BloatedGuppy said:
I'll fight you on this one, Zhukov.
Oh ho, buckle up Old Man Canada.
The game is flawed, but it is miles better than Inquisition.
Well yeah. Clipping one's toenails is miles better than
Inquisition. It's hardly the highest of bars.
Andromeda feels to me like
Inquisition with the bad bits toned down, but still present.
"
Feedback indicates that players did not enjoy trekking across large inconsequential maps to perform a hundred checklist tasks while encountering aimless MMO-style clusters of hostiles."
"Very well. We shall have them drive a buggy across larger inconsequential maps to perform only a couple dozen checklist tasks while encountering aimless MMO-style clusters of hostiles!
"Brilliant!"
Yeah, it's technically an improvement. A bowlful of dogshit is preferable to a bucketful. The smaller portions don't improve the taste though.
I think the high visibility of many of the problems has been overshadowing some pretty solid/fun core game play.
Sure.
But I'm not just thinking about the facial animations (which are shit) or the graphical bugs (which are numerous).
The pacing is down the toilet because open worlds are now apparently required by law. (Fuck you
Skyrim, fuuuuuuck yoooouuu!)
The characters are an insipid bunch.
Cora feels like a cross between Ashley (no-nonsense military lass) and Kaiden (oh my biotics woe is me).
Liam feels like a cross between James Vega and Jacob. God knows who thought that would be a winning combination. Apparently they couldn't decide which of Bioware's standard issue one-male-one-female-bangable initial companions to imitate so they just mashed them together.
PeeBee the oh-so-uninhibited-and-whacky-nerd-wish-fulfillment-fantasy is one stray fucking onii-chaaaaan away from making me throw up.
Drak is surface-level Wrex without any of the things that actually made Wrex compelling.
Jaal is a poor man's Javik.
Vetra is... umm... actually, Vetra's alright. 1/6. Gold star.
Maybe they get better later on. I'm not holding my breath. Besides, there's a 50/50 chance that any dramatic payoffs will be undermined when somebody turns and walks through a wall in mid conversation while Ryder directs a determined cross-eyed grimace into the middle distance.
The dialogue is often corny as fuck. God knows Bioware is no stranger to corn, ("The priiiize" etc etc) but they'd usually make up for it with charismatic characters with some solid arcs.
Andromeda makes up for it by... occasionally being serviceable if I squint really, really hard. Hell, some of the dialogue feels out of place. Literally, as if someone got the lines out of order or the conversation was patched together out of recordings intended for a different purpose. The "My face is tired" exchange being the obvious example. That conversation actually made it through a multi-year development process.
Mining is back and is even more tedious than ME2. Now you get to aim probes while practicing your minibus reverse parking skills. Somewhere, someone thought that was actually a good idea.
The crafting system is simple (yay!) but somehow still requires a great deal of menu navigation (wtf?).
The galaxy map. Dear fucking God the galaxy map. Which fucking prize genius thought that people would enjoy slowly and unskippably panning between planets? Sure, it looks pretty, but I'm having trouble appreciating the space vistas while clawing at my own eyes in frustration.
Speaking of which, the interface is sluggish and the PC version is poorly ported.
Character creator is simultaneously both limited and difficult to wrestle a passable human face out of. I honestly couldn't tell how much of it was the creator itself and how much was the interface.
The weapons are a step down from the previous game. ME3 had nice, snappy guns that were, at least in my eyes, better than those in the vast majority of shooters.
Andromeda has some okay guns and a massive pile of unsatisfying pew pew crap. Melee has gone from being decently satisfying to limp and clumsy.
Multiplayer is back and, to be fair, can offer some extremely repetitive fun. Right up until the host's connection lags out and I'm dumped unceremoniously back the the menu sans progress because apparently we've been transported back to fucking 2003.
"Well", one might say, "
Why not use the game's finely tuned matchmaking tools to find regionally compatible matches with favorable ping times?" To which I would reply, "
I FUCKING WISH!"
Mics are set to open by default so I get to listen to every drooling dumbfuck on the planet yelling at their family while I fumble through the lousy interface trying to mute them.
Oh, and in five years they weren't able to come up with a single new game mode.
...
Phew.
On the plus side, the classless skills system is a boon. The planetside scenery is occasionally pretty enough to distract me from the fact that I'm going to have to slowly drive up every one of those mountains. Being able to look out the windows of your ship is really nice. The freedom of movement is nice. Combat is pretty good
when enemies aren't getting frozen or phasing into the fucking grou... ahem.
Should have been a new IP. I hope it fails horribly.