A lot has been said of Mass Effect: Andromeda in the past few months. Whether it’s goofy saddle walk cycles, tired faces, or awkwardly forthcoming trans characters, BioWare’s latest has had its fair share of humiliation since release. And while the Canadian RPG gurus have promised to patch the more laughable issues plaguing Andromeda’s launch, there’s no getting around the fact that this isn’t the game players expected.
The elevator pitch for Mass Effect: Andromeda is brilliant — follow the adventures of a new crew of pioneers as they explore a whole new uncharted galaxy! The developers even set this game 600 years after the events of Mass Effect 3, leaving behind any baggage that might carry, and providing a fresh start all around. Ten years ago, these guys introduced us to a dozen iconic alien races in their first entry of the series, so you can imagine what kind of unique and varied races a whole new galaxy will have a decade later — and imagine how they’ll tackle first contact! Unfortunately, it doesn’t take very long for Andromeda to start letting its players down.
SCOPE & EXPLORATION
Once players get past the technical disappointments in the game’s opening hours, Andromeda’s most glaring and omnipresent problem begins to come into focus: its scope. While the game BioWare promised was grand and sprawling, the game players get is anything but. You’d think a new galaxy would have more than two new alien races, but you’d be wrong. In fact, it’s even worse than it sounds, because Andromeda actually rejects the opportunity to mine its catalog of races by cutting all but four of the classic aliens from the game.
If there’s one thing that a game about explorers should get right, it’s exploration. Andromeda gets it wrong in spades. All those planets you were going to explore? I hope you’re okay with five, because that’s what you get. Oh, and even though they’re all in distant solar systems and have wildly different atmospheric conditions, you’ll be happy to know that the same enemies will populate each of them. Each planet is littered with Remnant sites, which all look the same and swarm with the same Remnant drones. Peppered between are crash sites and enemy camps, most of which are already dotted on your map. It seems the only thing available to truly discover is the world’s invisible walls, which indiscriminately cut through large open plains. To call them an invisible wall would be a misnomer, because upon approaching these walls, a glowing honeycomb barrier shimmers into view. It’s a shame, given how few planets you’ll be landing on in your time with Andromeda, that they couldn’t be bothered to hide these seams a little better.
Amid the mundane hours traversing the various wastelands, there are occasionally glimmers of hope. There was an exciting moment early on while going through the missions on Eos, where I awakened a massive Remnant Architect and initiated a multi-phase boss encounter. It was a refreshing, interesting change of pace. It whetted my appetite for more grand set-pieces like it, and gave me hope of seeing them peppered throughout the game. Then, on the ice planet Voeld, it happened again. I’m sorry, let me be clearer — I mean literally the exact same encounter happened again. Same enemy model, same attack patterns, same event phases, everything. Be prepared for a lot of copypasta in Andromeda, because nothing good in the game is squandered.
COMBAT
While combat may be the most competent part of Mass Effect: Andromeda, it’s held back by too many bad decisions. They put a lot of effort into making combat feel fun and engaging, and it mostly works. The wonky cover system can be forgiven by the freshness boost jumps and dashing brings to combat. Guns feel better than they ever have, and there’s a lot of variety there to really cater to your play-style. Unfortunately, most enemy encounters play out on the open world maps, where the level design is generic and simple. The combat only really shines in the far less common, meticulously designed main-story levels that feel more like classic Mass Effect. It’s a shame that the heavy reliance on open-world encounters — Andromeda’s only substantial addition to the Mass Effect formula — fails to take full advantage of its strongest mechanics.
Most of the combat abilities feel good, but their variety and depth is undermined by Andromeda’s limited ability slots, which force the player to pare down their skillset dramatically. Dilemmas like this are present in all RPGs, but Andromeda handles it particularly poorly. Because only three active abilities can be assigned at any given time, any skill points distributed outside your core three are effectively wasted. Instead of balancing between a jack of all trades or a master of one, you’re either a jack of three trades, or a master of three trades. This system heavily incentivizes investing in a core set of skills early on, before you know what kind of play-style suits you best, while discouraging any kind of experimentation. You’ll get the option to pay credits (at an exponential rate) to re-distribute your accrued skill points, but that’s a bandage; not a solution. Mass Effect: Andromeda expects you to know what kind of Pathfinder you want to be, and fumbles when you don’t.
Continuing the trend of throwing bad decisions over good content, Andromeda’s equipment management is one of its biggest barriers between the player and a slew of excellent features. It’s not that it’s drastically different from previous games, but that the needs of this game changed, and the features didn’t catch up. There’s a plethora of weapons at your disposal, but finding them is a chore, and swapping them is even worse. You can’t simply equip weapons in your inventory. No, you have to manage your loadout from your ship, or from a Forward Station. So that sweet gun you just pulled from a container is going to have to wait a while to be put to use. And if you think you’re going to craft a couple guns and give them a test run, you’d better be careful; all those guns tie up your precious inventory space, whether they’re equipped or not. Yes, despite having an entire ship at their disposal, the Pathfinder prefers to carry every single item they own on them at any given time. No chests or storage lockers in Andromeda. The game frustratingly unfriendly to the idea that a player would like to own more than one set of armor, or more than a few different guns at any given time, which puts it at odds with its own loot caches and reward drops throughout the game.
Maybe their solution to this problem was the R&D Terminal, where you can unlock and craft every weapon or piece of armor in the game. Unfortunately, this is also a total mess. I hope you’re in the mood for lists and lists of stuff, because that’s what you’re getting here. And if you see that you’re low on materials when you want to develop something, it’s time to sift through the kitchen junk drawer for a notepad and the dullest golf pencil you’ve ever seen. There’s no method of tracking the materials needed for any given project, so you’ll have to remember them on your own. You can get an expanded look at the material icons, of course, because somebody worked hard on those icons, damn it.
It’s also amusing in a maddening sort of way that, once you’ve crafted something from your R&D Terminal, you have to run to a Loadout Station on the other side of the ship to equip it.
STORY & MISSIONS
Of course, BioWare’s bread and butter is storytelling. A lot can be forgiven for a great story, with interesting characters, and difficult decisions. Andromeda has none of those. Some of the story threads do come into their own in the later parts of the game, especially the Loyalty Missions, but fifty hours is a lot to ask from a player before things start to pay off. Even then, it’s hard to compare much of Andromeda’s cast to previous entries in the series. If I wanted a crew full of Kaidan Alenkos, I wouldn’t have left him for dead on Virmire.
The Pathfinder isn’t very compelling either, which is unfortunate considering the amount of time they spend on the Ryder family. Andromeda would have been a great opportunity for BioWare to open up the alien races as options for the player character, the same way they have with the Dragon Age series in its best outings. Instead, it shares another trait with Dragon Age in its crappiest outing. It might be unfair to expect Mass Effect to take this route, but when they’ve created a world with as richly developed alien races as they have, and they start a new chapter of the story around a theme of galactic cooperation amongst said aliens on a whole new frontier, there was no better time to take that step than with Andromeda. Alas, as with so much in the game, they took the easy way out.
Gamers have been spoiled by games like The Witcher III when it comes to expectations for side quests, but even still, BioWare owes its players more than a litany of fetch quests. There’s rarely much more than some narrative dressing around these missions — sometimes as little as a paragraph on a datapad — and even less in completing them. I don’t recall a single side quest found through natural exploration, nor any more satisfying to complete than to have it ridden from my log. The choices made during these missions, if there was any, were arbitrary. When you know the outcome changes nothing, the choice is irrelevant. BioWare has done a better job of this in the past, including previous entries to this series, which makes at all the more disappointing this time around.
GRAPHICS
Any gamer knows deep down that graphics aren’t everything, and they know even deeper down that pretty graphics certainly help. It’s not the most important thing to get right, but that shouldn’t be taken as an excuse to get it very, very wrong. BioWare isn’t exactly known for gorgeous games, but what the hell happened?
How do these characters actually look worse than their predecessors? Some apologists have cited the shift from Unreal to Frostbite, but look at these gorgeous faces from Dragon Age: Inquisition, running on Frostbite back in 2014.
Of course, these are primary characters and not generic NPCs, but it illustrates what Frostbite is capable of. Andromeda frequently falls short of the benchmark Inquisition left, which is disappointing considering it’s unarguably the bigger franchise of the two, presumably with a bigger budget and more development time. Inquisition was every bit as big and open as Andromeda, and while Inquisition had its detractors, it succeeded almost everywhere Andromeda stumbles.
Sometimes, Andromeda’s uglier details come from what feels like lazy decisions. Look at this image from Havarl:
If you’re having trouble understanding what it is that makes this giant tower look so ugly, it’s the water droplet effect recycled from human-sized characters, scaled to a ridiculous degree onto this massive structure. The illusion of these being water droplets fails when they’re the size of basketballs. This could have been any static “wet” bump map effect. Instead, it’s this ugly mess that only draws the wrong kind of attention. Maybe there’s technical limitations I’m not aware of here, or maybe it really was just a lazy throwaway. Regardless, it’s hard not to look at this and wonder why they thought it was a passable effect for such a visible landmark.
Maybe I’m focusing too much on this stupid effect, or maybe it’s the perfect metaphor for the kind of shortcutting this project was subjugated to at various stages of development. I don’t know that that’s true, but I know that this game doesn’t feel like it has the attention to details BioWare has been known for in the past. This doesn’t fall on bad artists or bad programmers, but on the development leads that decided what’s important. And this time around, it doesn’t feel like those leads understand what makes Mass Effect so special.
Anyway, here’s some more silly screenshots:
Fortunately, graphical improvements are one of the easier things to patch in at a later date. BioWare has already released one of these patches, with another apparently on the way. Unfortunately, these sorts of patches can never address what’s really wrong with Mass Effect: Andromeda.
The first Mass Effect was a technical garbage fire, with NPCs that looked like burn victims, and animation cycles so repetitive they spawned memes. Many textures would fail to render on time, and others were so blurry you would assume they hadn’t. But, nonetheless, it was a masterful achievement in world-building, atmosphere, and divergent storytelling. It was populated with fascinating characters, unforgettable choices, and powerful sequences. Mass Effect created a rich world that beckoned players into the lore, and rewarded those who pushed deeper into the conversation wheels. It made up for its graphical limitations with a vibrant neon aesthetic, pulpy synth tunes, and a cyberpunk noir tone. It dug its heels in, somewhere between Star Trek and Blade Runner, and found something special. Ten years on, everything about Mass Effect sticks with me. Ten years from now, what’s going to stick from Andromeda?
When I look at Andromeda, I’m not worried about its blemishes, glaring as they may be. But when I look below the surface, I am heartbroken. I don’t see the heart of a game that launched a franchise. I don’t see a world I could revisit six separate times, across three platforms. I don’t see characters that I could ever mourn for. I don’t see a game with ambitious goals, or a team that made the right decisions instead of the easy ones. I see what I hope is a misstep, and not a change of course. Otherwise, it’s time to part ways.
BioWare, if you’re lost, it’s okay to look back.