ZPage Entertainment 

Mass Effect: Andromeda had a lot of bad publicity before its release, mainly surrounding the animations of characters saying that they looked worse than the original Mass Effect that released 10 years prior in 2007. I am saddened to say that the game wasn’t only as bad mechanically as was said (if not worse), but there are far more problems with the game than the animations, with very few redeeming qualities.

 

To get this out of the way, let’s begin with the aforementioned animations. As advertised, people’s faces during cut scenes all look the exact same whether they are happy, angry, etc. While in some games this may not make a big difference to me, a game such as Mass Effect where there is so much importance on the connections between characters it is very off-putting. The glitches don’t stop there, however, as there are many times when the game freezes for a second or 2. I’m not talking about once in a blue moon here. It is especially noticeable when driving the Nomad car around planets, where almost once per minute this will happen. The next technical difficulty I noticed was the save states of the game. In 2017, we have grown accustom to finishing small or large battles, and having an autosave. In Mass Effect: Andromeda, the autosaves seem almost random, in that I could complete a quest, go off and die a few minutes later, only to have to redo that whole quest again. In addition to these issues I had problems with the game colour fading in and out at random as well as not being able to fast travel because I was “in combat” with no enemies on my radar or within sight.

 

Not to say that the game is without any pros, I did find myself being very interested in the plot at the beginning. Reminiscent of the movie Passengers, we are awoken in a ship travelling to a distant galaxy in search of new planets to call home. We get to the new galaxy only to find it has been invaded by aliens trying to take over and destroy everything and everyone. The idea of having to complete quests to make the world liveable for humans was interesting, and the puzzles and quests regarding this task were the most fun and unique part of the game. Even this, however, got old fast as they became repetitive from one world to another.

 

One large issue that I found other than technical difficulties was in the lack of creativity in the game. The game features the exact same alien species’ as the original trilogy (with the exception of the new enemy), and within each race all of the characters are almost indistinguishable from one another. Every Krogan looks like the rest, and so on and so on. Not only did this make the visuals stagnant, but made it very hard to care for any given character when you aren’t even sure who you’re talking to.

 

Other than the main missions, most other side quests were extremely dull and had no reason. In a world where you came to a new world to make it habitable for human kind, you shouldn’t be expected to go do obscure errands for other people. Even the tasks that make sense logically aren’t interesting since they are all just going from one point on the map to another, defeating the group of enemies there, scan a random item, then going to another area to do the same thing. Space exploration was unfortunately more of the same, in that you are forced to wait 20 to 30 seconds going from one world to another, where 95% of them you can’t actually visit but instead can only scan them for resources (of which another 80% or so have none). The amount of reward you get from doing this is not worth the time, and it was in no way fun or exciting to do or watch.

 

One grey area for me is the amount of detail (or as I thought for the most part, random crap) that was added into the game. There is an absurd amount you can read and learn about every character, every world, every mission, every mineral and resource you can find on any planet, and more. While this is not interesting to me, I can see the appeal for others. The one thing that makes it a grey area for me though is knowing some people enjoy this and it in no way is forced on those who don’t care about it, but surely there is too much and it must detract from any actually interesting or important information.

 

I will end with the one aspect of the game that I actually think got better as I went through the game – combat. When I first started playing, I found that even the weakest of enemies took a ton of time and ammo to kill. I was slowly leveling up but didn’t notice a change in my combat strength at all. Eventually I did find ways to combine powers and gun combat to maximize my effectiveness, and was able to use my level up points to actually increase my effectiveness in a way that I wanted. As for car combat, I would say this stayed bad the whole game. You can run over enemies but they don’t react or even realize you’re there. You can kill an enemy and they simply disappear, no death animation, no body to examine, nothing. Enemies too strong to kill that are run over aren’t hurt or pushed back, but just stay there and act as a brick wall stopping your progress no matter how much force you have coming towards it.

 

Mass Effect: Andromeda is a game that did not live up to the hype created by its successful predecessors. Despite an interesting story idea and decent combat, the technical glitches and many missed opportunities make this game simply not fun.