Andromeda | Martin Crownover

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.

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With Inktober behind me, I'm back to chronicling my adventures in games, game development, and other art. This time, I'm reporting in on my progress with Mass Effect: Andromeda, which I've been chipping away at each night.

I'm happy to say that I'm about done with the game - the mission I'm about to start has informed me that I can continue exploring the Heleus cluster once I've finished it, which I assume means it's the final conflict. I've put in a little over 70 hours at this point, diligently completing every side mission and exploring every location, sometimes to the point where a night's session is spent almost entirely running around the Nexus, talking to various NPC's and closing out quests.

I'll write about this more soon, but I've enjoyed most of my time with Andromeda. It took a long time for me to really warm up to it, but I've had fun with the missions, and the story turned out to be pretty interesting. I've gone from hating the Angara to feeling sorry for them, though the final mission may add a further twist to their plight - we shall see, I guess.

I'm going to go try to finish things up. It feels good to be free of my daily illustrations for a moment!

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Well, the Angara are growing on me now. I still really hate how they look, but their story is interesting- especially their relationship to the Kett.

Sigh.

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This is sort of a little thing (pun intended) but I find the scale in Mass Effect Andromeda to be much more appreciable than in the original trilogy.

Once you establish Podromos on the first explorable planet, Eos, you get a really good sense of the sheer size of things with your ship touched down next to the newly bustling colony. The ship is huge, but is still dwarfed by the collection of portable structures and equipment around it. And that's all settled in a small valley in one section of Eos.

It's cool to see/hear the shuttles coming and going, and each pod is packed with all sorts of tech doodads that really lend the world a believability that Mass Effect 1-3, having been made for older hardware, didn't often achieve. Especially the first game, where outposts on alien worlds were almost always just one or two simple, boxy buildings that were devoid of nearly all decoration.

There is, perhaps, a little more intimacy in the previous games because of this limitation - even the camera hugs Shepard closer, and with a tighter FOV - so the grand views of Andromeda aren't without their faults.

I have to give credit where credit is due, though. Mass Effect Andromeda is often a pretty game, if nothing else.

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With Psychonauts 2 and Life Is Strange: True Colors finished, I'm back on Mass Effect Andromeda again.

I'm settling into a rhythm with this game now, and I don't hate it at all - running around planets and clearing out tasks to improve their viability is a bit mindless, but still fun. The lore of this game isn't as exciting as the original Mass Effect trilogy because all of those games is conveniently swept under the rug with this one.

There are definitely some things that bother me about this game though, particularly the graphics. I know I touched on this before, but I can't get over how weird some of the alien races look. Even the Asari (aside from Peebee) all seem to have this weird, dopey/sleepy look to them that grates on me.

Why do they all look like this? It's such a strange, pointless departure from the original games.

I still hate the Angara more, though. They look like the result of a bad plastic surgery.

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I'm still working through Mass Effect: Andromeda, which I've been playing in between other games, as a follow-up to finishing the original trilogy remaster.

I've been trying to keep an open mind about this game and so far, it's been better than I remembered it, with just a few annoyances here and there. I've gotten past the point where I quit playing the first time!

But that means I've now met the Angara for the second time and boy, I hate how these guys look. The male Angara look lion-ish and sort of serviceable, but the female Angara - Why do they look like that? Are they... cross-eyed?

It also really bugs me that the Angara are so bow-legged. They look awkward when they walk around, and it's hard to suspend my disbelief through all this.

I think I just expect more from the creators of the original trilogy than this. The Angara look like a first draft for an alien race in a game with a fraction of the budget this game had. They aren't bad, per se - just not up to snuff with what I know BioWare is capable of.

Anyway, I continue on... slightly disturbed, but undeterred.

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Years after my original attempt at playing through Mass Effect: Andromeda, I'm back at it. I've started playing the game in earnest after finishing the original trilogy once more, via the Legendary Edition.

So far, so good, I suppose. I'm not very far yet - I'm on the first proper planetary expedition at Eos - and I haven't yet caught up to where I was when I quit the first time, which I believe was at the end of that sequence.

I replaced my dopey male Ryder with this one.

I didn't quit my first attempt because I disliked the game. Rather, it just didn't grab me the same way the original trilogy did, and some other game came out soon after (Fallout 4?) and I lost interest entirely.

I don't really hate anything yet, but there are a lot of little things about the game that are sort of collectively annoying:

I don't like how virtually everyone in the game is young. As far as the story is concerned, it makes some sense, but it doesn't feel like Mass Effect because of that.
The idea that the game's pseudo-narrator AI, SAM, has to be fused to your character's mind in order to save them from death is dumb.
The Frostbite engine (along with BioWare's stable of graphic artists) is capable of some amazing visuals - but it sure didn't seem ready to take on the close-ups required for a game like this. I especially don't like the way the Krogan and Salarian NPC's look, compared to their original Unreal counterparts.
The exploration camera's FOV is too high, and it creates a fisheye effect when you're running around exploring.
There are too many points/currencies/etc. going on for purchasing new equipment and upgrades. It's very confusing.
Combat seems accidentally difficult at 30fps.

A friend of mine, who played through the game when it launched, assures me that Andromeda is actually a decent game that just got a bad wrap. I might come away with that opinion too. But it's too early to say.