(WARNING: SPOILERS EVERYWHERE!)
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| Ryder fucking shit up. |
Scan enemies to help us gain a tactical advantage. Scan plants because something something ecosystem. Scan a bunch of satellites in half a dozen solar systems to figure out where some missing shuttle went. Scan a fucking door, because otherwise the nearby activation console won't become interactive. There is so much scanning in this game, I've literally watched entire 40 minute episodes of GameSack on my smartphone whilst scanning planets for worthless resources. I'm not making this up. It actually takes hours to scan every system in the game and there is zero sense of reward, which is true for the vast majority of quests in Mass Effect: Andromeda.
There is a side quest where an NPC gives you a shopping list and sends you to the market. I'm not joking. You're supposed to go to a bunch of merchants and buy some shit for a Turian, then come back with the goods for a bit of experience. There's even a goddamn followup quest, which has you buy some more stuff for him. I don't care how desperate they were to add "content" to this game. If I'm supposed to be some galaxy-saving superhero and you're telling me to do your shopping, then you fail game design on the most basic level.
What's worse - these pointless filler-quests never end! It's impossible to enjoy, let alone focus on the game's main plotline, because you're constantly getting interrupted by bullshit. Download a list for movie night aboard your ship. Place, scan or find a bunch of nav beacons randomly scattered all over a planet. Do boring, arbitrary stuff, some of which doesn't even come with dialogue, a cutscene or a decent reward, but just text boxes (email, datapads etc.) and a shitty experience reward. Zero satisfaction.
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| We'll bAAAAH! Nevermind! |
I'm not wasting any more of anyone's time blabbing about the fucked up animations, because it's been done to death and I just don't find them massively game-breaking. Besides, there are so many actual game-breaking bugs, so how about I talk about those, instead? Like the time I went into my room on my starship, only to have the door close behind me and never open up again. It wouldn't budge, no matter what. So I went and loaded my most recent autosave, which lead to a black screen. The autosave broke, meaning I had just lost well over 30 minutes of progress, thanks to a stuck door.
"Only idiots rely on autosaves" is what most sane people would say here. Problem is, Andromeda flat-out refuses to let you save during critical missions. Sometimes you're not in a mission at all, but manual saving still won't work, because somebody is talking, a door is closing or there's some other shit going on, which temporarily prevents the manual save feature from working. During my time in Andromeda, saving was disabled more often than not.
That's a huge problem, because scripts regularly fail to trigger, causing missions to get stuck, preventing quest baddies from spawning or, in one hilarious case, causing infinite enemies to spawn until the whole game crashed.
Poor game-design
Instead of a minimap, Andromeda uses an Elder Scrolls style compass. And what's the first thing modders put into every Elder Scrolls game after all the nude mods are done? A FUCKING MINIMAP! Because the compass works so well and everyone loves it. To make up for it, PC users get the most amazing UI controls, ever. Menus are sometimes closed with the ESC key, sometimes via Tab and to make matters more fun, certain other menus can only be exited with the T-key. Some menus, such as the Strike Team window, don't respond at all. I can't hire, equip or release any strike teams (all buttons and hotkeys are unresponsive), so there's one bit of filler content I won't be interacting with. Shame!
I was excited about the combat during my first ten hours of trial gameplay. Little did I know it would never advance beyond what I've seen in the trial, because you only get three active skills as opposed to the four skills characters had in ME3. Sure, you can unlock and level up every single skill in the game, given enough time and experience points. But what's the point if you can only ever use three at a time? And remember when you could still issue orders to your squad mates? In Andromeda you can tell them where to go, but that's it. Yes, they've actually managed to dumb things down even further since ME3.
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| 143 skill points spread across a ton of skills. You get to use three. |
Baddies also drop a ton of loot, all of which clutters up your tiny inventory, forcing you to throw away or deconstruct stuff every ten or so minutes. Ultimately, I just stopped picking up loot altogether, because it wasn't worth the hassle. 90% of the weapon modifications had negative side effects or were for guns I never used. There's a bunch of augmentations for armor, which always come with massive penalties. What would I want with a +50% shields -50% health "upgrade"? Or a melee booster, which comes with massive penalties to the damage I deal with weapons and powers?
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| Spawn placement has its problems. |
Then there's the Nomad, which replaces the Mako from the original trilogy. I'll admit I actually enjoy driving around in that thing, though BioWare made sure to avoid making this new vehicle too fun or even convenient. By default, the Nomad will get stuck or even roll backwards the moment you try to drive up a molehill. The only way to avoid that is by switching to six wheel drive, which allows you to climb even the tallest mountains. It also causes the Nomad to slow down to an agonizing crawl. This means you're constantly switching driving modes, which adds absolutely nothing to the enjoyment of the game. What the hell were they thinking?
Worst of all are the unskippable cutscenes. Let's say you're exploring a planet and some NPC asks you to get back to the Nexus ASAP. So you leave the planet and get an unskippable liftoff cutscene. You bring up the star chart, zoom out, look for the Nexus, then you get an unskippable cutscene of you approaching the Nexus. Then you get a little unskippable video of the Tempest appearing near the Nexus, followed by yet another unskippable video of the Tempest actually landing. The NPC you're supposed to meet is in Operations, so now you get an unskippable cutscene of the little subway train taking you there. You talk to the guy, get sent to another planet, so now you get the subway again, then the liftoff, then the animation of your ship moving to the planet, then the landing sequence, NONE OF WHICH CAN BE FUCKING SKIPPED! I get it, all of these videos and sequences mask load times, but for fuck's sake, they can't be interrupted even when the loading is done! Why am I even playing this on a PC?
Some seriously bad storytelling
Attention - there be spoilers here!
Towards the final stretch of the game you find out that the Andromeda Initiative was started as a plan B to escape the Reapers. Funny thing is - that's a secret, kept by the leaders of the entire thing. Most of the pioneers getting frozen to explore Andromeda millions of lightyears away do so, because they wanted to see something new, make discoveries, start a new life... you know, all those perfectly valid reasons to leave the fucking galaxy.
This is absolutely ridiculous! The vast majority of people traveling to Andromeda had no idea about the Reapers and just wanted to explore somewhere new? Why? Has the entire Milky Way been explored already? Was there nothing left to discover? Then why are NPCs constantly whining about how much they miss their friends and families, their favourite food and all sorts of crap that reminds them of home? Who the hell would be insane enough to have their ass frozen for 600 years, drift through space, hoping to wake up in the right spot at the right time millions of light years away? I'm lucky when a new games console or a piece of hardware I order for my PC lasts for more than three or four years if it isn't dead on arrival. These guys blindly trust their starships to last for centuries, just so they can explore boring, single-biome planets. Granted, these "golden worlds" were supposed to be perfect when they had been spotted, but that was 600 years ago!
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| Dat casual sex tho! |
Some side quests get a bit of a story, but it's best not to think about the writing too much. There is one quest where you're supposed to track down a killer. You go to the crime scene, there's a dead Krogan, you get to do cool shit like scan for DNA and blood and what have you. And there's a knife right outside on the porch. With an engravement that leads you right to your guy. Why in the ass do they even need a pathfinder and his badass scanning abilities if the killer leaves his shit in plain sight? Who wrote this? What were they thinking?
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| Bad animations are the least of his worries. |
The main story has its good moments and I did enjoy most of the main plotline. What I didn't enjoy was the fucking setup for a sequel (not bloody likely at this point) or some DLC (you can bet your ass on that one). The only way to be more brazen about it would be if they had the next badguy dance around naked with a large sign that says 'DON'T FORGET TO BUY OUR DLC' on it.
To add insult to injury, an after-credits dialogue reveals that they have just spotted a ship full of Quarians, Elcor, Hanar - basically all the aliens which have been completely absent from Andromeda so far. You hyped for that DLC yet?
The new guys are great
I see a lot of complaints about Ryder and his team and I disagree with most of them. The whole thing is a bit unfair. People love Shepard, Garrus, Wrex and everyone else who isn't Kaidan or Jacob. Or James Vega. Or Ashley. Huh. Come to think of it, the original trilogy had some shit crew members, too. Here you get a bunch of new guys and immediately they're supposed to live up to the characters we've been following for three games. And honestly, I think most of the new characters do a pretty great job and they're perfectly likable.
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| I sense a butt coming. |
In many ways, Ryder is the Anti-Shepard. He doesn't have a plan, he's no stern authority figure and the writers are doing a great job showing that he was never trained or prepared to become a pathfinder. He follows his gut and makes the best of the situation. There's that moment where the Tempest gets surrounded by a bunch of enemy ships. "There's over a dozen ships. They're scanning us!" And Ryder responds, "Well... scan them back!" with so much determination in his voice, I couldn't help but burst into laughter.
Sometimes things get a little too weird when characters suddenly drop references to Star Wars or The Avengers. But when my Turian space-girlfriend tells me she made cow for me and I see my character struggling to pretend he's overjoyed at the sight of this charred, ruined chunk of meat on his plate, I can't help but love the new crew. So what if they're a little more goofy than Shepard? Don't tell me you already forgot about the fucking emergency induction port!
Some characters are weaker than others and there's one crew member in particular, who had waaaay more text and weight on the plot than anybody else, which was rather annoying, but I'll get to that.
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| They do have the license, I guess. |
One thing that hugely bothers me about the setting is how, even though I'm exploring a brand new galaxy, I'm only making first contact exactly once and it sucks! So I run into a bunch of ugly aliens, who immediately open fire at me and that's that. By the time you bump into the Angara they've already seen tons of humans and they don't give two shits about you. They're also the ugliest, lamest and dumbest aliens in the entire Mass Effect universe, so thank god only about 80% of the game is about these assholes.
In fact, one of them, an Angara named Jaal, joins your crew. Then you get to explore that guy's homeworld, two other planets his people live on, figure out that the enemy faction is actually a bunch of mutated Angara. Long story short, you'll be playing the vast majority of the game dragging Jaal's ugly ass with you, so why we get six different team mates I'll never know. Unfortunately, compared to Turians, Asari and badass Krogans, the Angara are just a bit lame. Jaal keeps blabbing on and on about his feelings, constantly stressing that his people are very emotional, so you're always hugging it out and then he takes you to meet his family and his countless cousins and siblings. Basically, Jaal is Italian.
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| Surprisingly, you only suck his cock figuratively. |
It looks utterly breathtaking at times
No, not the characters. But the landscapes are incredible, gear is ridiculously detailed, the lighting is phenomenal and in some moments the game looks better than pre-rendered cutscenes do in other AAA-games. There are other games rendered in Frostbite, which look even better, but it wouldn't be fair to call Andromeda ugly, just because its inhabitants walk around like human-gorilla-hybrids with a load of shit in their pants.
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| Screenshots just don't do it justice. |
Ridiculously realistic rain effects, spectacular tech combos, my first gigantic, super scary remnant architect - at its best moments, Andromeda looks absolutely amazing. With that said, I can't remember a single piece of music I've heard on there. And I'll never forget the tune the original Mass Effect played when Shepard became the first specter.
Please don't kill the franchise
There are some great moments in this game. Some are hilariously funny, others are genuinely exciting and action-packed, especially when you take on some of the game's largest enemies. I didn't entirely hate the story, despite a few stupid plot holes. I like the new crew, even when I kind of hope that Jaal is gonna die in the first DLC. And I like Ryder, because they weren't even trying to make them anything like Shepard. Ryder is more laid-back, more relaxed, has a bit of a potty mouth and honestly, that totally works for me.
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| BLAM! Shotgun to the face is fun, even with a dumbed-down combat system. |
I hope this won't kill Mass Effect. I'd like to see a second game set in the Andromeda Galaxy, based on these worlds Ryder has found and terraformed. I would totally play Ryder again and I'd hang out with the new crew some more. But at the same time, I'd want interesting, meaningful quests. No more filler-crap, no more plants, rocks and doors to scan, no more side missions granted by email and datapads, which contain absolutely no story. I don't care if an Andromeda 2 could be completed in a mere 20 hours if all the content is fun, well-designed and interesting to play. I've spent more than 80 hours completing this game and I'm just glad it's over. And that's never a good sign. Still enjoying the multiplayer, though.
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