Mass Effect: Andromeda
This is going to be one big rant, about similar to my X-files one a year ago. Structure.
The background: Been a long time fan and player of all things Mass Effect. Played through all 3 games with all dlc more times than I can count. This isn’t some heartless, soulless, one sided rant, this is addressing an insult to long time fans of the ME series.
Foreground: Leading up to this game, I was starting to get hyped about it, the gameplay looked promising, the premise had me intrigued. I was going to buy it day one, but then school got crazy. During that time I read reviews about how bad the game was, as always, I’m skeptical of reviews and 9 times out of 10 I never trust them. I hesitated on buying it when school let out and decided to wait until a trial was released, which it was a month ago. I played the trial which ends about 3 hours into the game. I “acquired” the full game soon after since I had some interest in the game, which had me restart the game. Then the anger started to build up as I loaded the game...
Rant: The main menu of the game is very true to the previous Mass Effect games, you create your own character/choose trait/choose background/choose name/hit start game. PLOT: After that, the cracks in this game reveal themselves within the first 30 seconds. It starts off with some quote that should get you pumped about the lore and then delves into what is going on. Essentially your on an arc that is meant to go into deep space (about 600 years of cryo sleep) to explore and find habitable planets. For about as long it took for you to read that previous sentence was about as long as they took to explain all of this to you. They completely spit out the plot.
I felt no emotion yet, wasn’t even intrigued, mainly because of how fast they presented the lore to you, but how bland the voice actor was. VOICE ACTING: Every SINGLE FUCKING CHARACTER has the BLANDEST voice ever. Not even remotely kidding on this. It truly is amazing how bad the voice acting is by everybody. At first I thought the animation was causing it to seem bad, but nope, the voice acting is utter garbage. The dialogue makes it worse. Back on topic, so you wake up from cryo sleep, find out your twin brother is stuck in cryo sleep because of plot device. Your character doesn’t even give a shit that your brother could die (OH PROBABLY BECAUSE THEY SAY HE’LL BE SAFE), basically killing any tension for me to care about him. So we brush over the fact I have a twin brother and go to the nearest planet.
SQUADMATES: You scout out a planet with your squadmates and your father (he dies, don’t worry it’s so goddamn obvious). The planet is pretty interesting, they introduce you to an alien species (main villain) that immediately want to kill you. Whats weird here is that your squadmates talk as if you guys are best friends and just say weird lines in combat. Let me give you some contrast. In the first game you are slowly introduced to your squadmates and over the course of the first game you start to form bonds with them. You learn their quirks, emotions, background and makes you understand their combat dialogue more. That way by the 2nd game (Mass Effect 2) when you have your squadmates back and they’re cracking jokes you understand why they would do that because you know that character so well already. This game just assumes that you know everyone right off the bat and are best friends. It assumes that me as a player fully understands this character based off their 5 second screen appearance and bland voice acting. (WELL I FUCKING DON’T AND IT’S INSULTING).
DEATH: So you get to the cutscene where your dad dies, it has no emotion and no purpose at all besides making you the leader of everything. There is no emotional applied here since you’ve only seen your dad on screen for about 15 seconds in total. He honestly just feels like a squadmate than a father since your characters interact so weirdly with one another. Not going to talk more about this, it was so pointless.
LEADER: Your character is meant to be this leader of everything, a strong leader that is meant to sacrifice herself for the greater good. The issue is, she just kind of nonchalantly wants to be a leader. Her dialogue is constantly talking about “we’ll see what happens” or “I guess we’ll give it a shot” or even better, “this will be an adventure!” She doesn’t seem like a strong leader at all, more like a spoiled teen in high school driving a hot pink mazda with “PINK” on the bumper that dad bought for her. In the original Mass Effect your main character was just a soldier that learned about this great threat to humanity. He began to take matters into his own hands and didn’t back down from anything or go “THIS WILL BE AN ADVENTURE” like a kid going to the zoo.
ANIMATIONS: I know, I KNOW, this topic is done to death. The animations are terrible. The reason why I have this section is to talk about this: The entire Mass Effect games are most known for their facial animations. Hell, the first 3 games have the best animations an NPC could have in an RPG, you can read their emotions easily. The animations helped amplify the voice acting and it even made it so that every alien species in the game was unique. Compare to these krogan voice actors from Mass Effect 2: https://youtu.be/9Q9acaCQAlU To this very odd choice in voice modulation for this Krogan in Andromeda: https://youtu.be/WKxk1LEyYyc?t=1m29s You see what I’m getting at? And why I was completely dumbfounded when I first saw that reveal of the Krogan species in Andromeda? That brings me to my next topic.
EVERYONE AND EVERYTHING IS HUMAN: Every species in this game sounds human. Its oddly crisp, flat, and has no inflection at all. My breaking point was a result of this. I was initiating dialogue with a character when I got so sick and tired of hearing every character sound so clean with their dialogue. It was strange, it was just so bland. Their was no inflection, every species sounded the same. I didn’t even quit out, I got so pissed I just turned off my computer because I was not about to sit through a 40 hour game listening to the same monotone voices.
USER INTERFACE: It’s very clunky, annoying to navigate and not very responsive. There a lot of micro managing within the menus and the game is nothing but menus. It’s annoying to navigate and just cumbersome.
FINAL THOUGHTS: The best way to put this game is like reading a fan fiction story on some website. It doesn’t feel like it was ever meant to be a unique game, the story is boring and very predictable. You can already assume how the story is going to go early on because they use plot twists that have been done to death. You are never fully immersed into the world at all or why you should even care about saving anyone. There are not any high stakes that can compel you to stay with this story. They should of just dropped the Mass Effect title and just called it “Andromeda.” They should of made the plot more intriguing like what if you found out the initiative was never meant to succeed. What if it had a more sinister approach like how Fallout Vaults worked? To the public it was a safe haven, but on the inside, it was just a big science experiment. I’m glad to see that Casey Hudson has returned to the studio and that this series is put on hold for awhile. They should scrap the initiative story line all together and just start anew.
