around you trying to make Andromeda a viable habitat for your people, while fending off scary looking bad guys with guns. The scary looking bad guys with guns want to assimilate you, but I never caught why. The big bad wants to rule the galaxy. What a unique concept. I found myself skipping so much minor dialogue and actually saying out loud “I DON'T CAAARRREEE” which, as a big fan of RPGs I've never done.

Ryder, the main character, is a cardboard cutout. I'm supposed to care about his sister, who is in a coma. But beyond “she's your sister!” I was never given a reason to care. In fact I forgot she was part of the story until the game forced me to talk to her.

This next paragraph will contain a “first 2 hours” spoiler, so skip over it if you'd like.

The thing that really told me that this was a game written by people who only know Star Wars fanfiction, that they only have a cursory understanding of story structure and character development, was Ryder's father, Alec Ryder. You awake from cryo sleep and meet your father, “Pathfinder” of the Andromeda Initiative. He's a leader of the humans in Andromeda. I instantly thought “My father is a big shot? He's definitely going to die before the game is over.” Shortly after, you need to fight beside him and he's a total badass. Throwing tech and biotics and shooting dudes left and right. My next thought was “Forget what I said, he's going to die before this scene is over.” Guess what happens. Yup. He's dead, and you have to take his place. It was just so childish, so predictable. He may as well have has a target painted on his head with the words “I'M GOING TO DIE SOON.”

I wanted to much more for this game. Mass Effect deserves better. I recall a poll going out from Bioware after ME3 asking “what do you want to see in the next Mass Effect game?” It felt good that they were sort of acknowledging that we were all underwhelmed by ME3, and wanted the next game to be way better. But there's another possibility. Maybe Mass Effect, much like Dragon Age, can't be better. Bioware is only a name. The people within, writers, directors, producers shift and move. Bioware didn't make the original Mass Effect that I love so much. That specific team, in those specific years at Bioware made Mass Effect. So while it's sad to see a franchise I once loved fall from grace (for me, much like Star Wars), it's important to remember that, while Andromeda was a galaxy that flopped, there are thousands of others out there. Other worlds being developed by other teams, new characters, heroes, villians, gods, and scoundrels all exist. It's my time, as a fan, to put Bioware out to pasture and blast off into the multiverse to see what other studios have to offer.

Mass Effect: Andromeda is a decent game and a substandard product.

I don't want to only focus my criticism on the ridiculous in-game character animations as that has been done to death and I have never been much of a graphics whore. The animators just don't know how human beings walk, talk or show emotions. But all the graphical elements are not equally bad. In fact, some of the pre-rendered cutscenes (especially the ones on the final planet) and the landscapes are remarkable.

The reasons Mass Effect: Andromeda is a substandard product are the amount of padding in the game (Exhibit A and B: the absurd number of scannable planets and the whole concept of tasks), the re-use of the same 10 enemy models, a dull and uninspiring protagonist, and an unnecessary focus on the monotony of the crew's existence. I understand that the game designers did some of this to justify the $70 price tag. But the amount of small talk I had with NPCs made me question why I even play video games. By the way, the fact that the game's four optional bosses are the exact same is one of the laziest design decisions I have seen from an AAA RPG game.

There are things that the game does well. The gameplay is the best in the Mass Effect franchise, though the real fun began once I switched to the Vanguard class (video below). This is also the hardest Mass Effect game to date (till I learned to game the system) and that made the combat on Insanity quite satisfying. Some of the banter between the companions, while you are wandering the landscape on the Nomad, is amusing, to say the least. Finally, some of the side quests are quite meaty and have consequences on the main story, which is also decent.

Do I feel like the 74+ hours I wasted on this was worth it? No. But that holds true for every aspect of life.

Actual Score: 3/5

20 hours in I couldn't play it anymore. The first few hours were great. Things were tense and uncertain, first contact was brutal and game mechanics fresh. Unfortunately after getting familiar with the gameplay the flaws slowly creep in.

The story had so much potential but no real depth. The game only gives you access to a few planets and a space station. Andromeda feels too empty, space feels too empty, the map is too empty. Where are the space animals, alien ships, unknown entities, anomalies, extravagant flora and fauna? Basically it is Milky Way 1.5 where aliens are exactly the same as you and can speak english within the first minute. Shouldn't the meat of the story be exploration? Shouldn't we be finding outlandish aliens and deciding whether to fight them or help them? Leaving irreversible consequences while populating the galaxy?

We only have one real enemy type throughout the game. (an angrier version of turians). Liberally scattered to make up the excessive barren landscape. They are predictable in movement, which make for repetitive and uninteresting gameplay. I recommend playing on insanity so that your character build actually matters.

Was so disappointed after the second planet sequence. The game divulges itself to be a grindfest, forcing you to destroy base after base of bad aliens who don't want you here, occasionally saving some good aliens who don't want you here but have more important things to worry about (like the bad aliens killing them).

Meanwhile, sprinkle some settlements here and there, because you are a pathfinder remember?