After yesterday's post, I sat down and played through the final mission of Mass Effect: Andromeda. I expected the last mission to be a massive affair that would take an hour or two to complete, but 40 minutes later, I was zipping through the credits and playing through the epilogue.
In a way, I was sort of relieved. I like an epic ending, but it can feel like a slog if you're not ready for it. When I played through the remastered Mass Effect trilogy a few months ago, the final run at the end of the series felt like it went on forever - and towards the end, I wanted to take a break, but I didn't want to leave the game in a state where I couldn't save my progress, so I had to power through it.
As with my other game reviews, there are spoilers below!
So four years after this game was released - and I played it first, right when it launched - I came back, started anew, and played through just about every part of the game.
And honestly, it was a lot of fun! I kind of wish I hadn't waited so long to play it now.
The game's story starts off pretty dry, and it did not hold my attention initially in either playthrough. I didn't make it all that far in my first attempt to play this game however, so this time I pushed on - and as the adventure unfolded, I found things got more interesting.
The movement and combat in Andromeda feels a bit squirrely compared to the original games, and it took a lot of time for me to get used to it. The first hour of the game wasn't enough to make it feel natural, and I had to turn aim-assist on to get it to feel right. Once I had grown my arsenal of weapons and powers enough to experiment though, it all just clicked. Instead of feeling tedious, combat felt fun. And I appreciate all the modern touches BioWare added to the formula to help progress things, like fast-travel, compass waypoints, an aggressive auto-save system, etc.
I hated the Angara in the early part of the game. They felt shallow compared the alien races in the original Mass Effect trilogy, and their character design just rubbed me the wrong way. But as with the story, the Angara also grew on me as I played. When it was revealed that the Kett were turning Angara into other Kett via genetic mutations, I felt empathy for their horror. When it was revealed that the Angara were created by an alien AI to inhabit the cluster, I felt sorry for them. It was a long journey for me, but... I sort of like them now. Even though I still don't like how they look.
Andromeda is a big game, and it took me over 70 hours to finish it. Towards the end, there was a lot of back-and-forth going on, where I had to visit and revisit Elaaden and Kadara in particular, and that got annoying. I'm glad that BioWare made it so you can skip the animations zooming around each local part of the cluster, which I don't think was in the game originally. It's cool to watch some of them all the way through, but you have to do way too much of this to not be able to skip it at some point.
I liked that the game had a diverse set of characters throughout. The people around the Nexus and the Initiative outposts look like all types of people. I wish the same work had been put into differentiating the alien races, like the Asari, who - aside from Peebee, who looks like a blue Ninja Turtle - all inexplicably look exactly the same. This was not true in the original Mass Effect trilogy.
My original Andromeda run was started with a dopey looking white guy as my Ryder, and this time I picked a character who looked very different from that, to see how it might affect the way I play or how it might impact the story. It did make things more interesting to me, I think, because the character didn't feel as generic to me. Some of the voicework for Sara Ryder was funky, but overall it was a great experience.
I did notice that sometimes - as in real life! - the game's camera seemed to be calibrated to lighter skin tones, and so in cutscenes with a dark background, my Ryder would occasionally get lost in darkness.
There are a lot of little problems like that in this game, when you really start looking. People clipping through objects, animations that jump, the occasional repeated audio cue. But as I noted above, this is a big game, and it's hard to ferret out all of those issues, so I get it. None of them, save for one weird bug very early on, ever stopped me from progressing.
Having played through this game now and enjoyed it, I'm sad it was in such a bad state at launch. BioWare did a good job fixing things, but the damage was done, and many probably remember this only as a bad game/experience, which is a shame.
Mass Effect: Andromeda is a good entry to the Mass Effect universe. I wish things had gone differently so that we might have seen what adventures the Ryder siblings were off to next.
