Those of you who are familiar with the Mass Effect series already will know that it is a sci-fi action RPG series developed by long term legends of genre, Bioware. By the time the original game was released they had already entertained 1000's of PC owners with their classics set in the Dungeons & Dragons universe, such as Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights. Then with the advent of the original Xbox they decided to make something a bit more console friendly, which resulted Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, still regarded as one of the best games set in a galaxy far, far away ever made. That experience gave the company the idea to create their own original space opera, and thus the Mass Effect series was born. It was conceived as a trilogy right from the start, with story seeds sown from the earliest moments that would pay off two games later. Everything went smoothly, until players got to the end of Mass Effect 3 and witnessed the ending. To say it was divisive would be putting it mildly. The disgruntled fans ranted and raged all across the internet, until Bioware finally relented and released the free Extended Cut DLC. Then, all went quiet - the series was seemingly done, for now. A few years later though, Andromeda got announced and the fans started to get excited about what the new game might bring. Then they played it, and the backlash began again. Is it truly as terrible as everyone would have you believe? I really don't think so, but allow me to explain further...
Plot & Character: 7 out of 10
Mass Effect: Andromeda sees the series transported 600 years into the future and into another galaxy. The Andromeda Initiative has set out to try and set up a colony on one of several potential "golden worlds" that have been identified thanks to some clever Salarian technology. Things don't go according to plan, however - a strange dark matter known as the scourge causes massive amounts of damage to the human Ark, Hyperion and the planet that they were hoping would be conducive to supporting life turns out to be un breathable and beset by devastating lightning storms. The "Pathfinder", i.e. the person spearheading the expedition to find a livable world, tragically dies while exploring this planet, and so it falls to their heir to take up the mantle in their stead. This is your playable character, a male or female human named Ryder (you can choose their first name).I did think this was a pretty good starting off point for a new game (or potentially a whole new series) but certain developments later on in the story weren't so great. The new antagonists, the Kett, came across as a weak facsimile of the Reapers, or rather the Collector's from Mass Effect 2. Vaguely humanoid, hostile aliens who take the genetic material of other species and use it to make more drones. Not very original at all, and not as well executed as before. There were also several plot lines that were set up in this game that never went anyway, because Bioware were obviously expecting to continue the story in a sequel at some point. We now know that this isn't going to happen, not even in the form of DLC, so it does make these threads quite unfulfilling.
In terms of characters and your crew, I have slightly better news. While it took me a while to warm up to them, I actually came to really like the crew of the Tempest (which is the new Normandy), at least the alien ones. I found the two humans, Liam and Cora, a bit boring and predictable really, despite the latter being trained as an Asari Commando for much of her life. The new Asari, Peebee was annoying at first but once you get used to her energetic personality she's actually pretty cool. Drack, the Krogan, shares a lot of personality traits with Wrex and Grunt before him - he's gruff, likes to shoot the bad guys and is a nice guy at heart. His unique trait is that he is very very old, and most of his organs are synthetic transplants.
My two favourite crew members are definitely Vetra and Jaal. Vetra can't possibly match the excellence of her fellow Turian, Garrus Vakarian but she's not too far off. She's loyal, dependable and very good in a fight. Jaal is a member of the only new non hostile race in the game, the Angara. He's a part of their resistance and very experienced in fighting the Kett, and he's a very interesting person with lots of stories and insights to share about life in the Andromeda galaxy. The crew is rounded off by Lexi, an Asari doctor (voiced by Natalie Dormer from Game of Thrones), Suvi, a human science officer with a lovely Scottish accent, Kallo, the ace Salarian pilot, and Gil, the chief engineer. While these last four won't be joining you in battle, they are all fairly well fleshed out with their own "loyalty missions" to complete throughout the game. In fact, this is one aspect of Mass Effect: Andromeda that I thought was done really well, the loyalty missions were more extensive and spread out that they have been in previous games, and even when you were technically done and had unlocked the level 6 skills for that character, there were normally more scenes to see with them.
Ultimately, even though the story is quite unoriginal in key areas, the fleshed out characters go a long way for compensating for that. The unresolved plot points were quite interesting too, such as they were, so it is a shame that we will probably never find out where they would have led us (unless a novel or something is released that covers that stuff - that could still be an option).
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| Mass Effect: Andromeda does look nice, but not quite this nice (this is early promo artwork). |
Graphics: 7 out of 10
For a good deal of the time, Mass Effect: Andromeda is a decent looking game, and occasionally a beautiful one. For me, the icy world of Voeld was the stand out, with the blizzards eventually giving way to serene tundra with a very pretty skybox to behold. The jungle planet of Havarl also impresses, with it's dense, lush vegetation. Outside of the environments, much has of course been made of the poor facial animation in the game, so much so that it became a meme for a while and staff who worked on it were persecuted. While this has been improved with patches since the game was released, it still ain't that great - NPC's have a tendency to look like waxy automatons rather than living, breathing people. Of course, it stands out the most on the human characters as our brains know what they should look like and can spot when something isn't right. There is also a noticeable difference in quality between minor characters and important ones - your crew obviously had a lot of work put into the making them look halfway decent, whereas a random scientist on Eos can tend to look a bit half baked.
Sound & Music: 7 out of 10
I don't think the music of Mass Effect: Andromeda is quite as strong as the trilogy that preceded it, but I did come to rather enjoy it by the end of my time with the game. The main theme starts of rather subtly, but gradually builds up to something more epic. You will hear this tune every time you load up the game and during the end credits, so you will be rather familiar with it by the end. Other than that, there is also some great battle music with some furious drum work, perfect for driving you on and furthering your blood lust. There was also one particular use of synthwave that gave me goosebumps - I think it plays as you land on Voeld for the first time, if I'm remembering correctly.
The voice acting is pretty good most of the time but I do remember a couple of instances where there were some very odd line reads - almost as if the voice actor wasn't aware of the context that they were saying these things and therefore emphasising the wrong part of the sentence. This has to be the fault of whoever was directing the voice actors, and also whoever decided it was fine to insert these recordings into the game as they were. Maybe the studio was rushed, I don't know, but it does come across as rather unprofessional, especially from a big studio like Bioware.
The voice acting is pretty good most of the time but I do remember a couple of instances where there were some very odd line reads - almost as if the voice actor wasn't aware of the context that they were saying these things and therefore emphasising the wrong part of the sentence. This has to be the fault of whoever was directing the voice actors, and also whoever decided it was fine to insert these recordings into the game as they were. Maybe the studio was rushed, I don't know, but it does come across as rather unprofessional, especially from a big studio like Bioware.
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| Havarl is quite a nice looking environment but the dense foliage makes it trick to navigate at times. |
Game Mechanics: 8 out of 10
Like it's predecessors, Mass Effect: Andromeda is a third person cover shooter with strong RPG elements, such as levelling up, equipping and modifying armour and weapons, spending points on skills, an in depth conversation system and romance options. The combat mechanics have been tweaked in a few different ways that I actually came to enjoy after a while getting used to them. Firstly, you no longer stick to cover with the press of a button, instead all you have to do is kneel down next to something large enough to provide cover and you will automatically protect yourself. It feels odd at first but became second nature by the end of the introduction. You also have a jet booster built into your suit which is used both in navigating the world and in combat. By jumping in a fight you get a few seconds of slow motion where you can snipe fools in mid air, which feels really satisfying when you pull it off. There's a skill that you can buy that will extend this bullet time as well.
Andromeda also scraps the notion of fixed character classes, allows you to spend your skill point on whatever you want right from the get go, from either the combat, tech or biotic skill trees. As you unlock more skills you do unlock different profiles that kind of act like classes, except you can add multiple profiles to a favourites list and switch between them in battle on the fly. It's very handy, and allows you to experiment with various different skills to see what you like best. I'm not too sure what they level cap is in this game, or if it even has one, because I was around level 56 by the end of the game and still going. My companions had maxed out all of their skills already but I was still going, because there are roughly 50 skills to choose from with 6 levels each. When it comes to powering up the skills, Andromeda has borrowed the same system that was introduced in 3, where you have one choice of upgrade for the first three ranks of a skill and then you have a choice of two different options when you reach ranks 4, 5 and 6. For example you may have to decide whether a skill does more damage vs shields or vs armour.
This game also takes a leaf out of Dragon Age: Inquisition and shifts over to open world exploration for the bulk of its play time. There are plenty of more structured missions such as the main story events and the loyalty missions with your crew, but a lot of time will be taken up with bombing around in the Nomad (which is the new Mako), establishing new forward stations (that you can then fast travel to) and completing side quests. Because you are trying to make these planets liveable and establish new colonies on them, almost everything you do in the game gives you Andromeda Viability Points, or AVP, with the goal of getting every planet you visit to 100% viability. If you are thorough and do everything (or a good deal of it at any rate) this isn't too hard. Reactivating the Remnant vaults (which are like atmospheric processors that radically change the planets for the better) and killing Remnant Architects (huge worm like robot creatures that are the most challenging things to fight in the game) will give you a large amount of AVP. Once you hit certain thresholds you get to choose who to bring out of cryo which basically gives you a new perk such as the ability to detect and mine more minerals.
On the whole I didn't mind the open ended structure too much - it made sense for the story they were trying to tell here, but I think I still prefer the briefer, more tightly designed structure of the original trilogy over this one.
Andromeda also scraps the notion of fixed character classes, allows you to spend your skill point on whatever you want right from the get go, from either the combat, tech or biotic skill trees. As you unlock more skills you do unlock different profiles that kind of act like classes, except you can add multiple profiles to a favourites list and switch between them in battle on the fly. It's very handy, and allows you to experiment with various different skills to see what you like best. I'm not too sure what they level cap is in this game, or if it even has one, because I was around level 56 by the end of the game and still going. My companions had maxed out all of their skills already but I was still going, because there are roughly 50 skills to choose from with 6 levels each. When it comes to powering up the skills, Andromeda has borrowed the same system that was introduced in 3, where you have one choice of upgrade for the first three ranks of a skill and then you have a choice of two different options when you reach ranks 4, 5 and 6. For example you may have to decide whether a skill does more damage vs shields or vs armour.
This game also takes a leaf out of Dragon Age: Inquisition and shifts over to open world exploration for the bulk of its play time. There are plenty of more structured missions such as the main story events and the loyalty missions with your crew, but a lot of time will be taken up with bombing around in the Nomad (which is the new Mako), establishing new forward stations (that you can then fast travel to) and completing side quests. Because you are trying to make these planets liveable and establish new colonies on them, almost everything you do in the game gives you Andromeda Viability Points, or AVP, with the goal of getting every planet you visit to 100% viability. If you are thorough and do everything (or a good deal of it at any rate) this isn't too hard. Reactivating the Remnant vaults (which are like atmospheric processors that radically change the planets for the better) and killing Remnant Architects (huge worm like robot creatures that are the most challenging things to fight in the game) will give you a large amount of AVP. Once you hit certain thresholds you get to choose who to bring out of cryo which basically gives you a new perk such as the ability to detect and mine more minerals.
On the whole I didn't mind the open ended structure too much - it made sense for the story they were trying to tell here, but I think I still prefer the briefer, more tightly designed structure of the original trilogy over this one.
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| Jaal ended up being one of my favourite characters and a valuable addition to the crew. |
Innovation & Cleverness: 4 out of 10
Quite a low score here because as this is part of an established franchise, it's a little low on originality, and as I said earlier a lot of plot came across as a bit rehashed. However, I do want to give props to Bioware for managing to come up with an entirely new crew of characters that are interesting to hang out with for the most part. They also do a decent job of establishing some mystery in the plot, with Ryder's memories gradually being unlocked over time.
Value & Replayability: 8 out of 10
The Mass Effect series, like most of Bioware's games, are designed to be replayable. As well as the Paragon / Renegade choices, the story and side missions often present you with choices that will have an effect on the overall plot. It can be fun to go back later on as a completely different version of Ryder and do things differently than before. In the previous games, decisions you made in the first and second game wouldn't pay off until the third part, and some of the key choices you make in Andromeda obviously would have changed something in the planned sequel. Again, we're unlikely to find out just what at this point.
This is also a pretty huge game - the new open world structure with vast planets to explore and a seemingly endless supply of quests to complete ensure that your play time can easily reach the 50 hour mark. I ended up just shy of 55 hours on my clock and I know I still had quite a bit left to do. That is considerably longer than any of the previous games in the series which took about 30 hours at most to finish if you took your time with them. So you definitely will get your money's worth with this one. What's more, you don't need to go out and buy a full copy of the game, at least if you own and Xbox One. It's included as part of EA Access so you can sign up to that at a cost of £3.99 per month until you're done, which if you ask me is a great deal.
This is also a pretty huge game - the new open world structure with vast planets to explore and a seemingly endless supply of quests to complete ensure that your play time can easily reach the 50 hour mark. I ended up just shy of 55 hours on my clock and I know I still had quite a bit left to do. That is considerably longer than any of the previous games in the series which took about 30 hours at most to finish if you took your time with them. So you definitely will get your money's worth with this one. What's more, you don't need to go out and buy a full copy of the game, at least if you own and Xbox One. It's included as part of EA Access so you can sign up to that at a cost of £3.99 per month until you're done, which if you ask me is a great deal.
Overall: 7 out of 10
I don't agree with the general consensus that Mass Effect: Andromeda is a terrible game, in fact I think it's quite a decent one. It certainly has its flaws, and overall I would place it in third place within the series overall (with Mass Effect 2 being first, 3 being second, and the original game coming last), but we aren't exactly swamped with quality science fiction RPG's so it is one of the better efforts in recent years. I also don't think this game is directly responsible for the death of the franchise - for that I think the blame lies partly with the "fans" who ranted and raved about every little problem, and partly with EA for not providing Bioware with the time and support they needed to deliver a AAA product.
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