Mass Effect: Andromeda (2017)

After playing through the Saint’s Row reboot that was considered one of the “worst games ever” and enjoying it. I decided to give Mass Effect Andromeda, a game with a similar reputation, a try. I was able to grab it for less than $10 on the PS Store.

Now, obviously I’m playing this game 6 years after it’s release, so a lot of the bugs that were present at launch have been patched out. I didn’t come across any bugs that were game breaking. The biggest thing I encountered were audio bugs. Ryder, the player character, would start randomly talking while exploring the main hub Nexus, and I think I figured it out. You give interviews throughout the game and the news reports play throughout the Nexus, but I think they forgot to make Ryder’s lines come from the speakers and not himself. There were a few occasions of pop-in where it took NPCs a moment to show up in game. Other than that, the game ran smoothly and I had no crashes. There are several cases of "BioWare face" in this game. People don't really emote when they talk, just stare at you like an android. The worlds you explore though look beautiful. I had to stop a few times just to stand on a ridge to enjoy the view.

The gameplay and combat have been improved from the original trilogy. Combat was never the high point of the Mass Effect series. They’ve tried to enhance the cover shooting with more mobility. Ryder is much nimbler than Shepard thanks to a jump jet. There is a focus on being mobile, darting between covers. Still, you can’t play this like DOOM 2016. Staying out of cover for too long will get your shields, and health bar, shredded. When you do get into the late game, I did tank some damage just to get an enemy dead quicker, but you have to be careful not to get surrounded. I didn’t notice much change in how your AI squadmates handle. You have the same controls to order them to take up certain positions or focus on certain enemies. I did find their battle acumen a little lacking. They don’t seem to focus on enemies that are closing in on us and will let them flank around us without trying to shoot them. And the enemies are very bullet spongy, which I always remember being an issue with Mass Effect. Few of them are hard to fight, they’re just tedious.

There’s a crafting system and a tier system, because why not. You find your favorite weapon, then keep collecting materials so you can craft the tier II, III, IV, & V version of it. Same goes for your armor. If each level or every other level made the weapon or suit have a different visual appearance, I’d be much more okay with this system, but it doesn’t. I also wished you had a wider array of casual clothes, because I felt like Ryder was wearing his athletic clothes everywhere.

The other part of the game is spent exploring planets. There’s about 6 different world spaces you can explore. They are little open world areas and each one is a different stereotypical space planet, like the ice planet, the jungle planet, the desert planet. You traverse these plains using the Nomad, your 6x6 expedition vehicle. Mass Effect vehicles have a reputation, but the Nomad does what it needs to do efficiently. It’s got a boost and jump and can climb most any slope with the AWD mode. Driving it around felt a bit like controlling a MudRunner truck. You can get upgrades for your Nomad and I did wish there were some more offensive options. You can try to run over enemies, but it’s clear the game didn’t really plan for you to use the Nomad as a weapon.

A problem that I’ve dealt with in any type of space game is loading screens. When you have to travel between planets, loading times are a necessary evil. This issue is compounded when I’d be on a side quest that requires me to visit 4 different worlds, and maybe on two of those I’m only there long enough to talk to one person then be sent off somewhere else. Loading screens are stylized as your spaceship traveling around the cluster. They are just long enough that you have time to check Facebook while you wait.

Andromeda sets you in the shoes of one of the Ryder twins as you are sent off to the Andromeda galaxy. I think this was a smart way to handle a new Mass Effect story. You leave the Milky Way a few years before the events of Mass Effect 3, and it takes you 600 years to reach your destination. It effectively skirts around whatever choices you made at the end of ME3, because you are 600 years removed from Shepard’s saga. The game only really mentions the events of the original trilogy at the end of a side quest where you learn the Andromeda Initiative was created partly as a failsafe for the upcoming Reapers. I know this game was developed by BioWare, but this setting and story feel like Andromeda was made by a new developer, sort of like a Fallout New Vegas to a Fallout 3, or those post-Insomnia developed Rachet & Clank games.

There’s a different feeling to this game. Of the classic Milky Way aliens, you only have the major ones come over: no Quarians, Volus, or Batarians. And everyone is part of the Andromeda mission, so everyone has the same goal and similar personalities. Most people who decided to take the trip are either excited for a new adventure, looking for a fresh start, or doing a civic duty. And the Initiative isn’t a military program, Ryder isn’t a commander like Shepard. It’ probably for the best they don’t try to make a Shepard 2.0. Andromeda is a coming-of-age story for Ryder. Before Mass Effect 1 starts, Shepard is already an accomplished military leader with a crew that must follow his orders. Ryder’s crew is civilian and he doesn’t have the commanding presence of Shepard, so your squad doesn’t always take you seriously. Instead of having a good/bad karma system for dialogue, you can choose Ryder’s personality. Is he logical, emotional, a joker, taciturn? I can’t be 100% sure, but I often chose the flippant answers and all of Ryder’s dialogue was more casual & jokey. I wonder if I played as professional Ryder if his dialogue would be drier and straight forward? If so, it’s a great way to make dialogue choices extend to my character’s overall personality.

Another thing this game was derided for was the writing. I found Andromeda to be peaks and valleys in this regard. There are a few lines that are awkwardly written, like the classic “My face is tired”. Your squadmates have canned dialogue during missions where they comment on events happening and while sometimes they sounded natural, I did notice a lot as canned lines compared to previous games. I usually enioy chatty companions who remark on the world and interact with each other, but the game suffers from verbal diarrhea. They seem afraid of silence, so your companions just talk endlessly. But on the other end, they do have some great dialogue and characterization. There’s also a bigger emphasis on humor than in the past titles. It was appreciated and does give your squad a Guardians of the Galaxy vibe.

I also really liked the squadmates at your disposal. They have great personalities and none of them felt like a water down version of an original trilogy companion. Andromeda does finally give us female versions of Turians and Krogans, which I’m surprised it took them this long. Vetra, your turian companion is one of those people who can get you anything for a price, but also doggedly looks after her sister. Drack is one of my favorite Krogans. He’s a typical old man archetype. He’s seen a lot of stuff and claims even more. He’s stubborn, but also a mentor. I did chuckle when he sent an Email to cheer me up that was a series of pictures of shotguns, many of which were watermarked or low res. Your human squadmates, Liam & Cora, are fine, but it’s hard to compete against wacky aliens. Cora does seem to mention that biotics were discriminated against in the Milky Way, but I don’t recall that being a thing in the previous games. Then there’s Peebee, your Asari companion. She’s red flag city; very flighty, and self-focused. As the story progress, she does learn to accept the rest of the crew as her family. I did romance Peebee this go around. She’s got both the sexy green (or blue) alien lady and manic pixie dream girl archetypes going for her, I’m not made of stone. And they make romance a bigger aspect of the story than in the original trilogy. It’s not just flirts and one sex scene. Others will remark on your crew and lots of regular scenes also make mention of your romantic partner. I don’t remember that being the case for Shepard.

As the strangers in a new galaxy, you do run into new alien races, and I think the story dropped the ball in regard to first contact. The first aliens you meet are a hostile race called the Kett, least that’s the name your crew gives them. There’s also a weird space vine you name the Scourge. Later you meet a friendlier alien race the Angaran. At first they are speaking an alien language, but within 2 mins of your first meeting you meet one that speaks English with no reason given. Even just a throwaway line that your universal translator has parsed their language would work. Even more ridiculously, they also call the hostile aliens the Kett and the space vines the Scourge, what are the odds? The Kett are a good villain faction. There’s a little bit of Reaper in them, in that both capture aliens and convert them to their race, but the Reapers were fairly one note. They had no culture or politics and couldn’t be reasoned with. They were simply a force of nature villain. The Kett are an alien empire. You learn about their power structure and religion.

There are certain spots where the game seems to rush the story. Another one I noticed was negotiating with the Krogans. They have abandoned the Initiative and started their own colony with blackjack and hookers. There’s a struggle between two Krogan clan leaders that I expected to be a prolonged side mission of me deciding who to put into power, but no. After about two stops the mission is done. Compare that to the Kandara story arc, which is where you travel to a pirate planet and help a less evil gang take over the port. There you team up with Reyes and complete 4-5 missions to shift the balance of power. It does feel like the Kandara world space was one of the first developed as it got the most attention, and Reyes is one of the few side NPCs who really sticks out. He feels like he was originally meant to be a companion, but they cut him out.

One thing Mass Effect has always done well is final missions. You give a big rousing speech to your team and set off to save the galaxy. All of the people you helped out along the way show up to lend a hand, and I'm a sucker for those "here comes the cavalry" moments. It makes all the work you did on side quests feel worthwhile. The boss battle was just a zerg rush of enemies, but the story around all of it was good.

All in all, like Saints Row 2022, I ended up really enjoying Mass Effect Andromeda. It was more Mass Effect, in a good way. Even if the story writing can be uneven, there’s some heart in it. The characters are all memorable. It’s a shame this game was so poorly received. I’d really love to have more adventures with Drack, Peebee, and the rest of the crew, but that’s unlikely now. Andromeda was one of those games that I got into and was a bit sad when the game finally ended. Everything was done, no more new adventures with the gang. I can see the little seeds they were sowing for the sequel that will never be, though I can hope in vain. As for the new Mass Effect we will be getting, I know it’s in the Milky Way, but I hope they don’t bring back Shepard. His story is done.

Okay, let's get what I didn't enjoy out of the way first, because it provides context for the rest of this review and provides an insight into what you're getting yourself into with this game: A lot of the gameplay is really quite boring. How, exactly? Well, unless you only do the story missions, the majority of the gameplay involves you trundling around your new-found galaxy (in some way, shape, or form), looking for quest objectives, talking to NPC's, or shooting a group of enemies. What this results in varies greatly from XP to genuine relationships, lore explanations, and components of the story, with the latter three seeming genuinely fulfilling, making it a shame that the processes in which you really immerse yourself in the game's universe can be so arduous. Basically, anthing but the main story often involes very repetitive gameplay, which isn't helped by fact that the planets you explore are fairly uninspiring. There's only half a dozen or so of them, and when you're provided with the usual "desert planet," "ice planet," and what I can only describe as a big asteroid, you do feel a little bit short-changed if you were thinking this was going to be a galaxy of worlds to explore. Andromeda falls short of the quantity of locales to discover provided by the original Mass Effect, and seemingly, their quality is sometimes barely a step up above the barren rocks you begrudgingly skimmed the Mako across.

Still here? Nice, because if you can stomach that, then you might well like the rest of the game (as I did). With that in mind, for those who haven't played many RPG's, myriad boring side-quests and all, this is not the game for you. However, for those who liked the exploration and customisation provided by the original Mass Effect, chances are this will be right up your alley. For a start, you're nowhere near as restricted in terms of customising your character's loadout and abilities when compared to the original Mass Effect Triology. For example, there are far more weapon mods, you can switch between character classes anytime after a few hours of gameplay, and you can mix and match powers as and when you desire. You can really play this game according to your preferences.

Also, regarding the universe the game builds, it actually does a pretty good job in my opinion. Firstly, NPC's, codex entries, and hidden bits of lore try to fill you in regarding what's important, and while the main story poses more questions than answers, you do have to remember that this was supposed to be the start of the post-Shepard Mass Effect era, and that these things are entirely subjective. As for the characters, every game has its fair share of uninteresting ones, and this game is no exception (cough Cora). However, there are more than enough opportunities to really get to know your crew, what drives them, what they're like as people, and they interact with each other both on missions and away from them. With the more nuanced characters, this is really worthwhile if you really want to make the most of your experience.

What else, then? Sure, there are some minor irritations, such as the fact that you can't order your squadmates to use their powers (and they can't use multiple weapons), but it does make you think of when and why you should or shouldn't bring a squadmate to a mission (let's be honest, for those of us who played the original trilogy, we just picked our favourites). Otherwise, the facial animations are still a bit creepy and textures don't always load as and when they should, but it didn't notably affect my relationship with the game.

My conclusion? Give this game a chance and reserve your judgement for when you've completed it (because it will change before, during, and after your playthrough, as it should). Just be warned, I'm not sure that any quest marked "task" is anything but a waste of time, although I am sure of one thing; this game may be divisive, but it is certainly not objectively bad.

I would do 4.5 if I could

After my playthrough of the ME trilogy I held off on this game for a WHILE because I'd only heard bad things, so I was shocked to find a really fun and enjoyable Mass Effect game in it. I think it's one of those cases where on it's own this would be a really good game, it just happens to live in the shadow of a trilogy of unrealistically incredible games and gets a worse reputation because of it.

There obviously was SOME bad. Namely: No bug I ran into was "game breaking", but there were definitely bugs and they definitely required some problem solving. I didn't understand the complaints that the side content/non priority missions were tedious at first, but they definitely started to wear out there welcome around the 25 hour mark. Which feels like a net win to me.

What this game NAILED though, and what for me is the most important part of a game like this, are the characters and the story. I ADORE (Sara) Ryder, I think it's incredibly impressive that BioWare was able to make a character who's still as blank and malleable for the player as Shepard was, but still at her core feels like a separate protagonist. And my CREW?? I would kill and die for every single person aboard the Tempest and I could not say the same about the Normandy. My biggest complaint with this is the same that is is with every Mass Effect game, which is at some point you run out of dialogue options with everyone when you genuinely just want to keep talking to them. Also a net win in my book.

I know we'll probably never get another Ryder adventure, and I think that's a shame. The original Mass Effect wouldn't be the staple it is today if it hadn't been given two additional games to iron out kinks and find itself. It is now my sworn duty to defend this game, and I will do so with pride.

3.5 stars rounded down

(If I hadn't rated Mass Effect 1 - 3 at 4 stars, I'd have rounded up instead of down because I did like Andromeda a lot more than a typical 3-star game—probably more than any other game I have rated this low. But I already had my established ratings in place for the trilogy and I wasn't going there for Andromeda. C'est la vie.)

The decision to leave the Milky Way Galaxy for an unsettled Andromeda Galaxy is one undertaken by four arks full of, respectively, humans, salarians, turians, and asari, plus a preliminary ship intended to arrive before the arks and get everything ready for the arks' arrivals. Maybe you can tell how all that has gone when the game launches with the crash landing of the human ark on a horrifying planet, Habitat 7. Habitat 7 was, based on Milky Way-based scans of Andromeda, one of a handful of planets that were going to be fit for, well, habitation. Between unbreathable air, floating rocks, a scourge in the sky (itself responsible for the crash), and a violent alien species disinclined towards diplomacy, Habitat 7 is a bust. It also kills the human Pathfinder—a fancy title for the person on each ark tasked with, essentially, exploration and determining which planets are fit for living—a responsibility that falls on (wait for it) your character, Ryder. You also learn that the preliminary ship is not ready, none of the other arks have arrived, leadership is in disarray after an uprising that killed key people, morale is low, and the sudden arrival of an ark a year later than expected is not met with the joy you might anticipate. So, uh, there's a lot to do.

If I understand my timeline right (which is debatable), it took 600 years for the arks to leave the Milky Way and reach Andromeda. They left sometime before the end of Mass Effect 3, although I suspect it was near the end of Mass Effect 1. But the key thing to know is that the characters basically have zero knowledge of the events of the original Mass Effect trilogy, with only a few tight-lipped rumors that come into play in the final quarter of the game (generally in the context of "there may not even be a Milky Way anymore" mindset). But because these characters, essentially, predate the context of the trilogy, there is still things like the genophage as a krogan reality—both present in the krogan (not given their own ark, but a part of the first ship) and the on-going resentment for it. And it's kind of a shock as a player to be like, "Wait, didn't I solve this in the last game?" yet for everyone to be stuck in the past about it. That's the biggest thing, but it's still weird to be playing a Mass Effect game where no one knows who Shepard is.

Depending on what you're looking for in a Mass Effect game, this disconnect from the trilogy is a viable deal breaker. It didn't break my deal (at least, once I got into the groove of what Mass Effect is doing), but I get it.

It doesn't help that Andromeda starts off rough. I'd say the first ten to fifteen hours (based on a normal first time play style, not a speed run of the main mission) are pretty bad, which includes the fairly streamlined introduction and the first world you go once the open world element opens up. Once i got into Andromeda's cycle (land on planet, grind it to a state of habitable, create outpost) I did get into the process. There is a certain delight in "suffering" through each planet's early stages, doing what needs to be done, clearing out objective markers on the map, and seeing the viability meter rise.

But things didn't really start clicking for me until I found two key weapons, which greatly aided my enjoyment of the regularly scheduled combat: The Inferno (a remnant sniper that doesn't use ammo and has a high rate of fire, but lower damage per shot and has a cooldown when you exhaust a "clip.") and the N7 Crusader (a shotgun with farther reach and accuracy than most). They're both weapons that play into my own play style of hiding behind cover, getting off as many shots as possible before shields or my clip depletes. The N7 Crusader, especially, was a revelation, with enough range that I could use it as my main gun in most battle situations. I haven't enjoyed using a shotgun since playing Resident Evil 4 (assuming I could even find ammo for it, lol), yet here we are. I probably could have played through the end game with just those two weapons. (I mean, I practically did; I don't think I pulled out my AR once after the point of no return, lol.)

Weapon and armor crafting is, I think, supposed to be a big element of the game. You get a lot of resources to that end. There are three categories of weapons (and, presumably, armor although I only ever crafted armor when it was required for a mission sooooooo... I think I crafted two armor, lol): Milky Way, Heleus, and Remnant. Or, put another way, the stuff based on technology that came along with the arks, the stuff used by the two intelligent species you encounter in Andromeda (kett, themselves transplants to the region, an enemy, and the angara, native to the galaxy and allies), and then remnant tech (a long gone species, like the protheans in the Milky Way, whose derelict structures still dot the Andromeda galaxy). But I didn't really feel the need to do much crafting. My sniper, sure. That was something I discovered at a time I was really teetering on the edge of quitting because I couldn't connect with my weapons. Everything else I basically bought or found. I could see people getting really into messing around with augmentations and mods, but I found them kind of confusing and not fun. I used them, yes, because duh, but I didn't waste time getting cute with them. Was happy with the basic "a little more power with no penalty is fine" approach rather than decide if I thought more power with less accuracy was a fair tradeoff. I suspect players who really dive into the augmenting/modding side of things could come up with some cool stuff. I was just happy to have weapons I liked, lol.

But as with all Mass Effect games, while connecting with weapons is pretty necessary just to enjoy playing, the real draw is interacting with companions and other characters. You end up with six companions (which feels light, but seems on par with ME3 and ME1, with only ME2 having more once you account for DLC characters and Legion), and I kind of loved all of them. You start with two humans from the pathfinding team, Cora and Liam. Liam is pretty so-so (falling right in line with the bland starting male companions from the trilogy, Kaidan, Jacob, and James, but also continuing a trend where each is better than the last so I like Liam more than them), but Cora is fantastic. Before you set out for the first real planet (ie, not Habitat 7 lol), you gain Vetra, a turian, with a neat visor. Then you gain PeeBee, an asari, pretty quickly on the first planet, with Drack, a krogan, not far behind. Finally, you'll grab Jaal, an angarian native to the galaxy, who is initially along, essentially, so the angarians can keep tabs on this new alien presence in the system, but quickly becomes an integral part of the team. I enjoyed interacting with all of them, and apart from companions, there's a fair number of other people on your ship to communicate with. So, as with prior Mass Effect games, I spent a lot of time running around the ship, catching up with everyone. And as with prior Mass Effect games, the opportunity for unique dialogue with each character isn't quite as often as I would have liked, lol. But that's OK. Then throw in various people on the Nexus (ie, the home base) and various people on the various planets (generally with less unique dialogue except after especially major plot points) and I spent about half the game running around just to talk, lol.

That might be the source of one of my biggest complaints about Mass Effect Andromeda. Travel within the galaxy takes forever. First you have to bounce out of whatever system you're in, which doesn't take long but requires a few button presses to go from the planet view to system view to galaxy view. Then you have to hone in on your next destination, first by selecting the destination (and prompts a lengthy flying sequence with an annoying strobe effect). Once you're in the system, you select the planet (or ship or whatever the destination is), prompting another flying sequence (with, admittedly, some cool perspective animation), before finally being able to actually select where on the planet you're landing (a seemingly unnecessary step since any landable planet only has one landing zone), followed by a landing sequence. Only one of those sequences is skippable, the rest something to be slogged through each and every time you want or need to go somewhere else. Some of it is doubtlessly baked in as a load time, but the balance feels off and, even by 2017 standards feels pretty damn long. My suspicion is they sacrificed time in favor of the initially cool—but gets old quick—perspective of flying through space. On the one hand, "it's only a couple of minutes." On the other hand, it creates a very distinct barrier to casually going anywhere without having a pretty valid reason.

The romance options are pretty compelling. FemRyder and MaleRyder share a large portion of the pool, with only a handful of romanceable characters unique to each. I started off NOT interested in PeeBee, focusing on Vetra, Suvi (one of the ship's crew), and Jaal (who I didn't like at the outset, but quickly grew on me). By about the 1/3 mark Vetra dropped off my radar and was waffling between Suvi and Jaal. Then Reyes came into the picture, and something about the way Ryder can dialogue with him is so snappy and appealing that I seriously considered him for a while. But, dropped Reyes for several plot-related and personal reasons and around that same time PeeBee really started to snap into focus as a character. Jaal was a bit too serious for my tastes, so it basically came down to Suvi or PeeBee. Had Suvi asked first, I might have gone there, but PeeBee preempted her and I couldn't turn her down—mostly because, from a logical perspective, a primary companion likely has more interesting things going on than a crew member. No regrets. Also had a bit of a fling with Keri T'V, because apparently Ryder has a soft spot for asari. HEY BIOWARE, I'M STILL WAITING FOR A ROMANCEABLE KROGAN. PLEASE.

(I should note that if you're loose with the flirt button, you can get yourself in a position where you're cheating on your romanced character with Keri. Basically, around the midway point you can kinda commit to a fling with Keri after certain conditions are met, and those conditions probably won't be met until your romanced character is decided. If you flirted enough with Keri to pop that fling AND you're uncomfortable with Ryder cheating on their lover, you can continue with the Keri interactions until the point she asks to meet at the Vortex (a Nexus bar). Meeting her there will make it inevitable. However, it is invisible to the other characters—ie, nothing will be affected by it—nor does it show anything, so if you accidentally go too far and have moral issues with Ryder cheating, you can pretend she went to Keri's apartment for coffee and not anything physical, lol. Now, I decided when I met Keri that I was into her and just committed to playing Ryder as a stinkin' cheat. Sorry, Ryder, and PeeBee.)

You know what, I've kind of talked myself into 3.5 stars rounded UP. Sure, it's not as good as the trilogy, but I ended up having a blast with Mass Effect Andromeda and just can't quite feel comfortable assigning it just three stars.

Edit: It's inevitable that I think of something else I want to address after posting, lol. One thing I relied on heavily in the trilogy are the ammo powers (incinerate, disrupt, etc). They really changed the ammo powers in Andromeda. Instead of being an actual power, they're consumables. Ugh. I've never been good at using power-related consumables. I tend to hoard them for "the future" and by the time the future comes, I forget I have them or don't remember how to use them or have, essentially, adapted to playing without them. Such is the case here, where I used my incinerate once early on, then completely ignored them. And, to be fair, just based on description they seem pretty weak: Only lasts a few clips before needing to be reconsumed. Maybe if I was using high-capacity clips they'd feel better, but I was maining weapons with 6 and 7 shots to a clip. Meanwhile, the upgradable powers, without the ammo-related stuff, mostly ends up being similar to stuff we've seen in the trilogy, which means powers I never really used before because I was an ammo-power main. Ended up leaning on concussive shot/fireball for the first 2/3rds of the game or so—two powers I had a bit of experience with—and when those seemed to not pack the sort of punch I was looking for, skewed in the direction of cloak and something so irrelevant I don't even remember what it is called. The cloak DID fit my play pretty well. Incidentally, my third power slot was assigned to the remnant tech PeeBee gives you at around the 1/3rd mark. It was my best and favorite power. I dunno, I got pretty unexcited about developing and upgrading powers when you can only have three of them assigned at any given time. Once you've got your relevant passives leveled up and your three slotted powers leveled up, you can start leveling other things for fun—clever players can create different builds and whatnot—but that's not how I play. Seemed like wasting time leveling up a power I wouldn't use is, well, a waste of time. (Oh, and to add confusion to the mix, some of the powers require a consumable of some sort—they might have called it a "power cell"—to use and I'm already annoyed enough that I have to scramble around the battlefield for ammo, I wasn't going to add a second thing to track. Just give. me cooldowns and I'm happy, you know? And I was happy because I didn't upgrade those powers. Just pretended they didn't exist. Ignorance is bliss.)

This was my first Mass Effect game and credits rolled after 56 hours. I've heard quite a lot about this game, most of it bad. This review is almost 4 years after release, so I suspect many bugs have been fixed by now. I didn't get many bugs at all, there definitely were some, but rarely.

Dialogue, story, characters, exploration. It's all really good in this game. Gameplay is fine, it's a little repetitive shooting things, scanning other things and generally just travelling back and forth between planets. The game looks really good, I played on high settings. There are some gorgeous planets that you'll explore and the beginning of the game really stunned me with how open it was. I felt like a kid the first time you get the car and can drive around freely on planets. I remembered how I would always want a game like this.

The new aliens, the angara, are a big part of this game. I felt like they were a bit too cliche and avatar-like at times. The enemies and the main boss are also kind of cliche, with motives that don't really go further than "I want power". But the universe this game series has built up is so vast that you could make a story out of anything, and I hope it will return someday.

If I were to compare it to some other games I've played, it's basically The Outer Worlds but bigger and better. It has some hints of Horizon Zero Dawn and Borderlands 2 in it. I will rate it 9/10, and I will play the other Mass Effects now. I hear great things about them.

After 3 playthrough attempts spanning over 110 hours, and after having the game installed on my PC for over 3 years, I've finally finished Mass Effect: Andromeda: the game that "killed Mass Effect". And I'm here to say that this game is..... fine. It's fine.

Graphics:

They're what you'd expect from an Xbox One / PS4 release game, or an end-of-generation 360 / PS3 game. Which is a bummer, considering that this game released about midway through the "current" Xbox One / PS4 gen. The environments -- particularly plastic, metal, & skyboxes -- look really nice. Character models range from "pretty decent" (the game's "big bad" Kett Archon) to "these guys absolutely looked better in the original trilogy" (almost every human character, including/especially the playable protagonists). Animations are improved from the abysmal state at release, but by no means stellar for a 2017 game. Lazily acceptable, I'd say.

Music & Sound:

The game starts with a promising title screen theme. And from there on, you're treated to a whole bunch of unmemorable synth noises. You'll find no "Suicide Mission" themes here. Sound effects are competent for a space adventure.

Characters:

Compared to Commander Shepard, Scott/Sara Ryder is a bumbling tool. In my playthrough as Scott, he constantly second guessed his ability to "adult", he wanted to have dance parties in alien underground vaults, and he was just a generally uninteresting dude. And his squadmates are equally as uninteresting: a band of bland Millennial stereotypes, and Drack.

Story:

Tens of thousands of humans, asari, turians, krogan, and salarians take a 600-year trip in stasis, leaving the Milky Way to settle Andromeda. When they get there, it's not as hospitable as they hoped. There are some bad-guy aliens called the Kett, and you deal with them while making the galaxy habitable. And there's a mysterious Prothean-esque race called the "Remnant". That's about it. Meh.

Gameplay:

Take a typical Ubisoft map full of objectives that you need to complete. Flesh those objectives out to have a bit more story than Assassin's Creed Origins had. And then put it in space. That's the basic gameplay loop.

Combat is actually fairly enjoyable. Walking around with your scanner out, trying to get points to craft stuff is not. The actual crafting system itself: even less fun. The inventory/mission menu system is convoluted and messy, needlessly filled with submenu after submenu.

Like Mass Effect games of the past, you have choices that you'd think would affect the story, but they really don't. At all. Your choices simply cause completely inconsequential NPCs who acknowledge those choices to sometimes appear.

Even the Loyalty Missions for your teammates have no real outward effect on the storyline. They simply give you access to those characters' highest tier upgrades. Some of the characters' Loyalty Missions include some of the game's more engaging gameplay with some interesting environments (Liam); while others were insufferable fetch-quests that forced you to zigzag across the galaxy, repeatedly watching the same planet approach/depart animations (Peebee).

Conclusion:

If you're looking for an open world treadmill to eat up dozens & dozens of hours of your time, this is certainly one of those. It's not terrible. But it's also not great. I'd even say it's better than the Ubisoft open world games it's trying so hard to emulate. But in 2020, I'm really getting "Open World"-ed out.

Andromeda: Jetpacks!

Andromedon't: Unimaginable amounts of crafting.

The Mass Effect series is a classic featuring fantastic writing, memorable characters and an exciting story set in a complex and vibrant world. These are big shoes to fill. Unfortunately, Andromeda is not only not a good Mass Effect game, it's not a good game overall.

One wouldn't think this from the start. I was first impressed by the strong music theme that accompanied the relatively detailed character creator in which I spend more time than I'm comfortable to admit. After putting the finishing touches on my Shepard Ryder, I was quickly (and literally) dropped into action. New aliens whose language we --realistically-- could not understand were shooting at us and refreshingly, I was following orders from my commander instead of being the main gal.

However, it all went downhill from there. After what's essentially an escort mission, my character was quickly (again) the chosen one, I was (again) finding advanced technology left by a mysterious ancient race and fighting enemies that (again) were abducting our allies to (again) transform them into more of them. I was (again) exploring huge planets in a ridiculously all-terrain rover and (again) proving planets for resources. Our heroes had travelled 2 million light years during more than 600 years in cryostasis for new, amazing stuff; instead they stumbled into an uninspired clone of the same Milky Way shenanigans.

Besides rehashing the same story of the previous games, Andromeda showcases a galaxy of bad decisions. Instead of the relatively short and self-contained missions of previous games, the first few areas feature humongous areas filled filled to the brim with quests. The upshot is that you can spend hours upon hours checking objectives with barely any meaningful interaction with your squadmates. So, after finishing terraforming a whole planet I still hadn't learn anything about them. And the few interactions that I did have, didn't reveal much. Everybody remarks about how open and in contact with their emotions the new Andromeda aliens are, but you never actually see it. The romance system appears to have been reduced to a crude imitation of its former self, with Rayder being able to openly hit on every character almost before even knowing their name.

Back is the Mako, with different name but only slightly less ludicrous physics, and so is the lacklustre inventory management from the first game and the pace-halting hacking minigames. Gone, however, is Medigel, mid-battle pause, and the ability to control teammate powers. This last omission removes any incentive to customise the squad, so I ended up just press the "auto level-up button" every time and thus missing on part of what's supposed to make them unique. Also missing are interesting battle banter: the memorable "Go for the optics Chatika!" is sadly replaced by a bland "I hate the Kett". Lastly, in a unfathomable design choice, you have quick access to just 3 powers which, again, results in only spending skill-points on them and ignoring the rest of the limitedly massive skill-tree.

On top of all this unpleasantness, there's a thick patina of technical issues. My game froze several times during long and unskippable cinematics. The cursor was often visible on the centre of the screen, even during combat and exploration. Sounds were constantly cutting off. Characters were out of frame during conversations.

It's a pitty, really, because it's not as if they are all bad ideas. The addition of the jetpack opens things up to an interesting use of vertical space in combat and exploration. Dialogue-wise, Ryder's more light-hearted attitude is refreshing after three entire games of Shepard's seriousness.

Mass Effect: Andromeda really is a sad end for the Mass Effect franchise. I really wanted to like it, but it brings back worst aspects of the original games while at the same time lacking what made it great all neatly wrapped in a technically flawed package.

When I first bought Andromeda last year, the salesperson tried to talk me out of it, saying if I really loved the Mass Effect universe I wouldn't want to play this game. Idiot.

Andromeda is the perfect next step for the ME series. A new and ambitious plot that I think is best described as an epic space adventure. Super cool science and lore, excellent environments to explore, tight story, lovable party members (to my astonishment, Peebee went from being my least-liked to my best-loved), sexy romance and fun gameplay.

I'm too close to my feelings on the game and it's conclusion, having just finished it, to do Andromeda any kind of justice through words. I know I'll have words later, and probably lots of them. But for now I can say one thing confidently: I can't wait for more.

Update: some of my feelings and insight on Mass Effect: Andromeda can be found in Grouvcast Episode 9

Rating: 7/10

Andromeda is a good but hugely flawed game that doesn't live up to the original trilogy. In fact, it is lesser in most ways. It may also be a small victim of the fact that there are too many open world games in general, but especially right now. We've literally had Ghost Recon, Zelda, Horizon, and Yakuza (I classify it as such, even though it's a lot smaller), and the latter 3 are way better than this. I'm a little sick of open world games as a whole, not wanting everything to be that way, but right now I am pretty burnt out on them, even though they've mostly been great.

When discussing this with my brother, I mentioned my open world fatigue and he said that at the beginning we were all just happy with all the content, but now we want quality. If you're reading this, let me know in the comments if you relate to that, because I certainly do and I'd like to hear the opinions of others.

There's a personal preference on display, obviously, but it goes a little deeper than my tiredness. I actually thought the first and second ME were perfect RPG length, along with games like Knights of the Old Republic and The Witcher 2 (Witcher 3 is amazing too, and is the way to go from something more linear to open world). What I mean by this is that while there were still side-quests, there were fewer and they are deeper generally. I could go through the game in 20-30 hours, not completing every single one by any means, but not feel like I missed a lot. I think my sweet spot with RPGs is usually that time. Even in longer games I tend to stop doing side missions entirely at a certain point.

I bring this up because I want you to understand where I'm coming from, and also because I don't think Andromeda brings anything to the formula. I've skipped most side-quests because I couldn't care less, and while I admit part of that is said fatigue, it's also because they are really repetitive and lack any narrative strength. In making the planets more expansive, the soul has been stripped for the sake of quantity. Maybe in a different month I'm more forgiving of that, but right now I'm certainly not. I can't accept how it destroys the pacing.

It's not even like there's a good plot here. The first and second (you'll notice I mention those because I played them recently and have forgotten everything ME3) are not masterpieces of storytelling, but they are interesting with cool moments. The fear of the Reapers adds a lot of emotion to the experience, plus the characters are more fleshed out. Everybody here is bland or a cheap version of previous characters in the series, as I believe the other review on here (as of now) said. It's hard to commit to them and their cause when they aren't giving me much of a reason. I remember the moral dilemmas present in the previous installments and nothing here can reach that level.

A lot has been said about the technical glitches and while they are present, the only thing that occasionally irks me is the eyes going everywhere. Most of the time I don't care and feel that this is hugely overplayed. People saying "fuck this game" because it is not the most beautiful game in the world? Ridiculous.

With that said, I do think that the planets you visit are nice looking, with a good amount of variety in the environments. So it's not actually an ugly game by any means; they just stumbled a bit in ways. I haven't come across any of the game breaking bugs where you can't complete a mission, however.

The combat is the best it's been, even if you can't control your squad as much. That doesn't matter to me because I never felt the series was tactical enough to warrant that. What does impress me is how mobile you are, how much fun it is to jump from place to place. They did a good thing in updating the ME combat system with this type of movement, and should be commended for that.

And yet there's another flaw that's tied to the combat. While the action is great, I'm not a fan of changing profiles. It seems like they've embraced the RPG roots more with the bigger skill trees, and yet I liked being tied to a class. It gave me purpose in my otherwise drab life. But seriously, I never switch profiles because my preference is having a class and sticking with it. I knew going into it that I wouldn't like this aspect though. Being able to build your character the way you want is nice, but I usually like picking a path and just manipulating the way I go down it. It's more exciting to me, but I may be alone with this.

I was originally at an 8, despite this my issues, but I realized that the game pisses me off after I spend a bunch of time with it each day. My favourite games don't do that. This may come across as small to some, but the amount of time you spend waiting really annoys me.. or at least as much as a video game can, because let's face it, first world problems. You have to pick a place, wait for the stupid animation to stop, then wait again, and then when you want to land you have to watch something again. Wasn't ME2 mostly instantaneous in this regard? I understand a bit of a load time when entering a new area but this is ridiculous. It doesn't help that I hate having to press the button multiple times to get out of the menu. In fact, the UI is awful and cluttered. Generally these would be minor pet peeves, if isolated, but together (along with everything else I don't like), it kills my desire to continue. I'm a patient guy, this tests it.

I went into this game with all the best will in the world. I wanted this game to succeed. To blow me away. I was aware of some of the negative buzz, but it focused mainly on the visuals and animations so I dismissed it from hand and went in with an open mind. But the game just isn't all there. It's missing something. Something big. And it's not about the graphics, it's about the plot. The original Mass Effect had a simple but compelling story, and while it began to seem silly after a while that you could take time out from your galaxy-saving mission to guest star in some crime drama or reunite lost friends, it maintained that sense of danger and mission.

This game is designed to have a similar mission: you're there to save the colonization mission to the Andromeda galaxy. It's a good mission to be honest. It keeps you away from the continuity of the ME3 ending while giving you new worlds to explore and an entirely different threat. But here's the thing: they take it all for granted. Rather than build up tension, we're just calmly introduced to the situation and then told to get to it. Some moments at the very beginning seem to be on track with the sense of isolation and danger, but once you reach the big station that's all gone. You know the situation's bad because you've been told it, but you never feel it. It's bad storytelling.

The villains are completely undercooked. They just start shooting you on the first world you explore. No words, just shooting. For a first contact scenario it's not very exciting. They're also not very dynamic as villains, particularly coming after the Reapers. Just another generic ruthless warrior people villain of the week. Hooray. Oh, and there are more giant ancient alien artifacts, only this time they're not built by Protheans but by the Remnants. Further originality.

This game feels like it's lacking a soul. There was no heart put into this. None at all. The game really needed to set up a new galactic civilization with different rules from the ones in the Milky Way. But what we get is empty worlds. Okay, I suppose a game about colonization needs a few of them. But to have any sort of larger threat we need something bigger. I suppose they could have gone the Tomb Raider route and made it about pure survival, but they needed to put something in here apart from poor imitation clones of ME games past.

That absence of any clear conception of what they wanted to do is present throughout the game. The game feels unfocused and occasionally confusing. I found myself wondering what I was expected to be feeling, because characters were having a much stronger reaction to things than I was. This is a new galaxy. It should feel new. I should feel a thrill of exploration. The characters should feel that thrill of something new. But of course, that would have interfered with the single-player MMO style of the game. They'd have had to focus on the plot instead of padding it out with continuous fetch quests.

The quests. Oh, the quests. That's probably the hardest thing to deal with. Mass Effect quests could always be a bit of a mixed bag, but for every 'help convince my husband to return home' there was a 'help Garrus assassinate a dude' quest to make up for it. But here the quests all seem so artificial. I don't just mean that there's no sense of threat, sometimes the quests are set up so obviously that it hurts and at other times they're padded out through repetitive tasks. As an example of the former, your father locks down a portion of the data you may need to survive until you have progressed as a pathfinder. What sort of sense does that make? It's not corrupted data or anything, he just decided that you shouldn't know things until you had found the memory fragments on worlds you hadn't colonized yet. It makes no kind of sense. And your reward for completing it is that you get to listen to Ryder's father ramble on about the usefulness of AI. Yay?

Not everything about the game is bad. The characters are still fun. The two human sidekicks are boring obviously, just as they were in ME1, but the new asari is frighteningly enthusiastic and impulsive. Your turian friend is a female this time around and so avoids some of the Garrus-like tendencies of other turians. The krogan is, however, just a pale imitation of Wrex. But what should be obvious from these descriptions is that comparisons to the strong cast of the original trilogy is unavoidable and generally not in their favor. It's something they were never going to evade entirely, but mixing up the races or at least genders would be a help. As would varying the ship designs (I get the personnel transports, but why is your scout ship a bad imitation of the Normandy? Or the Nexus just like the Citadel?).

Really, the biggest problem is not just that they use the same species, it's that they place them in the same roles. Peebee's no Liara and doesn't act like her, but she fills the exact same role that Liara did: scientist/archaeologist. You even run into her on a dig site! Same with the direct, tough-as-nails turian number two and the warlike krogan soldier with a thoughtful bent. It's lazy and an easily avoidable mistake. What they should have done is put characters like the krogan Kesh into your party. Kesh is a female administrator working for the colonization office. She's smart, insightful, and very krogan, but she's not a mercenary and instead acts as a community organizer. She's different enough from Wrex that she has room to breath as a character. Except of course, that she's not in your party so you rarely see her. You can see similar ideas with your salarian pilot. These are the types of characters that should be on your team. Not Garrus, Liara, and Wrex v. 2, much as I like some of them.

But still, pale imitations or no these characters are a lot of fun together. You get some seriously entertaining banter among them. And what helps it all work is Ryder. Ryder is no Shepard. But she, at least, isn't trying to be. The Paragon/Renegade wheel is gone. Replacing it are four new options that you can choose based on your personality. This means that you can build Ryder as a character beyond being simply the living embodiment of decency or the vilest savior in history. Ryder can be serious or she can tell jokes and laugh nervously at her responsibilities. This is Ryder's first big test and she knows it. You're not going to feel like the destined badass saving the galaxy, but you can be the plucky underdog proving herself to the universe. And that makes the character interactions feel fresh. Even if you're just talking with a Wrex clone, his reactions are going to be different when talking to an insecure youth rather than the epitome of badass warriorhood.

I want to end with something positive to say, so I'm going to talk about the combat system. It's great. Probably the best the series has ever seen. The traditional cover system is intact, but now you have the ability to jet pack into the air or forwards into an enemy. It can be a bit hard to control sometimes, but in general it's a lot of fun. About the only downside is that you can no longer command your party members so directly. The most you can do is tell them where to position themselves.

Basically, this game doesn't hold a candle to the originals. The combat system is better and it can be nice to have an open world, but the game is too unfocused and features some poor decisions that undermined these features. If you enjoyed the previous games you'll probably find enough common elements in here to make it worthwhile playing. If you want to get into Mass Effect don't start here.

Oh, and the character models/animations suck.