Mass Effect: Andromeda is a spin-off of the Mass Effect trilogy, featuring a completely new cast and a new galaxy to explore. Unfortunately, it does not live up to the hype of its predecessors, releasing in a broken state and even with all the patches, it is still not that great. Even on a PS4 Pro, there are noticeable framerate drops which make what’s onscreen stutter. There is no option to drop the resolution down from 1800p to try and give it a “performance” mode. The graphics aren’t stellar either, feeling only a slight bit above the PS3 games.
While Andromeda starts off the story between the events of Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3, the actual game takes place long after the ending of the trilogy. You play as Ryder, who is part of the human group traveling to Andromeda to find a suitable planet to colonize. Along with the other alien races, their objective is to colonize and expand their influence in the Andromeda galaxy, similar to how it is at Milky Way. Ryder is part of the scouting group who goes ahead to make sure that the proposed planets are suitable for life.
After 600 years of hibernation, they awake to find that things are not going as smoothly as they expected. Their ship encounters a dark energy cloud and is damaged, while Ryder is sent along with his teammates to explore the planet. The planet turns out to be inhabited by a new, hostile, alien species. It takes a short while before the familiarities of the Mass Effect universe to come into play. The various alien species we’ve come to known make their appearance after the prologue, while there are several new species introduced.
This is a RPG cover shooter. With a third person camera, the shooting mechanics are what you’d expect. However, Ryder has biotic powers, which maps to the shoulder buttons. These include explosive, gravitational and other effects. Unlike the weapons who rely on ammo, the powers are on a short cooldown. Sadly, the game has a horrible tutorial for gameplay mechanics. They bombard you with boring text and still manage to make it vague enough to not be immediately easy to grasp. It seems to over-complicate things with its various systems which makes the whole experience feel bloated.
As Ryder levels up, he or she obtain points which can be put towards improving their stats or improving their powers. Upon creation of your character, you aren’t regulated towards a particular class anymore, rather, you determine the powers you want and create your own customized class. The same goes for your teammates, although they have a much more truncated skill tree.
The biggest addition here is the jump jet which makes levels a lot more vertical. Ryder is able to use their jets to quickly jump up or forward, which the game uses to add some minor platforming elements. This is not a good thing as the developers keeps adding these stupid jumping gimmicks to the level design, which makes them tedious and annoying to traverse through to your objective.
The level designs are bigger and less linear with branching paths. Andromeda has a focus on exploration and the various planets that you can land on are huge open world maps with heaps of things to do. There are new side missions popping up all the time. However, it can be a slog from the very beginning, where it is barren and you’re constantly asked to scan things. There is no countdown to impending doom as part of the story but it takes this too far and the pacing suffers for it.
The main story is cutscene heavy with a limited amount of combat. This is a shame given that the cutscenes are pretty boring. The story seems to meander for a while, covering standard stuff of Ryder going to various planets, befriending the existing species or finding out more information about the mysterious ancient alien civilization. This makes Andromeda feel extremely slow paced and it is really weird with the setting of being the first in the galaxy, going to uncharted places, but complex structures are built at a high speed or there already being an advanced civilization, contrary to that colonization aspect.
Dialogue options are a huge part of Mass Effect but in Andromeda, the various dialogue choices don’t seem to correspond that accurately to what Ryder actually says. A lot of the times, none of the dialogue choices feel appropriate to how you want to portray your Ryder. Another gimmick is hazardous conditions on planets that will constantly drain your Life Support meter. While it is not really that dangerous since the depletion rate is slow, it is still annoying that you’re on a time limit every time you first get to a planet before you end up terraforming it. Throughout your whole playthrough, there is a constant need to interact with what are basically switches, levers and doors, which is repetitive and tiring. Waiting for doors to open while the indicator is spinning reminds you of the elevators from the first game.
The camera is situated too close to Ryder with no option on consoles to pull it back. This is probably because pulling it back would have caused the frame-rate and performance to tank even further. The environments can be pretty and the wide open areas are impressive at times, but being empty, they’re just there for you to rush past. You do miss the bustling of the areas of the original trilogy; it feels so lifeless even in hubs in Andromeda. Furthermore, the facial animations are still off, particularly around the eyes rolling for no reason and the weird blinking of characters.
The bugs are extremely disappointing, particular one if you don’t immediately initiate the final story mission after finishing the penultimate one (e.g. if you’ve played enough and want to turn the console off), then it won’t appear at all. This sort of game breaking bug that prevents you from even completing the game and laziness of not even fixing it is disgusting. If you’re lucky, you’ll notice it quickly and so you won’t lose too much progress by reloading an old save, rushing through the penultimate mission again and hopefully it’ll trigger the final one. Then there are similar bugs for loyalty missions where you can get a black screen and even reloading an older save may not help. The cause could be due to “skipping” cutscenes (jumping to the next piece of dialogue before the NPC finishes speaking). It’s ridiculous and puts you off the whole game.
The main story chain of missions only takes you around ten or so hours. The bulk of the game will be made up of the optional side missions, which includes the loyalty missions of your squad. Unfortunately, the story, just like all the characters, feels flat. As a result, even the climax is not that great and the way the final level was structured did not feel epic at all. The story is dull thanks to having a ton of unoriginal developments. Ryder is like a much more boring version of Shepard, who goes around recruiting allies and finding advanced technology of a long dead civilization in order to save the galaxy.
The loyalty missions, even though they are the better missions of the game, still boil down to travel to a planet, sit through multiple non-skippable cutscenes (doubling as loading screens), either run or drive to the location marker, spend less than a minute talking and then return to your ship to travel to another planet. You’ll spend 95% of the time either sitting through loading screens or mindlessly driving to the location and the payoff is not worth it.
Overall, Mass Effect: Andromeda is a massive disappointing, even if you have tempered your expectations and did not expect much of it. The fact that it is still riddled with performance issues and bugs that the developer and publisher never bothered to fix is frankly disgusting. The story is boring, the characters are boring, and the gameplay is boring. There are few redeeming features of the game. It’s a bad game overall, and one of the worst AAA games of the generation. It definitely tarnished the reputation of the original trilogy.
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