Mass Effect: Andromeda Review

[PhoenixMaster]

Pretty good review! Thank you so much for posting it. It's sad to see that the side missions aren't like The Witcher 3's which I think an rpg should inspire from(And Bioware mentioned they took cues from it to). It appears they didn't learn from their mistakes with Inquisition much, it looks like the only redeemable thing is the combat.

 

[PhoenixMaster]

The characters are fairly shallow, with highlights here and there, the tone of each character varies on a whim or plot convenience, it's like a bunch of 13-year-old school boys all got together to write a massive Mass Effect Fan Fiction, but forgot to talk to each other to make sure their stories inconnected in a natural fashion.

Yup, whenever I see some gameplay footage the dialogue reminds me of this:


As for the inevitable Dragon Age: Inqusition in Space, they straight up told us DA:I will be BioWare's reference for future games. Atleast from what I hear they won't DLC the ending cliffhanger this time.

Welcome to the complete edition bargain bin category BioWare.

Did they now? If Inquisition is their point of reference for future games in terms of game play, I will just write these guys off my list of ever buying games from them again. Inquisition was a complete bore to me with it's tedious quests, boring open world locations, and stiff combat.

 

[Bob_McMillan]

Oddly enough, what really ticks me off about the game is that you have to hold E now to do stuff. It always felt kinda fluid to me to just press spacebar at everything.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

Jim Sterling posted his official review; 5 out of 10: Mediocre.

Guess I will be passing on the ME:A series. I can't even bring myself to say that this game had promise, it didn't.

 

[CritialGaming]

UPDATE!

With the 1.05 patch of Mass Effect: Andromedia, many many animation issues I had or saw in the game during my review have been fixed. The faces and dialog scenes specifically look 100% better, even if they are still typical Bioware stiff. So those of you coming to the game late should have a much better experience than us early adopters because of that.

Whether you are still not going to support or play the game is up to you, but at least Bioware is trying to address and fix issues that should never have seen the public eye. Take it for what it's worth I suppose. But I wanted to point it out here that, yes, the patch has fixed a lot of the ugly in the game.

 

[votemarvel]

Being able to skip the planetary travel animations is an absolute godsend.

Jumped into multiplayer for the first time and at wave five it crashed to the desktop. I think I will just stick to using the app on my phone to complete the Apex missions.

I can't see myself playing this game to completion though. I started a new run in the first Mass Effect and I'm already more excited to see the worlds and events than I am for something completely new in Andromeda.

Mass Effect: Andromeda isn't a bad game by any stretch but there is something missing and to me that is it simply doesn't feel special.

 

[pookie101]

UPDATE!

With the 1.05 patch of Mass Effect: Andromedia, many many animation issues I had or saw in the game during my review have been fixed. The faces and dialog scenes specifically look 100% better, even if they are still typical Bioware stiff. So those of you coming to the game late should have a much better experience than us early adopters because of that.

Whether you are still not going to support or play the game is up to you, but at least Bioware is trying to address and fix issues that should never have seen the public eye. Take it for what it's worth I suppose. But I wanted to point it out here that, yes, the patch has fixed a lot of the ugly in the game.

the new patch snuck in an unannounced update to denuvo which means no fixed eyes for you filthy pirate types

 

[Mcgeezaks]

UPDATE!

With the 1.05 patch of Mass Effect: Andromedia, many many animation issues I had or saw in the game during my review have been fixed. The faces and dialog scenes specifically look 100% better, even if they are still typical Bioware stiff. So those of you coming to the game late should have a much better experience than us early adopters because of that.

Whether you are still not going to support or play the game is up to you, but at least Bioware is trying to address and fix issues that should never have seen the public eye. Take it for what it's worth I suppose. But I wanted to point it out here that, yes, the patch has fixed a lot of the ugly in the game.

Just more evidence that the game was rushed out the door because of EA.

 

[Basement Cat]

I only recently finished the original Mass Effect trilogy. As a result of my coming to the series so late I avoided the now inevitable "Bug Season" that comes with just released BioWare games. I love the trilogy. I knew about the hate and the drama about ME3's ending but with the Extended Cut I was content.

Heck, I never, ever buy a new BioWare game straight away: Instead I've tended to wait upward of a full year or so as to ensure that I won't have to worry about bugs and patches and such.

As for the comparison to DA I: I friggin love the idea! I've put more hours in DA I replays than I'm willing to admit to anyone because I've always been the kind of BioWare RPG fan who milks its games for all that they're worth. Neverwinter Nights, KOTOR, Dragon Age, now Mass Effect.

The primary reason for my not buying ME A now isn't "Bug Season" but the fact that my old laptop isn't up to playing it: I guess I'll have to start manually upgrading it. Oh. Well.

I've never gotten into the BioWare hate that became so vicious that BioWare decided to close it's Forums. Haters gonna hate, sure. But BioWare's critics hate very, very loudly.

Which doesn't stop BioWare's games from selling millions. Inquisition won Game of the Year despite the haters.

Apparently millions of other folks love their games, too.

Individual preferences. *shrugs*

 

[votemarvel]

As someone whom stuck it out in the Bioware forum until the very end, there was very little 'hate' against the company there. The vast majority of people who had complaints put them across in a polite manner. The rest just wanted to talk about and discuss the games.

The great problem was the lack of moderation that let the troublemakers run rampant. The moderation was handled by a company known as The ModSquad and they did almost nothing on there, only kicking into action in the last couple of weeks (to prove to future clients they were doing something I suppose.)

I've seen Bioware go from a company that was loved without question to one that is mercilessly ridiculed. That they thought that they could solve that by shutting a single forum was somewhat naive on their part.

As to Game of the Year Awards, there are so many out there that I have no doubt a game about me wiping my bum could win GOTY somewhere.

 

[Basement Cat]

As someone whom stuck it out in the Bioware forum until the very end, there was very little 'hate' against the company there. The vast majority of people who had complaints put them across in a polite manner. The rest just wanted to talk about and discuss the games.

The great problem was the lack of moderation that let the troublemakers run rampant. The moderation was handled by a company known as The ModSquad and they did almost nothing on there, only kicking into action in the last couple of weeks (to prove to future clients they were doing something I suppose.)

I've seen Bioware go from a company that was loved without question to one that is mercilessly ridiculed. That they thought that they could solve that by shutting a single forum was somewhat naive on their part.

As to Game of the Year Awards, there are so many out there that I have no doubt a game about me wiping my bum could win GOTY somewhere.

My only familiarity with the BioWare forums stems from having Googled questions about BioWare games I was playing. I really miss having access to the wealth of knowledge available in those forums. Wisdom lost to us all--Forever!

 

[SlumlordThanatos]

Mass Effect: Andromeda isn't a bad game by any stretch but there is something missing and to me that is it simply doesn't feel special.

I think that "something" is a soul.

There's two different types of games. One type is a game that its developers made because they wanted to make something fun to play. The Witcher 3 falls squarely into this category; it has that soul, that je ne sais quoi that lets you know that they truly wanted to deliver the best possible experience to their customers, without being too concerned that it's a commercial success. For these games, they think that if they deliver a good enough product, commercial success will follow.

The other type is a game made to make money, and Mass Effect: Andromeda falls into this category. It feels unfinished despite being in development for years, and it plays like a checklist. Open areas? Check. Sidequests? Check. Sex? Double check! It just doesn't have that soul that many similar games have, it just has a corporate-mandated checklist in order to move as many copies as possible before people discover that it's not quite as good as previous entries.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

I think that "something" is a soul.

There's two different types of games. One type is a game that its developers made because they wanted to make something fun to play. The Witcher 3 falls squarely into this category; it has that soul, that je ne sais quoi that lets you know that they truly wanted to deliver the best possible experience to their customers, without being too concerned that it's a commercial success. For these games, they think that if they deliver a good enough product, commercial success will follow.

The other type is a game made to make money, and Mass Effect: Andromeda falls into this category. It feels unfinished despite being in development for years, and it plays like a checklist. Open areas? Check. Sidequests? Check. Sex? Double check! It just doesn't have that soul that many similar games have, it just has a corporate-mandated checklist in order to move as many copies as possible before people discover that it's not quite as good as previous entries.

I think this comparison is actually selling CDProjektRed short. The Witcher 3 is obviously meant to be a commercial success, this is most notable in how it streamlines a load of features from the first two games and makes sure to properly re-introduce characters from the books and games so that newcomers gets a chance to understand what's going on. It has all the trademarks of open world checklist design (filler areas? Check. Markers you visit to get more map markers? Check. Filler side quests? Double-oh Check.), yet most players are completely unaware of it or turn a blind eye to it. What it comes down to is that CPR is showcasing a masterclass in Game Design in the Witcher 3.

The open world in W3 is essentially barren, interspersed only with mobs and random loot in any place that is not directly tied to a quest, yet most of us get the feeling that it is a dynamic, living open world. That's because CPR uses tricks like giving NPCs daily routines, dropping occasional lore items for the player to find and ties the design of the open world strongly into the overarching plot. We see burned villages and battlefields full of corpses in Valen and we know it is because of the war, even if those places only have two lootable objects and a mob of ghouls.
The side quests are mostly empty filler, one quest is seriously all of of "go into barn and kill ghouls", but because each side quest has a voiced questgiver that provides background on the quest, we instantly feel as if the quest is more significant then taking ten steps and killing five ghouls before being given some silver. Even the utterly pointless Horse Races and Fistfights have their own storylines and escalating rewards, to make people play them. That the occasional sidequest also has a complication or twist (go into warehouse to kill ghoul, find out one owner tried to kill the other with it, tell guards or take bribe) means that we remember those sidequests fondly for engaging us more then we initially expected.

The Witcher 3 is not better then ME:A or DA:I because it is somehow more of a love project. It is better because CPR are much, much better developers in all aspects of game development. ME:A and DA:I stumbles on basic writing, fails to make their open worlds feel living (and instead feel like old school MMOs) and has troves of unengaging sidequests that have no backstory and no tangible or emotional reward. The Witcher 3 uses its' much smaller budget to obfuscate the open worlds lack of interaction, to frame its side quests and limits the number of talking roles to provide more quality voice work for each actual talking role. The Witcher 3 was a supremely well-managed project by all accounts and I think CPR deserves credit for that.

 

[Redryhno]

Mass Effect: Andromeda isn't a bad game by any stretch but there is something missing and to me that is it simply doesn't feel special.

I think that "something" is a soul.

There's two different types of games. One type is a game that its developers made because they wanted to make something fun to play. The Witcher 3 falls squarely into this category; it has that soul, that je ne sais quoi that lets you know that they truly wanted to deliver the best possible experience to their customers, without being too concerned that it's a commercial success. For these games, they think that if they deliver a good enough product, commercial success will follow.

The other type is a game made to make money, and Mass Effect: Andromeda falls into this category. It feels unfinished despite being in development for years, and it plays like a checklist. Open areas? Check. Sidequests? Check. Sex? Double check! It just doesn't have that soul that many similar games have, it just has a corporate-mandated checklist in order to move as many copies as possible before people discover that it's not quite as good as previous entries.

Well that's sorta because of the difference in the market the two studios faced more than anything. CDPR literally gave their press reveal for Witcher1 in a hotel room they carted people off to and it became one of the more beloved cult hits in game history to the point that they were able to make Witcher2, which gave the studio complete mainstream success and then Witcher3 that has become a gold standard for so many gaming genres and design. They started at very nearly the bottom and are now very much one of the most beloved companies in the world for both quality and consumer advocacy.

On the other side, Bioware largely got carried by alot of Black Isle early in their careers, but still managed to make good games when Black Isle crumbled, but before they became Obsidian, and then they fell apart themselves and Andromeda is just trying to find what made ME1 special to people without the new studio of fanboys not knowing what the fuck they're doing. Like, I started seeing so many "This character/thing/mcguffin is , BUT BETTER"(No, seriously, go look at your highlights of ME1 and you'll find the Andromeda equivalent) that I couldn't see it for anything but what it is. A cashgrab, which I wouldn't really mind so much if it had more redeeming qualities than the combat being decent and the environments looking nice when you can make out what things are. They never really faced all that much hardship until relatively recently in regards to critics, capital, and audience.

So much of Andromeda can be chalked up to it just being so fucking out of touch with what made the original games good. It's not making your characters into walking memes or smugly spouting one-liners(I'm fucking looking at you Liam and Peebee, christ I despise that character), it's about making them have more depth than "I was bored/looking for meaning in the stars" and "I'm afwaid of the dawk" level trauma and actually having opinions that might be controversial in one way or another.(Something I will never not applaud Ash, Garrus, Mordin, and Jacob for having). It's just so filled with vanilla-ness that I couldn't really find a reason to care about what was happening.

Like, I know it's treaded ground already, but seriously, compare Lambert's quest in Witcher3 or even the one where the Cat Witcher massacred a village. There was depth and reasons for their actions that weren't completely black and white. And they were like fifteen minutes total together. Then you compare it to something that was actually more important with the Krogan clan power struggle. There was a clear "good guy" and "bad guy" that was pointed out from the start and there was no real attempt to paint either as stained or redeemable throughout the whole bit. No circumstances that challenged the "good" side really, and no real attempt to give the "bad" side much beyond a soapbox labelled "EVIL".

 

[Pseudonym]

Quite a nice review, this. It more or less confirms my suspicions that this game would be playable but mediocre.

But on paper ME:A sounds like a great idea to continue the franchise without having to work out all the fine details. Which is an interesting statement when you consider just how many fine details were "overlooked" in ME:A. The premise is, the major races (not the minor ones because fuck them the reapers can have those worthless shits) created migration ships called arks and sent them off with a decent starting population to a new galaxy. The races figured that the fight with the reapers was gonna go belly up, so this served as a nice back-up plan to keep the plague of their existence going. And all told, it's a really good concept. It gives us a plausible reason to not only have a new galaxy to explore, but also make yet another game with all the same lovable races that we've grown to love in the first games.

Question about this. How fast can the races suddenly travel? Because I remember them having to use the reapers' mass relays to get anywhere. They could travel with some speed between a couple of stars but traveling across the galaxy by yourself apparently cost prohibitively much time. How do you travel around in ME:A?

 

[CritialGaming]

Quite a nice review, this. It more or less confirms my suspicions that this game would be playable but mediocre.

But on paper ME:A sounds like a great idea to continue the franchise without having to work out all the fine details. Which is an interesting statement when you consider just how many fine details were "overlooked" in ME:A. The premise is, the major races (not the minor ones because fuck them the reapers can have those worthless shits) created migration ships called arks and sent them off with a decent starting population to a new galaxy. The races figured that the fight with the reapers was gonna go belly up, so this served as a nice back-up plan to keep the plague of their existence going. And all told, it's a really good concept. It gives us a plausible reason to not only have a new galaxy to explore, but also make yet another game with all the same lovable races that we've grown to love in the first games.

Question about this. How fast can the races suddenly travel? Because I remember them having to use the reapers' mass relays to get anywhere. They could travel with some speed between a couple of stars but traveling across the galaxy by yourself apparently cost prohibitively much time. How do you travel around in ME:A?

Apparently the new "Normandy" can travel without mass relays because those things for completely forgotten in this game. You just travel from cluster to cluster, planet to planet in your ship.

 

[esserin]

Quite a nice review, this. It more or less confirms my suspicions that this game would be playable but mediocre.

But on paper ME:A sounds like a great idea to continue the franchise without having to work out all the fine details. Which is an interesting statement when you consider just how many fine details were "overlooked" in ME:A. The premise is, the major races (not the minor ones because fuck them the reapers can have those worthless shits) created migration ships called arks and sent them off with a decent starting population to a new galaxy. The races figured that the fight with the reapers was gonna go belly up, so this served as a nice back-up plan to keep the plague of their existence going. And all told, it's a really good concept. It gives us a plausible reason to not only have a new galaxy to explore, but also make yet another game with all the same lovable races that we've grown to love in the first games.

Question about this. How fast can the races suddenly travel? Because I remember them having to use the reapers' mass relays to get anywhere. They could travel with some speed between a couple of stars but traveling across the galaxy by yourself apparently cost prohibitively much time. How do you travel around in ME:A?

Apparently the new "Normandy" can travel without mass relays because those things for completely forgotten in this game. You just travel from cluster to cluster, planet to planet in your ship.

You don't travel to different clusters.
You travel between different solar systems in ONE cluster, the heleus cluster.
You need would mass relays to quickly travel between different clusters.
That's why you only encounter 2 new alien races in this game compared to mass effect 1 introducing a crap load of different alien species. It's one entire galaxy versus a tiny piece of another.

It does make the name of the game inaccurate but I guess calling it Mass Effect: Heleus Cluster wouldn't have sounded as good. ;P

 

[CritialGaming]

Quite a nice review, this. It more or less confirms my suspicions that this game would be playable but mediocre.

But on paper ME:A sounds like a great idea to continue the franchise without having to work out all the fine details. Which is an interesting statement when you consider just how many fine details were "overlooked" in ME:A. The premise is, the major races (not the minor ones because fuck them the reapers can have those worthless shits) created migration ships called arks and sent them off with a decent starting population to a new galaxy. The races figured that the fight with the reapers was gonna go belly up, so this served as a nice back-up plan to keep the plague of their existence going. And all told, it's a really good concept. It gives us a plausible reason to not only have a new galaxy to explore, but also make yet another game with all the same lovable races that we've grown to love in the first games.

Question about this. How fast can the races suddenly travel? Because I remember them having to use the reapers' mass relays to get anywhere. They could travel with some speed between a couple of stars but traveling across the galaxy by yourself apparently cost prohibitively much time. How do you travel around in ME:A?

Apparently the new "Normandy" can travel without mass relays because those things for completely forgotten in this game. You just travel from cluster to cluster, planet to planet in your ship.

You don't travel to different clusters.
You travel between different solar systems in ONE cluster, the heleus cluster.
You need would mass relays to quickly travel between different clusters.
That's why you only encounter 2 new alien races in this game compared to mass effect 1 introducing a crap load of different alien species. It's one entire galaxy versus a tiny piece of another.

It does make the name of the game inaccurate but I guess calling it Mass Effect: Heleus Cluster wouldn't have sounded as good. ;P

Yeah I didn't pay enough attention to it to even notice it in game. Sci-Fi changes it's rules whenever and however it wants.

 

[Pseudonym]

Apparently the new "Normandy" can travel without mass relays because those things for completely forgotten in this game. You just travel from cluster to cluster, planet to planet in your ship.

You don't travel to different clusters.
You travel between different solar systems in ONE cluster, the heleus cluster.
You need would mass relays to quickly travel between different clusters.
That's why you only encounter 2 new alien races in this game compared to mass effect 1 introducing a crap load of different alien species. It's one entire galaxy versus a tiny piece of another.

It does make the name of the game inaccurate but I guess calling it Mass Effect: Heleus Cluster wouldn't have sounded as good. ;P

Uhuh. Well fair enough. Thanks. Is there ever any explanation of how you got to travel 10 times the diameter of the andromeda galaxy and 25 times the diameter of our galaxy but are stuck in a small cluster after that? Or did it just take really, really long to get in the andromeda galaxy?