Mass Effect: Andromeda - Thoughts

[contains minor spoilers]

To those that claim that Mass Effect 3 killed all interest in the series, I invite them to play Mass Effect: Andromeda.

I have a lot of sympathy for the task that BioWare Montreal had before them—return to the Mass Effect universe, despite the previous game effectively "ending" it. To get around this, the studio wisely shepherds the player into a nearby galaxy, giving them new worlds to land on, new aliens to meet, and new mysteries to solve. But while it may appear as if the Mass Effect title is an anchor weighing down a fresh new sci-fi plot, the real problem becomes Andromeda itself. Gone are Mass Effect's best qualities, replaced by uninteresting imitations, open-world shenanigans, and vestigial resource systems.

Right off the bat, Mass Effect: Andromeda's writing is a colossal step down. Conversations are stilted, ideas constantly drift off, and the dialogue is as sharp as a pencil eraser. This turns arguably the best part about Mass Effect—interacting with your teammates—into something that's fairly mediocre, if not baffling at times. It doesn't help that BioWare Montreal decided that the defining aspect of Ryder (the main character) would be awkward meta-commentary, so even when the dialogue is decent, you're bound to get Ryder interjecting with, "okay, seriously? You did not just say that!" The lackluster voice acting does the script no favors either; I'd honestly be shocked if there was anyone that thought the writing was on par with the previous Mass Effects.

Adjacent to that thought, Andromeda's main plot starts off interesting... but never goes anywhere ambitious. Stationed across the Heleus Cluster are terraforming stations built by ancient robots, all of which are being sought after by the enigmatic and warlike Kett. And that's essentially the entire plot. There's some twists and turns throughout the story but Andromeda never escapes the looming shadow set by the Reapers. The Remnant are basically robotic Protheans, the Kett are organic Reapers, and every other Mass Effect race is just how you remembered them, dealing with the politics and prejudices of old. There's a new friendly race in this neck of the universe (the angara) but there's absolutely nothing intriguing about them, outside of their reincarnated memories—a fact that only plays into a single side mission.

Andromeda's main focus is squarely on the war between the angara and the kett, which is one of the reasons why I found the Mass Effect label to be kind of superfluous. The ties to the previous games are meant to make Andromeda feel more familiar, but there's almost no reason why the Milky Way explorers couldn't have all been human. Sure, there's a krogan-only outpost that the other aliens are scornful of, but the struggle of the krogan for autonomy feels like an old hat by the time you solve their dilemma. Differences between the species are ultimately minimal since the back half of Andromeda treats humans and their colorful space companions as all the same: vermin for the kett empire to subjugate.

The kett aren't a terrible video game baddie, but they are extremely dull to fight against. They don't exude creepiness like the Collectors or danger like Cerberus snipers, and their most memorable unit—the Ascendant—is the worst fight in the goddamn series. You have to shoot at an orbiting sphere in order to make them vulnerable, and then you only get 1-2 shots until the sphere shield returns, turning a single unit into a three minute ammo-wasting snoozefest. A lot of the other beefy units also overstay their welcome, but the Ascendant was a noxious brew of annoying, boring, and hard to hit. I generally enjoyed fighting the remnant more, but both factions lacked diversity, so how you fought one enemy wouldn't really change from how you fought another.

Mass Effect has always had this problem to some degree, but the wealth of battle options at your disposal meant you could push and pull on the encounters according to what powers were available. Gameplay-wise, Andromeda is unarguably the most diverse Mass Effect title, letting you mix and match skills and passives from any tree. But then it contradicts this freedom by limiting your repertoire to three powers max and completely disabling the manual use of ally abilities. So it really doesn't matter which of your allies you bring into combat—you're the only person that can dig yourself out of a tricky predicament. In fact, teammates were as useless as they were in the first Mass Effect, rarely killing opponents and constantly, constantly getting in the way of my sights. By the end they could dish out some decent damage, but that was nothing compared to the powerhouse Ryder became; my allies were better off as meatshields, and even they couldn't perform that role well.

But becoming a space wizard that could lob black holes every ten seconds wasn't an easy road to travel. I've been playing through the Mass Effect series on Hard and Andromeda has been the only one to put up a fight the entire time. Enemies are considerably bulkier and harder to hit (your aiming has to be VERY precise), and if you lose any of your health or ammo you have to go hunting for a resupply crate, which are few and far between. Taking cover is also fluid and buttonless, which occasionally works well out in the wild but is a mess in close corridors, where the only way to get Ryder to lower their head is by running them against an obstacle. To make matters worse, acquiring gear in this game is a confusing, bloated nightmare. You can spend one of three types of research points to obtain blueprints, which can then be developed with 4-5 different elements you'll mine from planets, and your gear can be both modified and augmented, and they come with their own rarity level, and there's over 100 types of weapons and armor to try this on. Or you can do what I did and just buy stuff from vendors. Once I found the Isharay and started collecting biotic damage armor, I had no reason to engage with 95% of the materials cluttering up my inventory.

The best thing I can say about Andromeda—besides having to ruminate on your level-ups since the difficulty is no joke—is that it's not starved for content. There are six sizable planets to explore with scores of side quests sprinkled across each world, ranging from "go scan this rock" to "kill a sprawling outpost of bandits." Between this and the ludicrous inventory system, Andromeda is brimming with content to kill time with... it's just a shame that the gameplay isn't all that fun and the narrative is uncompelling at best. Oddly enough, Andromeda struck me as a monkey's paw remake of the first Mass Effect: finally you have lush, open landscapes to explore and colonize! But it comes at the cost of having boring friends, shallow enemies, and conversations that are as memorable as what you ate for lunch last week.

There's a big fight at the end of Mass Effect: Andromeda where the main villain relentlessly taunts you with the most tired and cliche threats imaginable. By this point any kind of love or curiosity that I had left for the series had been drained, and all I could do was marvel at how utterly disappointing the experience had been. The other games had their problems too, but by the end of the day you still cared, having forged racial alliances and gathered together a ragtag team to save the universe. In Andromeda, I had no idea narratively how I beat the final boss and I didn't care what that meant for the world. I didn't even bat an eye when, after the boss's unceremonious death, a scant five sentences were spoken and then the credits began rolling. Mass Effect: Andromeda tried its best to forge its own path, but it ran out of gas as soon as it left the docking bay.