Thoughts on Mass Effect: Andromeda

I loved the first Mass Effect game. Probably one of my favourite space opera stories. The plot has as a nice dramatic development that feels natural and not too over the top. The characters are almost universally memorable. You even remember the bad ones because they stick out so much from all the awsome character design.

Mass Effect: Andromeda has maintained very little of those aspects. The characters are dull and not memorable at all, the directing and acting is sub-par and the animations are attrocious. Bioware clearly had some development issues during the making of this game.

At first I was pretty intrigued by the gameplay, the setting and the story. The gameplay is pretty similar to other mass effect game but I particularily liked the different progression systems in the game. You have a LOT of choices in developing your playstyle, which can be awesome if the combat design can support it. Unfortunately in most fights I felt that it didn’t really matter what tactic or strategy I used, I didn’t feel like one was better than the other. Probably had the wrong difficulty setting, but still I didn’t feel invested enough with the game to switch that around (the power of the backlog gives tough competition).

I really like the setting with a bunch of space travellers that are among the first to explore a new galaxy. The intro sets up a pretty solid premise and I was into it even if I didn’t enjoy the characters, acting or directing. I kept hoping for it to get better, but didn’t feel that my persistence got rewarded.

After putting something like five hours into it I decided to cut my losses and go ahead and continue over to a new game. Maybe I’ll get back to this at a later time to hype myself for the remakes of the original trilogy.