Mass Effect: Andromeda, which was released last month, is the much anticipated follow-up to the successful Mass Effect trilogy. After five years of development, fans were raring to jump back into the massive space exploration gameplay — this time, with even more massive exploration, political and interpersonal character interactions.
More importantly, developers BioWare needed to win back fans after the series’ faithful had major problems with the trilogy’s ending. Unfortunately, no one will be won back with Andromeda; this game is a mess.
You’ve probably heard the complaints about the character animation and graphics — more on that later — but Andromeda’s problems go much deeper.
We’ll start with the calling card of the Mass Effect series — its narrative. The writing is the biggest flaw of the game, as both the story and the characters are lackluster. While I love the premise of being a futuristic Lewis and Clark exploring a new galaxy, the painfully boring storyline with no interesting threats to our characters does the game no justice.
The main enemy, the Kett, are a new alien race who were already in the Andromeda Galaxy when our protagonists arrive. First contact with the Kett immediately turns into a firefight, and we have no reason to call these aliens the bad guys, besides the game telling us that they are.
Eventually, the motivation behind the Kett’s hostility is revealed, but even then, I didn’t have a disdain for their existence, swearing them as my mortal enemy.
Our protagonists are equally as boring as the story, save one or two characters. While part of this has to do with the voice acting cast having close to no big names resulting in only passable performances, the writing is mostly to blame here. Dialogue is frequently awkward and uninteresting.
Yes, the facial animations and graphics are subpar, but for me, that was the least distracting aspect of having conversations between characters. Especially given that at least once every hour, I would experience a graphical bug.
The galaxy map menu was clunky and took entirely too long with its unskippable animations of zooming in and out for planets whenever you fast travel. The research and crafting system is needlessly complicated and overwhelming and online multiplayer was unplayable due to connectivity issues.
But instead of me listing off all the problems with Andromeda, I’ll let the developers say what they feel is wrong with the game. BioWare announced a patch, released April 6, to address many player’s issues with the game including:
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Improved tutorial placement
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Single player balance changes
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Multiplayer balance changes
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Added option to skip autopilot sequences in the galaxy map
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Improved logic, timing and continuity for relationships and story arcs
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Improved lip-sync and facial acting during conversations, including localized VO
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Various bug fixes and stability improvements
The press release, “The Journey Ahead,” continues to outline planned patches for the next two months which will include improvements such as:
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More options and variety in the character creator
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Improvements to hair and general appearance for characters
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Ongoing improvements to cinematic scenes and animations
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Improvements to male romance options for Scott Ryder
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Adjustments to conversations with Hainly Abrams
In short, the developers plan to make improvements to the game’s stability, character storyline options, cinematics, animations, voiceovers and combat balancing. That’s literally every aspect that makes up a video game.
To see this two month plan confirms that BioWare released a game they felt was unfinished and is embarrassing from a team with so much time and money backing them. Granted, they did have EA as their publisher, who are by no means they seal of quality, but consumers deserve more than this.
Now, for everyone out there who is saying Andromeda is a terrible 1/10 game, they are wrong and speaking in hyperbole.
This is a flawed game, but it still has its strong sides, notably the combat system. While it’s not the best shooter on the market, I still had fun using the different weapons, powers and tech at my disposal.
Mass Effect: Andromeda, an action role-playing game, was released March 21.
