Mass Effect: Andromeda

Ok, I will admit my first play through was a shambles. Half of what makes up the Mass Effect universe was missing. I needed my dose of the Quarians I tell you!

However, on a second playthrough, a colleague convinced me to go in with fresh eyes, just Andromeda no Mass Effect. So I did.....

And my god this game is good. Some obvious ploys and deliberate plot holes ready for the next instalment. Which sadly looks like won't come to fruition. :( But I could have lived with story holes, knowing it will be revealed eventually in further games or DLC.

The combat is fun and worked well, the characters where a little similar to the DA:I group but hey, if it ain't broke why fix it. The voice acting was good and the story kept me interested.

It's a real shame we won't see anymore of Andromeda.

It really looks like the same game as Dragon Age Inquisition but in different settings and with different fight mechanics. Same boring side quests, rushed finale, bad or non-existing animations, bugs and glitches. So why everyone is saying that this one is so much worse? Because Bioware couldn't keep up the same feeling of running important organisation from zero to hero, and they builded up those super high stakes that you really don't even care about cause of the medium-quality writing. And with lack of that you are starting to notice things that in were hidden in DA:I behind that Inquisition atmosphere. No variety of enemies, technical issues, poor dialogues and quests that seems to be even worse than they really are. It took me 120 hours to finish it with 98%. And even with that wasted potential of the amazing Mass Effect universe that they created in the original trilogy I still quite enjoyed that. Combat is good and most of moral choices are forcing you to think about consequences, graphics is really nice and some moments can be impressive. This game is good and bad at the same time. I'll just leave this with 7/10 wich for me is safe, correct but still underwhelming and kinda mediocre.

Regardless of your thoughts relating to the ending of Mass Effect 3 back in 2012, at least the Bioware team making that game had the excuse of being under the gun to create something in 18 months that was not only new, but also to build upon technical advancements made in Mass Effect 2. Such a limited timescale no matter your resources, leaves little time to explore the creative aspects that often need much input and refining to really make the material into something that will be interesting, and impactful to the gamer playing it.

I do not however, have such sympathy for the team that made this mess. Who not only had over 5 years, a budget of over $40million, but most crucially a free creative pass to make almost any sort of Mass Effect game they wanted to. The drip-feed releases of screenshots and game footage showed promise, especially with Mass Effect now transitioning to the Frostbite engine. The changing of the November 2016 release date to March 2017 again showed promise, that Bioware & EA were actually going to take real care with Mass Effect after they damage they took in 2012. I myself was quite hopeful that this was going to be a great game to put things back on track.

Then we got to play the game for the 10 hour trial, and……oh my. If it wasn't a matter of public knowledge they spent 5 years on this, I'd have thought they cobbled this together in a year, and then didn't bother to QA or beta test it. If there wasn't such a thing as a 5 year rush job for a production of this nature, then Mass Effect Andromeda is the first. Graphically the game is nice, and some of the scenery can even be breath-taking, but now we get to what really brings it down. The animations, specifically character face ones. I've never seen backwards progress on such a thing until now, the ones from the original Mass Effect back in 2007 are better than these ones, and they weren't the best to begin with! With this being a game you spend hours talking to people, this is a key basic you need to get right. When characters greet the news that they've lost a friend or family member with their eyes darting around, and producing a goofy, vacuous smile like they have mental issues, then you have a fundamental problem with your game. Serious stuff ends up inducing laughter, and the actual comedy just becomes slapstick comedy since even punches characters make don't connect as if you were watching WWE.

Enemies glitch out of nowhere, your party members glitch all around you in combat, NPCs appear/vanish from thin air, some cutscenes don't trigger, some quests don't advance, dialogue in hub areas all cut one another off, so you can't listen in to any of it. Heck, there was even a bug where my character turned into something like the liquid metal T-1000 from Terminator 2!

It ends up being death by a thousand cuts, a few of those issues you could live with, but being so many of them that directly impede or taint your experience, it goes beyond farce and definitely beyond unacceptable. It's not worth talking about the story or lore, which have their own issues.

At the most basic level, Mass Effect Andromeda fails to be a good, solid game first and a Mass Effect game second. There is undoubted potential here, but it's all ruined by the awful work made of putting it together. There's so much wrong that if you couldn't laugh at it, you'd cry instead.

Don't bother getting this for at least a year, when they've hopefully fixed it or you can get it at bargain bucket prices. It's not worth your time or money in its current state, more importantly a purchase for this game now, is telling Bioware & EA that it's okay to release games in this state, and it simply isn't!

Like the previous games of the Mass Effect franchise, the design of Andromeda's protagonist characters are based upon real life models, both of which, as you would assume, are good looking people. The male Ryder appears as handsome as his real life counterpart, Steven Brewis, while the female Ryder is quite ugly and nothing like her real life counterpart, Jayde Rossi. Additionally, the female Ryder suffers from very strange facial animations which are often highly inappropriate considering the situations she is in, an example of this would be smiling while talking about the recent death of someone she cared deeply for.

Dialogue options in Mass Effect:Andromeda are very lacklustre with most situations only allowing 2 choices, either casual or professional. Almost all the casual responses result in cheesy one-liners and the professional choices are very similar in their intent, just without the 'humor'. When you are presented with a choice to do one thing or another, almost every single time this results in no difference whatsoever and will not affect the ending of the game or even the immediate circumstances after the choice has been made. This in my opinion means the player is without control and his or her decisions are rather meaningless.

Facial animations are terrible, example: Director Addison, an important character who the protagonist comes into contact with in the beginning of the game. When you first meet Addison she has wide open eyes that don't even blink and has no facial expression whatsoever. Addison proceeds to utter the line "my face is tired". Gamers realised that this line of dialogue was created in an attempt to somehow explain the missing facial animation for this character!

Summary. Mass Effect:Andromeda has many bugs. Enemies can and do frequently spawn up in the air and get stuck there, side tasks remain incomplete and weird NPC animations which make no sense whatsoever are quite frequent throughout the game. The characters of Mass Effect:Andromeda are uninteresting, quite ugly, badly animated and sometimes annoying. Since Mass Effect games are supposed to be role playing and team building games, this means the game loses all credibility as a role-playing game.

Notes: 2 patches have been released which (attempt) to rectify some of the animation issues and bugs but not all of the issues mentioned, however, this does not in any way excuse the state that this game was released in.

Final thoughts. It's a real shame that this game was released in such an unfinished and tarnished state. No one in their right mind would ever consider Mass Effect:Andromeda to be a triple A title like it's predecessors and as a huge fan of Mass Effect 1,2 and 3 I'm left feeling empty and cheated.

I think the extremely bad reviews exaggerated and consider the game a must-have for any RPG, and especially fans of the series!