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.

Mass Effect 3 - Thoughts

BioWare's contentious climax to the original Mass Effect trilogy isn't... really... all that contentious. Sure, there's the phenomenally underwhelming ending that makes some wild leaps in logic, but besides that Mass Effect 3 is undeniably the successor to 2. I don't think it's as masterful as the Collector-hunting-comrade-collecting journey, but it's riddled with great character moments, tense dilemmas, and energetic firefights. Whatever failings it may have (of which there are quite a few), I honestly feel that the team at BioWare did the best they could.

The worst part about Mass Effect 3—and an aspect I believe is more detrimental than the unsatisfactory ending—is that everything revolves around the ongoing galactic war. On one hand, it absolutely makes sense within the confines of the story. It avoids classic RPG tonal dissonance of, say, breeding racebirds while an apocalyptic meteor descends upon the planet, but it robs Mass Effect of its leisure and gentleness. Gone are the innocent times where you could stop by a store and inquire about an alien race's history; now you'll eavesdrops to garner war assets and convince old friends to become statistics in your army. Every conversation, every expedition, and every interjection is designed to further aid you in the war.

I'll reiterate that while it's understandable in universe, the galactic war becomes a black hole that saps a lot of joy out of the series. On every mission people constantly radio in to tell you to "HURRY UP", leaving you no room to soak in some of the prettier backdrops. Puzzles and minigames have also been entirely removed, reducing the gameplay loop to "gear up -> shoot shoot shoot". The silver lining is that the downtime in Mass Effect 3, where you're allowed to sit back and chat with your companions, feels a lot more well deserved. This is part of the reason why the Citadel DLC (where you're on shore leave) is so unanimously well-loved, and remains the crowning jewel of the Mass Effect experience. But even if you happen to play the game without it, there are still a lot of small character moments that'll put a smile on your face.

Perhaps the greatest improvement Mass Effect 3 holds over its older siblings is that your crew actually interacts with one another. To people that haven't played the series this may not seem like a big deal, but your squad is central to Mass Effect experience—if not the driving force itself. It's honestly kind of strange thinking back on the previous two games that, outside of a few exceptions, the soldiers on your ship never strike up a conversation. Mass Effect 3 remedies this by peppering in various radio chats you can eavesdrop on, as well as some unique lighthearted banter that'll pop up during a mission. It makes the crew feel more alive and cohesive, rather than guns for hire that only respond to their captain.

Unexpectedly, there's also more character customization than in Mass Effect 2—something that I honestly didn't expect (or remember). Fully upgrading an ability lets you pick three of six enhancements for your power, which can make your squad feel more specialized... even though you'll likely just choose "damage up" every single time. But what really surprised me was that Mass Effect 3 allows the player to carry any weapons they want into combat—at the price of slowing power recharge speed per armament. This had a significantly larger impact on how I played than any of the dopey mods from the first game ever did. With each weapon carrying its own magazine size, fire rate, damage, and specific weight, I had a lot of options to play with.

When it came time to storm the battlefield, I found myself having roughly as much fun with the combat as I did in 2. There are significantly less enemies protected by armor and shields in Mass Effect 3—turning my singularity into a potent anti-cover weapon—but this is offset by foes tossing grenades as frequently as their Uncharted 3 brethren. While explosives are a good way to de-trench the player from their favorite piece of cover, all it really served to do was slow down the gameplay as I bounced back and forth from one waist-high rock to another. I wrote in my entry on The Division how natural it felt to zip around cover, and my point of comparison was Mass Effect 3; far too often the game rewards you for staying stationary and simply shooting enemies before they can shoot you.

I would still classify most of the combat as entertaining (even if you get into routine habits), which is more than I can say for the mission structure. There's been a mass exodus of missions unrelated to the main campaign, creating of a drought of creativity in the level variety. Missing are the strange and unique side missions found in 2; Mass Effect 3 has you shooting Cerberus soldiers at a civilian base in one mission, and then shooting Cerberus soldiers at a Cerberus base the next. Side missions aren't the biggest draw to the Mass Effect universe, but they were a source of mystery in the previous games. Here, there's no time to tickle your curiosity—there's an enemy that needs killin', and a war that needs winnin'.

I've saved discussing the story for last again not because I don't have a lot of opinions on it, but mainly because it's impossible to discuss without delving into spoilers. Suffice to say, I don't think the ending is that bad (again, a big part of the experience is the journey, not the destination), though it's a lot better on replay when you're prepared for the blindside. The other big story beats are interesting and engaging, though it can border on embarrassing how easily galaxy-wide turmoil is wrapped up, or how quickly old friends make themselves scarce (hello David... bye David...) But I give Mass Effect 3 a pass largely due to the fact that it had a lot of ground to cover and variables to account for. Honestly, the one thing I cannot overlook is how essential the DLC is to the experience: Javik, the Leviathan, and the Citadel content all add some excellent flavor to the game's universe, and hiding the first two behind a $10 paywall is naked greed that spits in the faces of the fans.

I've read and understood plenty of arguments calling Mass Effect 3 a disappointment, but it was always going to be hard reaching Mass Effect 2's heights. 2 was a connective story that had a lot of freedom, whereas 3 had to play it by the rules and wrap up any loose ends. How well it does this depends on what characters you've grown attached to, how fascinating you find a galaxy-wide war, and whether or not you're okay with Shepard's dialogue options getting massively pared down (goodbye middle choice!). Beyond that (and the ending [and the crushing seriousness of the war]) there's not that much to hate. The character writing is as sharp as its ever been, the planets and vistas are genuinely jaw-dropping, and the gameplay remains fun long after you've downed your 1000th Cerberus lackey. Mass Effect 3's reputation may be visibly troubled, but the game is a solid product that—at its worst—occasionally skirts mediocrity.

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Images obtained from: PNGKey.com, reddit.com, gamewatcher.com, GameSpot.com

Mass Effect 2 - Thoughts

Mass Effect 2 has an amazing opening. An interstellar cruiser with an asteroid hull teleports out of nowhere and obliterates your ship, ostensibly killing your main character Commander Shepard in the process. Of course Shepard doesn't stay dead—and your ship gets reconstructed—but the bold start does more than just thrill: it establishes for all intents and purposes that the first Mass Effect has also been obliterated. Gone are the cumbersome inventories, the worthless RPG options, and the low-stakes conversations of the past. Mass Effect 2 is cleaner, more cinematic, and a categorical upgrade to the first game in almost every way. And it's not only a superior title—it's one of the best games on the Xbox 360.

That's not to say that Mass Effect 2 doesn't stumble. The worst part about the game is that it happily throws only two types of minigames at you over the course of thirty hours, meaning you'll "play" them over a hundred times. They're better than the droll Simon Says nonsense in the first game, but since neither minigame increases in intensity or complexity, they get real old real fast. Besides that, there's a slew of BioWare Bugs™ that will inevitably force a reload, and the UI remains in need of improvement. For instance, your upgrade catalog is sequestered to a computer terminal, ordered alphabetically instead of by type for some reason. And you can't even see what your squadmates' abilities do unless you bring them on a mission! I also have some reservations about the combat, but I'll get to that in a bit.

Mass Effect 2's failings may agitate, but they never really pull the game down. For the most part the rambunctious ride through space is smooth, fascinating, and always entertaining. What helps is that rather than embarking on a disconnected goose chase across the galaxy for an agent gone rogue, Mass Effect 2 is centered on two well-worn premises: building a team and getting revenge. The fabulously-designed Collector ship is an enigmatic vessel that hounds you throughout the story, its eerie, insectoid inhabitants popping up right when you start to forget about them. And your squadmates are as distinct as they are dangerous, being well-worth the effort it takes to recruit them thanks to their diverse designs, colorful backstories, and powerful abilities.

When I call their abilities "powerful", I don't mean it as some bizarre form of fictional flattery—your team in Mass Effect 2 frequently does heavy lifting. Taking cover has become a fundamental part of the series, as any unit left without it will get shredded to bits. Your allies are a key part of that "shredding": they unleash good damage, soften armor, and can pull entrenched enemies airborne so you can fill them with holes. I found myself constantly thanking my squadmates as peripheral foes flew back from concussive blasts or were ignited in a blaze of fire. Whereas the first Mass Effect had me babysitting my squadmates, in 2 I was trying my best to keep up.

Combat is no longer the clumsy slog it was in the first game, but it's not especially deep either. I don't think that's an indictment of the game's quality—I found the action to be plenty serviceable—it's just that you'll bereft of options most of the time. Battlefields can range from narrow hallways to larger stadiums, but since being out in the open is a death sentence, you'll find one piece of cover to plant yourself at and fight from there. And holy cow does Mass Effect 2 love throwing scores of enemies at you, making every encounter feel twice as long as it should be. The rock-paper-scissors system of having to deal with shields-armor-barriers keeps the gunplay from feeling brain-dead, but linking all abilities to the same cooldown pushes you to use same 2-3 routine powers. Again, the combat is satisfying for the most part, it's just that the longer you play Mass Effect 2, the more repetitive you'll notice the encounters are (and nowhere is this more evident than in the Arrival DLC).

Thankfully your journey through the galaxy is no longer comprised of dull rocky wastelands. Mass Effect 2 structures its campaign around recruiting allies and gaining their loyalty, which keeps the story strong, your tasks varied, and the narrative relevant. When you do decide to take a break and explore the unknown, the side missions are all surprisingly unique. True, Blood Pack is a lot like Blue Suns which is a lot like Eclipse, but the backdrops behind the mercenary groups offer the diversity that the first game desperately needed. On one planet you'll infiltrate a quarantined robot facility, on another you'll wade through a misty maze, and on another you'll tip-toe atop a crashed frigate teetering over a cliff. And those are just the side missions, the stuff BioWare is fine with letting you miss!

Lastly, the story retains the same level of excellence, both in content and prose, set by its predecessor. The removal of a lot of casual conversations might be disappointing to some, but I felt that Mass Effect 2 delivered a good mix of discussions both pertinent and incidental. The mystery of the Collectors has a good (though slightly ridiculous) payoff, and you'll come to love chatting with your staggering squad of twelve—or at least find a few to grow attached to. In the grand scheme of things, Mass Effect 2's plot is mostly connective tissue binding the first and third games together, but the enthralling story woven here outshines the tales surrounding it; 2 is the meat of the trilogy's sandwich.

Mass Effect 2's leap over the first game is practically cosmic. It's unarguable that in 2, the promising blueprint of Mass Effect has reached its full potential, culminating in one of the best experiences in gaming's seventh console generation. It's in no way a flawless game, but Mass Effect 2's problems come across as blemishes, not scars. It's an impressive, tense journey loaded with hours of content to ruminate over, managing to never overstay its welcome even if you 100% the game. I don't think any planet-hopping sci-fi video game has topped Mass Effect 2—and though it could be nostalgia speaking, I doubt any ever will.

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Images obtained from: NightSolo.net, etgeekera.com, youtube.com, NorthernLight.org

Mass Effect - Thoughts

The beginning of the most epic trilogy on the Xbox 360 is as rocky as a cliff's face. BioWare's Mass Effect is an active struggle to play—it fights back against your RPG and TPS instincts, trying to blend both but being good at neither. What it is, however, is an extremely stable bedrock to one of the best video game universes of all time. Mass Effect's aesthetics, characters, and interlocking political struggles are second to none in the seventh console generation, and no amount of clunky combat or barren worlds could ever change that.

I think an interesting distinction should be made here: Mass Effect's universe is engrossing but not particularly poignant. It doesn't have a deeper statement to make about our society like Papers, Please, nor is its plot something that can only be done in the video game format like Undertale. What it does well is delightfully simple: it gives you a fully 3D, novelesque sci-fi/fantasy universe to explore on (mostly) your own terms. You'll get to converse with various species, visit colorful planets, and dive into scads of lore and fictional physics. Mass Effect is a big playground where the goal isn't to find and create interesting gameplay scenarios like in sandbox games—it's to merely learn more. Discovering another codex entry or resolving a dispute between business partners is the crux of the game, not player expression.

This is the main reason why Mass Effect works despite its plentiful shortcomings. At the end of the day, what you'll retain from your experience are the conversations, character struggles, and anxiety over the choices you didn't pick. The last aspect—the choices—can unfortunately have shallow results (especially as the series reaches its close), but it feels meaningful in the moment, pushing you to ponder strange-yet-relatable hypothetical conundrums, like "can this species proselytize on the space-UN's property without a permit?" I think these questions can be enlightening without any kind of consequential follow-through, just because it gets you ruminating over which side of the fence you stand on. That's not to say I don't wish the series had greater ramifications for your actions, but that's not really a problem that the first game has to grapple with.

What is a problem is the gameplay. And no, not just the rubbery Mako sections—the gunplay in Mass Effect is a shockingly jittery and imprecise. Although I'm playing through the series as an Adept on the second hardest difficulty available, the challenge put forth by the game really wasn't an issue (especially once my entire biotic catalog was available). My gripes stem from the fact that fighting enemies is rarely satisfying: the framerate is constantly tanking, your weapon accuracy is laughable, foes are either stationary target practice or blitzing you, re-positioning is cumbersome, and the cover system is so sticky that you're better off manually dancing around corners. Meanwhile, whenever your allies aren't body blocking you or dying to god knows what, they're whittling enemies away at imperceptible rate. Keyword being imperceptible, as its an adjective the game is far too comfortable with.

A big problem with Mass Effect is that it wants to be an RPG without providing the information of one. There are no combat logs or floating damage numbers—the best you can surmise from your damage is how fast the enemy health bar (or tiny shield blip) lowers when you're on the offensive. The game provides you with information on the level up screen, but hard numbers about damage, distance, and percentages are fuzzy when you can't observe them during the gameplay. Leveling up truly feels like an arbitrary experience, outside of grabbing whatever nodes give you access to new abilities. And not even all of them are necessary; by the end of the game I was bulldozing through everything with just Lift and Marksman, the former for disabling foes and the latter for as my best DPS ability. I found that Warp and Stasis weren't even worth the time required to select them from the radial menu.

I don't really like the combat in Mass Effect, but thankfully the player can easily adapt to it. Neither the gunplay nor the (often hilarious) Mako sections reach truly abysmal depths—both are mostly a mediocre roadblock to the story. It also doesn't help that the bulk of side missions take place on the same mountainous, featureless planetoids which all happen to contain one of three buildings-slash-battle arenas. Between sniffing out missions in the Citadel's endless, labyrinthine hallways and having every side mission conclude in one of three drab locations, I was more than happy to be done with the game. I barely even touched its arena-based DLC, which featured endlessly spawning enemies (joy.)

Oh, and the last thing I need to begrudge is that inventory management (on the 360 at least) is a downright mess. You can only delete items one at a time, and any weapons or armor mods you purge return you back at the top of the list where your best gear is, meaning you have to scroll all the way down to find the junk you're trying to toss, delete it, and then repeat the process again. For scores of items. It's cumbersome and on top of that I found a large portion of the mods to be useless—why would you want to pick a mod that poisons enemies or slightly bypasses shields when you can choose the one that gives you nearly 40% more damage to most of the enemies in the game? For a game that prides itself on decision making, the gear you acquire has very little of it.

I don't think my good will for the Mass Effect series was misplaced: the first game spins one hell of a yarn that's ultimately rewarding to play through, even as a stand-alone entry. But it's as adventurous as it is unrefined. Mass Effect's laurels rest on its premise and narrative, not on its combat... or its performance... or its planet variety... combat... enemy variety... AI... or even the game's cinematography, which turns cutscenes into be dizzying shish kabob of quick cuts. But for BioWare to stumble this much and avoid landing flat on its face meant they were onto something truly special with Commander Shephard's enduring debut.

(As a side note: I'm actually of the opinion that driving the Mako provides a nice change of pace and is no worse than the shooting sections. Being at the helm of the galaxy's bounciest tank is not great, but it's no more repetitive and obnoxious than the rest of the game.)

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Images obtained from: steam.com, TheMotleyCrew.com, youtube.com, imgur.com