The best thing I can say about Mass Effect Andromeda is that it's playable.
To press deeper, this game represents the absolute worst of the modern video game industry. In BioWare's infinite wisdom, they decided to strip away everything they built in the original trilogy, sacrificing its tight, streamlined gameplay experience for open-world AAA garbage. Andromeda is like a bad future timeline that split off from the first Mass Effect, where instead of what we got in 2 they chose to double down on the boring, monotonous planetary exploration of 1. This is open-world design in its most tedious and least interesting form, and on top of that, hey let's pile on other features that everyone loves, like endless resource collecting, crafting mods and consumable powerups, equipment rarity, pointless 2% percentage upgrades to your powers, and a ton of side content that never amounts to anything more than bottom of the barrel fetch quests. Thus, a memorable action-RPG transforms into a goddamn loot shooter.
Anything you loved about the core experience of the Mass Effect trilogy is practically gone, and the vestiges that remain only serve to remind you how inferior the product is in comparison. Mass Effect was all about hanging out with your cool squadmates in space, getting to know them and becoming invested in their stories, and being presented with difficult decisions that challenge your morals and understanding of the story. Here, your crew are all merely different flavors of bland. I did not care to learn about any of them. I cannot think of a single choice presented that I felt I needed to consider for more than a second. And while I had my issues with the morality system of the original games, replacing it with four personality types that do absolutely nothing to color your character or their experience was a piss-poor alternative.
There seems to be a push to redefine this game as being "overhated" or somehow not as bad as originally characterized, but let me tell you, the massive technical disaster Mass Effect Andromeda was at launch only served to hide that this thing was absolutely rotten to the core. Even with the (slightly) cleaned-up presentation, there's almost nothing redeeming about it. Like many open-world games, it throws a lot at you, keeping you on that grind, where there's always something to do and you never have to stop and ponder about how little thought was put into any of this. It's like fast food, where you can keep shoving it into your mouth, never getting full but never feeling fulfilled.
Congrats to BioWare on developing the Arby's of video games.
To press deeper, this game represents the absolute worst of the modern video game industry. In BioWare's infinite wisdom, they decided to strip away everything they built in the original trilogy, sacrificing its tight, streamlined gameplay experience for open-world AAA garbage. Andromeda is like a bad future timeline that split off from the first Mass Effect, where instead of what we got in 2 they chose to double down on the boring, monotonous planetary exploration of 1. This is open-world design in its most tedious and least interesting form, and on top of that, hey let's pile on other features that everyone loves, like endless resource collecting, crafting mods and consumable powerups, equipment rarity, pointless 2% percentage upgrades to your powers, and a ton of side content that never amounts to anything more than bottom of the barrel fetch quests. Thus, a memorable action-RPG transforms into a goddamn loot shooter.
Anything you loved about the core experience of the Mass Effect trilogy is practically gone, and the vestiges that remain only serve to remind you how inferior the product is in comparison. Mass Effect was all about hanging out with your cool squadmates in space, getting to know them and becoming invested in their stories, and being presented with difficult decisions that challenge your morals and understanding of the story. Here, your crew are all merely different flavors of bland. I did not care to learn about any of them. I cannot think of a single choice presented that I felt I needed to consider for more than a second. And while I had my issues with the morality system of the original games, replacing it with four personality types that do absolutely nothing to color your character or their experience was a piss-poor alternative.
There seems to be a push to redefine this game as being "overhated" or somehow not as bad as originally characterized, but let me tell you, the massive technical disaster Mass Effect Andromeda was at launch only served to hide that this thing was absolutely rotten to the core. Even with the (slightly) cleaned-up presentation, there's almost nothing redeeming about it. Like many open-world games, it throws a lot at you, keeping you on that grind, where there's always something to do and you never have to stop and ponder about how little thought was put into any of this. It's like fast food, where you can keep shoving it into your mouth, never getting full but never feeling fulfilled.
Congrats to BioWare on developing the Arby's of video games.