CRITIQUE: Mass Effect: Andromeda - A Terrible Game

My first five hours with Mass Effect: Andromeda weren’t just disappointing, they were flat-out terrible. I rarely went ten minutes without encountering a glitch such as floating enemies or huge frame rate drops. The characters were dull and their dialogue cringe inducing. My mission log filled up with pointless fetch quests, and the user interface seemed designed to fry my brain. Forty hours later, I can look back on half-decent loyalty missions with my crew and satisfying combat. Unfortunately, the main story never improved, the dialogue remained clunky, and performance issues continued to plague the experience. Andromeda occasionally threatened to reach the giddy heights of mediocre, however, much like frame rate trying to stay at 30FPS, it never succeeded for more than fleeting moments. Andromeda received a rough ride in the weeks leading up to release. The game got panned for poor quality facial animations, and the ten hour trial period was enough time for the game to get written off as a disappointing follow up to the Mass Effect trilogy. I’m not going to judge the game poorly just because of a few dodgy facial animations. That’s not what this video is about. Neither am I going to write it off just because it starts slowly. Andromeda’s problems go far deeper than poor facial animations and a slow start. It’s a buggy mess throughout, the story is boring, any semblance of role-playing has been eradicated. You should avoid Andromeda at all costs. It’s not worth your time and it sure as hell isn’t worth your money. I should get a couple of housekeeping things out of the way early on. As you’ve probably figured out from the length of the video, this critique will be full of spoilers. As with my previous video on Horizon Zero Dawn, I’m going to go through the entire main story, together with the meatier side quests. If you want to play this game--god help you--and you don’t want to be spoiled, then click away now. I’m moderately sensitive to spoilers myself, so I don’t say this lightly, but I honestly don’t think the story is one I can spoil. The writers have done that job themselves. There isn’t much in the way of cool twists--or cool anything--really, so this video won’t make your experience with Andromeda any worse than it already is. I know it might sound like I’m just saying that so that you stay and watch the video, but if you look at my Horizon video you’ll note that I do strongly recommend you play the game before watching. I can’t say that here. The story is shit. I’m doing you a favor. After going through the story, I’m going to propose a story of my own. Basically this is how I would have improved the story of the game. I feel it’s important to do this after criticizing the game so heavily. Then I’ll get into more traditional review territory by discussing graphics, combat, and general gameplay. There are hyperlinks in the description if you want to navigate around and only listen to certain bits, however I can’t guarantee that the review section won’t also contain spoilers. In fact, i think it will. I’m sure a fair few of you have already hit dislike and are typing out well-reasoned critiques to explain exactly why I’m a cuck, or whatever other insults the young uns are throwing around these days. For what it’s worth, I’ll try to pre-empt a few of the rants I’m expecting to see, and give normal viewers a sense of where I’m coming from. I’m new to reviewing games, so it’s a good idea to let people know what my likes and dislikes are for context if nothing else. First of all, I wouldn’t describe myself as a huge Mass Effect fanboy. I played Mass Effect 2 and 3, but never played the first one. I really enjoyed those games and would have probably scored Mass Effect 2 at about 9 out of 10, and three at 8. Maybe. This was quite a few years ago, and my memory is hazy. I’m not butthurt by the ending to three. I didn’t think it was particularly good, but I didn’t have high expectations. Video games that nail their endings are few and far between, and Mass Effect simply gave itself too much to do. Second, I’m not slating the game just because of the bad animations that did the rounds before the game’s release. I’ve read a lot of people saying that Andromeda only got bad reviews because everyone jumped on the bandwagon and rallied against the game. That’s obviously nonsense. Andromeda got decent reviews--far better than it deserved in my opinion--and reviewers have usually made up their minds long before gifs start floating around on reddit. As I’ll demonstrate during this video, there are so many bigger problems here than facial animations. Third, as I was editing the video, Bioware confirmed that patches were coming to patch out some of the problems with the game. SOME of them. The only one that stands out as a big deal in relation to this critique is the planetary travel time. I obviously applaud Bioware for responding to criticism so quickly, but it just begs the question, how the hell did such basic problems end up in the final product? Finally, I’m not covering the multiplayer in this game. It just doesn’t interest me, and to give an informed critique of multiplayer requires at least twenty hours of playtime if not more. Okay, enough of that. Let’s talk about the game, because boy do I have a lot to say on this one. Andromeda is the fourth game in the Mass Effect series. While I haven’t played the first game, it looks like an RPG with functional shooting mechanics. Mass Effect 2 continued with the role playing aspects, but added far more enjoyable combat. You could choose whether your version of Shephard was a paragon or renagade--basically nice or strict--and your relationship with your teammates directly affected the ending of the game through what was known as loyalty missions. The third game moved away from the role playing aspects and abandoned the loyalty missions. The combat improved, although the difference was nowhere near as big a leap as between one and two. And then there was the ending. That didn’t go down well, but this video isn’t the place to discuss that. From the moment Andromeda was announced, EA promised that this game was a standalone entry and did not follow on from events in the previous trilogy. I don’t blame them for going that route, although I think it’s a bit of a cop out. The Mass Effect games are pretty damn good, but with so much controversy over the ending, and the flexibility of choices that players could make, any kind of continuation would have upset someone. It’s hard enough to reflect choices from earlier in the same game, let alone three games ago. You can play as either Scott or Sara Ryder. I chose Sara, so I’ll refer to my Ryder as a female throughout. Obviously, your experience may differ. As an aside, I’ve now chosen the wrong sex for both Shepard and Ryder. The general consensus was that Fem Shep was the stronger of the two in the original trilogy, and I can definitely say that picking female Ryder was the wrong call for Andromeda. You’ll see why. And with all that said, it’s time to get stuck into the story. I’ll take the occasional detour to talk about side quests, but I’ll try to power through the story as much as possible. The story of Andromeda starts in the year 2185, between the events of Mass Effect 2 and 3. Humanity has spread throughout the Milky Way, but some intrepid explorers have set their sights even further to the Andromeda galaxy. Now, already I think there’s a bit of a problem here, because we’re not given any reason for them making this journey. Are we expected to believe that this ridiculously expensive and complicated trip was just done for shits and giggles? We get a reason later on--assuming we complete a certain side quest--but right now there’s no decent motivation for the voyage. This is the nearest galaxy to the milky way, but it’s still 2.5 million light years away. Fortunately humanity, with the help of other races, have developed faster than light technology which allows them to get to the Andromeda galaxy in about 630 years. Cryo technology means that the travellers can be frozen and awake again on completion of the journey. Four arcs make the journey, plus a combined hub known as the nexus. The Hyperion arc carries mainly humans, and the other arcs carry asari, turians, and salarians. Krogans also make the trip, however they don’t get their own arc. They’re mostly on the nexus I believe. The human arc has 20,000 people on board, and I believe the other arcs have similar numbers. I don’t think we’re told how many people are on the Nexus. The Hyperion arc was heading for Habitat 7, one of the planets identified as habitable through the long range telemetry used back in the Milky Way. Sara Ryder wakes up from cryo sleep, and barely had time to defrost when the hyperion hits interference. The ship loses gravity, and Scott, Sara’s twin brother, can’t be woken up after his cryo pod is damaged. Sara fixes a couple of malfunctions as we learn how to use our built in scanner, and then she heads to the bridge. Sara joins the captain and a man known as the Pathfinder as they discuss the damage to the ship and look at what awaits them in Andromeda. There’s a weird scattering of energy in the galaxy, that we later find out is called the scourge, but that’s not the only problem. Habitat 7 is not the paradise the crew were expecting to find. It looks uninhabitable, but they won’t know for sure until they get down there. The scene on the bridge tells you a lot about what to expect from the quality of the writing here. That man on the bridge, the pathfinder, is actually Sara’s dad. Let’s just review what’s happened. The crew were all put to sleep for over 600 years, and the arc then came to an abrupt halt which damaged some of the cryo pods. Scott can’t be woken up yet. In those circumstances, don’t you think that maybe, just maybe, the father would check his daughter is okay? He barely even looks at her at first. Now, I know what they were going for here. Sara and her dad have a frosty relationship, and having the characters barely acknowledge each other is an easy way to show that to the player. I still don’t buy it, but fine. However, a few minutes later we have this scene. This scene establishes the awkward father daughter relationship while also not making the father come across as a complete tool. So why have him ignore her before? Anyway, the Pathfinder team head out to habitat 7. The energy signature sends their ship off course and Sara goes flying out of the ship. This scene is dreadfully directed. We experience the fall with Sara and then suddenly it fades to black. There’s a short load screen and then we resume the fall as Sara crashes into the ground, saved by her suit and jetpacks. I can’t for the life of me think why there needed to be a fade to black in here. If it’s because the cut scene needs to load then why not just make the entire scene a cut scene? There’s not much point in giving players control for a few seconds and then taking it away. You land miraculously close to your crewmate Liam and the two of you set out to find the ship. This will be one of the few times you see me travelling with Liam because he’s annoying as hell. That handy little scanner on Ryder’s wrist can be used to scan objects in the environment. If there’s any logic to what you can scan and what you can’t, then I don’t know what it is. When you scan materials you get research points which you can use to research new weapons and armor. More on that later. The scanning annoyed me immediately, but there’s plenty to enjoy on this first planet. First, it looks damn good, with electricity slamming down around you, and rocks floating all over the place, giving an impression of a world that is not in a good state. Mobility also feels satisfying. The jetpack helps you get around a touch quicker and the initial platforming feels good. The added verticality, means levels don’t need to be combinations of thin corridors all the time like they were in the previous games. While looking for their crew, Sara and Liam meet the Kett. These are the guys we’re going to be pumping bullets, lasers, and biotic energy into for the next fifty hours. You can tell they’re bad because they look like leftover concept art from the Protheons in the original series. To be fair to Sara, she does wait until the kett shoot at her before we open fire. I’m trying to give credit where it’s due, so I want to acknowledge that this is a nice touch. Humans are the aliens here. We don’t belong in this galaxy, and for all we know the kett are the native and we’ve invaded their home. Of course, once they start shooting, it’s only fair that we shoot back. You find a monolith that Sara believes is the source of the planet's problems, but it’s locked up tight with no way inside. You make your way to your crew, defeating plenty of kett in the process, and eventually rescue the stragglers. The Pathfinder, your father, pops up and tells everyone to come to his location because he’s found a solution to the weather problem. Your dad has set up a trap to thin the numbers out a bit, but there are still plenty of kett to kill. You make your way to a control panel, which somehow your dad is able to use while you fend off waves of kett. The game teaches you how to move your squadmates to tactical positions, but that’s all you’ll ever be able to do with them. In previous games you could direct them to use certain tactics or abilities, but not any more. Go here, go there, is the extent of the available commands. The pathfinder is able to open the door thanks to his built-in AI, known as SAM, an abbreviation of Simulated Adaptive Matrix. SAM helps the pathfinder activate the device inside the vault and almost instantly the weather on the planet changes. The vault explodes and Sara ends up shattering her helmet on the rocks as she falls. Her father makes the ultimate sacrifice and gives her his helmet so that she can breathe. He transfers SAM over to her with his last breath. He dies off camera. This death scene fell a bit flat for me. First of all, the second I saw him give her his helmet, I muttered ‘oh for fuck’s sake’ under my breath. This sort of thing always bugs me. Share the damn helmet. Let Sara take some deep breaths and then give it back to Alec. They only need to survive for a few minutes. I’m going to pretend that the air was toxic or something and that basically meant only one of them could survive. The bigger problem with this scene is the lack of emotional connection to the father. As I mentioned earlier, Sara and her father don’t have a great relationship, and the developers showed that to us as the player by having them barely communicate and act distant the entire time. It’s a bit of a mess really. She refers to him as sir early on, but then keeps saying ‘dad’ when out in the field. That’s the opposite of what I’d expect her to do. Anyway, this lack of affection might be consistent with their relationship, but for players it means we don’t much care about Alec at all. Sara clearly does love her father, they just don’t communicate well. She’s going to be gutted by his death. As the player, we just lump him in with the other random guys we’ve already seen die. I have a lot of problems with this first hour and I’m going to devote an entire section of this video to my own idea for the how the story should have started. For now, I’ll just say that this doesn’t work on many levels. The poor story decisions keep coming when Sara wakes up to find that she’s now the pathfinder despite Cora being the next in line. The pathfinder is a title, it refers to the person who is connected with SAM. Sara can’t remove SAM’s connection without dying, so she’s now responsible for finding a home for humanity. To Bioware’s credit, it is made clear that there’s nothing inherently special about Sara. She’s not a ‘chosen one’ or any of that bullshit. She just happened to be the person Alec transferred SAM to on his death. He should have transferred it to Cora, but we later get a weak reason as to why he chose his daughter. Before moving on, we get a short scene where the apparent leader of the kett, a being known as the archon, tries to emulate what Alec did in opening the vault. He walks off looking fairly displeased at his lack of success. While I think the design of the kett is about as uninspiring as it’s possible to get, I do like the archon’s connected horn, or whatever it is. It’s a nice touch to distinguish himself from the rest of them. Once the crew is able to get off the planet, they make their way to the Nexus. This huge space station will serve as the equivalent of the Citadel for the rest of the game. The Nexus is also the source of some huge story plot holes and problems with world building. Here’s the deal. The Nexus arrived in Andromeda just over a year ago. I’m not sure why it arrived a year earlier than the arcs. The Nexus is a hub that contains many different races, but not in huge numbers. The arcs are the main sources of people with the hyperion carrying 20,000 humans and presumably the other arcs carrying a similar number. The Nexus has been floating around in space for fourteen months and is running out of rations. They need to settle on a planet soon or they’re screwed. That’s where the pathrider teams come in. It’s Ryder’s job to go out and find planets that are habitable given that the scourge has fucked up all the initial plans. That all makes sense, right? Well, no, not really. In the fourteen months that the Nexus has been floating around in space, there has been a rebellion, along with the deaths of a few important leaders, including Jien Garson, who was leader of the entire project. The Krogan were used to put down the rebellion, however they didn’t get the leadership position they were promised and ended up leaving the Nexus. The defeated rebels, led by Sloane Kelly, were exiled. You might think that being ‘exiled’ in these circumstances was basically a death sentence, but as we see later, that’s not the case. The exiles are living on a couple of different planets and they’re doing quite well for themselves. We’re supposed to believe that exiles are somehow jettisoned from the Nexus and able to fend for themselves in this harsh new galaxy. The game tries to simultaneously tell us that the planets are completely uninhabitable without the pathfinder’s help, while also showing us that the planets are actually perfectly fine to live on. There aren’t many people on the Nexus, so if the exiles can survive, then the Nexus should be able to as well. By the way, there’s a book detailing the story of the rebellion on the nexus, but given the quality of writing in the game, there is no way in hell I’m reading that. The Nexus is in the game because the developers thought we needed a hub station like the Citadel. We don’t. I rarely visited the Nexus, and only did so when I absolutely had to. The whole thing feels clunky and unnecessary. You meet a few people while you’re here, but because they’re shoved away on the Nexus, you won’t deal with them all that much. Most of them are bland, or annoying, but I have a weak spot for Kesh. Look at this krogan and imagine how she sounds. Did you imagine it to be like this? She’s actually quite a cool character, and it’s a shame she couldn’t have been part of the team. Everyone else here is either dull or actively annoying. Listen to this dialogue. A grammar correction which she excuses by having a tired face. Who the hell wrote this? Or should that be Whom? After this, you meet Director Tann who is in charge of the Nexus after the seven people ahead of him died. He gives you your mission. As Pathfinder, you have to go out and make planets viable so that the Nexus can establish an outpost on them, starting with Eos. Eos marks the moment when Andromeda truly starts. Andromeda is an open world game, with five main planets to explore together with a couple of others you get to land on briefly. This is when we get to stretch our legs. The shackles are removed and we’re free to roam. What is the first thing you need to do on arrival on Eos? Power up some generators about 100 feet apart. This summons the Kett who pop up immediately for a shoot out. Ryder and the team then head to the big ominous looking monoliths that they saw on Habitat-7. We meet an asari called PB, and have to defeat some robotic creatures known as the remnant who are guarding the monolith. There’s a control panel which can only be activated after scanning some nearby glyphs and solving what is essentially a sudoku puzzle with weird symbols. It’s not easy to think up decent hacking mechanics, but I know a bad one when I see it. This is not fun and it slows the game to a crawl. The developers know this and nearer the end of the game you are asked to solve them less and less. Eventually, you don’t even need to bother. If there’s one positive thing I’ll say about the puzzles, it’s that at least the frame rate holds up during these sections. You bump into a Krogan called Drack, but he doesn’t stick around for long. He joins the team shortly after. He’s surviving just fine on this uninhabitable planet by the way. After activating the monoliths, we are able to enter a vault. This dark underground cavern is full of modern alien tech and remnant to shoot at. There’s some basic platforming and what I will generously refer to as puzzles. You just essentially activate a few consoles. This first vault reminded me a bit of the cauldrons in Horizon, except these are even more boring. After making your way down a few levels, you can finally activate the vault just like your father did on Habitat 7. And just like that time, the vault bursts forth with some weird fog that Ryder has to outrun before finally shutting the doors behind her. They find a map that shows vaults on other planets, so yeah, you guessed it, Ryder has to go to these planets and activate their vaults. Activating the vault almost immediately makes the planet more habitable, although if you’re expecting to notice any visual difference then you’ll be sorely disappointed. Now you have to make your first big choice of the game. Perhaps ‘big’ is an exaggeration. The outpost can only support a limited number of colonists, so Ryder has to choose what type of people get awoken from cryo-sleep back on Hyperion. Do you want scientists or military? You’re told that scientists might help develop resources whereas obviously the military would help with defense. Both your teammates chip in with their opinions. When you’re back on the Nexus there is a protest with angry crew who are pissed off that their relatives, members of the military, haven’t been woken up from cryo. This decision was made out to be important. It’s not. You’ll never directly make this decision again. You make further decisions about who to awake from cryo pods, but all it does is give you a few additional resources, be it minerals or ammo, or a discount on purchasing goods. I’ll show this a little more later. I can’t understand why Bioware chose to make such a big deal out of this decision, unless it was supposed to play a bigger part in the game. We could have expanded the outposts on each planet and defended them from kett attacks when necessary. Maybe some planets could have been devoted to science while ensuring there were enough military personnel around for protection. It could have been a meta game. When people talk about Andromeda having a slow start, it’s roughly the story up until now that they’re talking about. They’re right, the game does start slowly. Unfortunately, it doesn’t get much better. I want to take a slight detour to talk about the side quests now. Not many of them, just a couple to give you an idea of what to expect. The early side quests should be some of the best in the game. Most players start off doing the side quests and then start picking and choosing which ones they want to do later in the game. Those first couple of side quests are almost as important as main story missions when it comes to giving players a feel for the game and trying to get them invested in the world. To be fair, the first couple of side quests do just that. They give you a perfect idea of what you can expect to do for most of the game. In one side quest, you have to scan a load of access panels on the Nexus to find out who is sabotaging the equipment. You run from place to place, pull out your scanner and then move on. You find the culprit, but she pleads her innocence. Eventually you discover the real guilty party and confront him. Now, you might be thinking this sounds a little dull, but it’s harmless enough, right. No, it’s even more lazily written than it sounds. Look at this part where Ryder runs past this open security panel. There’s no one there. A few minutes later when you’ve identified the culprit, he’s suddenly there at the panel waiting for you. Again, you might think this sounds harmless, but think of what is not happening here. If the culprit was working on the security panel then alert players might have thought he looked suspicious and confronted him of their own accord. You could have solved the mystery early. It wouldn’t have required much rewriting at all, and would have been a cool little touch to players paying attention to their surroundings. Perhaps you talk to him and he fobs you off with a lie and then does a runner. This would require more work, but wouldn’t it be worth it to give the player a side quest that they can actually engage with? It would encourage players to play more of the side quests, instead of dismissing them as the waste of time they end up being. At least Bioware is consistent I guess. Speaking of pointless, a journalist pops up and wants to ask the illustrious pathfinder a few questions. You’re essentially given a 50/50 choice between supporting the establishment, or rebelling and giving a controversial reply that will raise a few eyebrows. I’m not a huge fan of 50/50 choices, but at least we get to influence proceedings in some way. Or do we? I never noticed any difference in attitudes after answering her questions. Did I say questions plural? I meant question, singular. She only asks you one question at a time because, as I’m sure you know, there is limited bandwidth to transmit messages. Yeah. That’s what she says. The side quest then gets put on hold. You’ll see that a lot, and it’s another great example of what you can expect to see when you stray from the main path. Then there’s the murder investigation. You might have already heard of this one. When you first visit the Nexus there’s a good chance you’ll bump into a wife mourning the fact that her husband has been found guilty of murder and will be exiled. She’s upset and asks you to go and speak to him. He’s only about 20 feet away, mind you. I’m not sure why she isn’t with him, but anyway. You speak to the accused and he professes his innocence. Rensus was part of the failed attempt to start a colony on Eos. His crew was attacked by kett, but the security chief, Reynolds, refused to call for an evacuation. There was an argument and suddenly Reynolds is dead. No one sees what happened due to a convenient sandstorm. While down on Eos, I investigated the crime scene for clues. Well, I say “I” investigated the scene. SAM did most of the work. I just pulled out my scanner and pointed it at things. After listening to some audio logs, I discovered that Rensus didn’t kill Reynolds. Reynolds was shot in the back, so it must have been some kett. However, Rensus did try to kill Reynolds, it just so happened that his shot missed. Not a bad resolution. There are some shades of gray here that suggest the side quests might not be entirely dull. You go and talk to Tamm and tell him what you’ve found. Tamm wants to go through with exiling Rensus because he’s basically guilty anyway because he tried to kill Reynolds. My Ryder didn’t like that approach because he’s not technically guilty. Tamm leaves the decision up to Ryder because it’s her fault for uncovering the truth. You get two choices: exile Rensus as planned or let him go with only some basic community service as punishment for disobeying orders. Seems like an option is missing here, right? Rensus tried to kill someone. He’s not innocent. Anyone who’s watched an episode of Law and Order knows what he’s guilty of--attempted murder. How the hell is there not a third option to keep him locked up for attempted murder? Again, it’s not like this would require a ton of additional writing. Now, I’m a lawyer, so I know there are some potential double jeopardy issues here, although I don’t see that as a good reason. For one thing, it’s not like we’re in a developed legal system. Tamm has just casually passed the decision over to you, so I don’t think double jeopardy is going to stop justice being served here. Plus, if you have the power to commute a sentence entirely, you probably have the power to reduce the sentence to a lower charge. One more quickly. While on the nexus you find evidence that there might be a stowaway on board. You follow a few clues and find a huge insect or animal in an office with other people around. How the hell did they not see this thing? I’ve just discussed four early side quests that are not only dull to experience, they also offer you little in the way of meaningful choice for how to progress. This is exactly what you can expect for the rest of the game, and not just in the side quests. Quick aside, as you can see, the quests are split between priority ops, allies and acquaintances, Locations, and tasks. Ignore all the tasks. You can also ignore the location stuff once you’ve brought the viability up to 100% on a planet. The allies stuff leads to loyalty missions eventually so you might as well do those ones. Back to the story. The group heads to the next vault, but their ship ends up coming to a grinding halt directly in front of the main kett ship. Now, it’s confession time. I’ve never actually been to space. I’m aware that means I can’t talk about it with complete authority, but bear with me. I’ve read books and apparently space is big. Like, really big. Imagine Novigrad in Witcher 3. Bigger than that even. The chances of bumping into another ship like this are so miniscule as to be mathematically impossible. Anyway, the Archon pops up on your screen and has a little chat with Ryder. If he wasn’t scared of her before… well, he definitely won’t be now. She handles the conversation with an amount of authority and confidence that would make Jeremy Corbyn look like a competent leader. They manage to escape despite being vastly outnumbered and once the coast is clear they happen to be right above the planet where the vault is located. Even though they previously went right past it… This planet isn’t empty. It’s home to a race known as the angara, so Ryder needs to get permission from the locals before exploring any vaults. The Tempest is allowed to land, but Ryder has to go out by herself. You’re escorted to see the leader of the angara, during which time you must walk incredibly slowly through the city while people talk about you, sometimes good stuff, sometimes bad. The angara have met humans before, although I’m not entirely sure how. Probably exiles from the Nexus. By the way, why do I have to open this door with my scanner? Wouldn’t they open the door for me? This is like you being escorted to a friends house and then picking the lock while they stand by and watch. You ask the leader about the vault on Aya, but she tells you the location is unknown. The only person who knows where it is is the Moshae. Of course, she’s been kidnapped by the kett, so you’ll have to get her back before finding the vault. Fortunately a friendly angaran called Jaal agrees to join your cause. Another inconsistency really bugged me here. When landing on Aya, you’re told that this world is full of unknown wildlife and materials. Hardly a big surprise, what with it being an alien planet. The second I was allowed to take my scanner out, I started scanning the plants and other materials. Nothing. None of it could be scanned. By the way, I’ve just been escorted to this place. Why do I have to unlock the door with my scanner? This would be like a friend bringing you over to their house, and then you pick the lock while they stand by and watch. How do other people get through these doors? When you’re back on the ship, Jaal tells you that the kett invaded andromeda 80 years ago and have been kidnapping angara. An angaran resistance has built up, but it’s not having a lot of success. As an aside, this isn’t a resistance. It’s an army. Jaal tells you to accompany him to two angaran planets to earn the trust of the leader. I don’t understand this unnecessary split. You need to save the Moshae. Doing that should be more than enough to earn the trust of the angara. It would make a lot more sense for the crew to go to one planet to get the location of the Moshae and then go to the next planet to rescue her. Again, you’re given this weird illusion of choice. The game lets you choose the order in which you visit the planet, but that’s it. It’s a meaningless choice, and might as well not exist. I went to Havarl first to help out some scientists who got trapped in stasis while trying to activate a console inside a remnant monolith. You go there and do your sudoku magic on the console to free the angara from stasis. We have to defeat loads of remnant on the way to the console, so I don’t know why the remnant trapped these angara in stasis, but shoot at us. There is a potential reason that becomes clear later, but the remnant are shooting at Jaal, so yeah, it doesn’t really make any sense. This planet is probably the most beautiful to look at, but there’s not much to it. Havarl is the planet that felt the most alien to me, partly thanks to the flying creatures illuminated by a nearby moon. Unfortunately it’s also one of the most frustrating to spend any time on. You see, the game has a huge problem with it’s navigation markers. The map for Havarl is small, but it’s painful to navigate. Early on, a map marker popped up telling me to head roughly to the middle of the map. I did that and jumped down into a ravine. It was a big fall, but you can slow your landing with the jetpack so it shouldn’t have been an issue. Except the game refused to let me do it. Just before landing it brought me back up to the surface. Turns out, you have to head north first to work your way down, and then head south to the marker. From there, you have to keep going south to reach an access point that will get you to the other side of the map. Once I wanted to get from the East side of the map back to the base and I just couldn’t figure out how to do it without fast travel. Games like Witcher 3 and Horizon will guide you where you need to go to avoid this kind of pointless frustration. In my Horizon review I mentioned how much it drove me crazy when Dragon Age Inquisition wanted you to go somewhere but kept putting unclimbable mountains in your way without telling you how to get around them. I can’t believe this is still a problem in Andromeda. Anyway, rescuing the scientists grants you some good will, but Havarl is too important to the angara for humans to build an outpost there. Addison pops up via a hologram and you chat briefly about how inspirational the pathfinder is, yada yada. There’s a reason I’m mentioning this. You’ll see later. When you leave Havarl, you can speak to Jaal and get an important quest that requires you to… yeah, go back down to Havarl. This sort of thing happens a lot! Jaal tells you about a second resistance group call the Roekarr. They’re more like rebels because they also hate humans and all the other new aliens that have arrived in Andromeda recently. It’s weird how everyone knows about humans, the ansari, etc, considering they’ve only just arrived and the Nexus was supposedly stranded in space. Word sure got around quickly. You go back down to Havarl and talk to one of Jaal’s contacts. The quest then gets put on hold. That happens a lot too. For reasons I will never entirely understand, Bioware decided it didn’t want you getting invested in any of its stories and insisted they be put on hold after any minor development. I came all the way down to this planet for one short conversation. I went to Voeld next to rescue the Moshea. This is the ice planet. We work with the angaran resistance to attack a kett stronghold where they’re keeping all the captured angara. We get our first decent story reveal of the game when it’s revealed that the kett are turning the angara into more kett. This obviously leaves Jaal a little conflicted about continuing to kill kett, but he doesn’t have much choice. A boss fight follows. The fight wouldn’t be that difficult if it weren’t for one thing--get too close to the boss and he can do a one hit kill on you. It’s kind of insane, and happened to me again later in the game because this boss is recycled a few times. Anyway, you shoot the orb to bring down his shield and then shoot him until he’s down. You get another fake choice here. The Moshae, who I’d assumed would be a pacifist, wants you to destroy this place even if that means killing the angara who are still here. Jaal wants you to rescue them even though this means leaving the facility in one peace. This decision technically has an impact on the game later on, but it’s essentially meaningless. I suspect many players won’t even notice. If you go back to Voeld, it’s now an open planet for you to explore and make habitable. It’s a pretty looking planet, and there’s lot to do, but the whole place just feels wrong. This was the base where the kett were keeping angara and exalting them into kett. It’s also a freezing ice planet. Why are there so many angara hanging around? I don’t think anyone would be living here in these circumstances, but then you wouldn’t have any side quests to do. Once you reach 40% viability you can establish an outpost. The thing is, you don’t have to activate the vault to make the planet viable. Just doing some tasks and killing some kett is enough. But the vaults are supposed to terraform the planets and make them viable. What’s the point of activating them otherwise? I didn’t bother activating the vault and still got the outpost. There was another hologramatic conversation with Addison and I headed back to Aya. Aya is now open for you to explore, but there’s not much to see. It’s mainly a marketplace, although there’s also a museum dedicated to remnant tech that keep PB occupied. This marketplace is where I received what is possibly one of the worst side quests I’ve ever experienced. The citizens of Aya have messages for the Nexus and Ryder needs to go to three different booths, about fifty feet apart, to download these messages and then forward them onto the nexus. Yeah. That’s it. What the hell is it with email in this galaxy. I just had a conversation with a hologramatic version of Addision while on an icy planet and yet here, in the middle of a sophisticated city, I cannot receive emails without going up to three different panels to download them. Anyway, when you’re ready, you head off to the vault with the Moshae. When Ryder activates the vault, a map of sorts pop up and the Moshae explains that the vault connects to another one in Meridian that appears to be the central hub. I’ve no idea how they’re getting this information from a couple of lines mind you. A couple more leaps of logic follow. The archon already knows where Meridian is and they have to stop him seizing that power. Why? What power does a terraforming vault offer exactly? Ryder wants to get there to activate all the vaults and make the Helious cluster habitable, although I really don’t understand how she knows all that. After a quick conversation with the angara leader on Aya, you find out that an angara has been working with the kett and might know where the Archon is located. Note that we’re now looking for the Archon. Not for Meridian. The map in the vault clearly didn’t provide information about where Meridian is located in the galaxy even though the last time a map popped up it clearly marked the way to Aya. The angara traitor is among the exiles on a planet called Kadara. This planet is dreadful. It’s a complete mess in every way and I’d argue that its narrative impact breaks the game. Let’s start with performance issues. Kadara has two parts: a small town of sorts, and everything else, known as the slums. When you land on the planet, you’re automatically dumped into the town, so if you want to explore the planet then you’ll have to immediately go through another loading screen. When in the town, some of the doors take a while to open. No real reason. I assume it’s hiding loading screens, but it’s frustrating as hell. Moving around the planet presents even more problems. There are huge frame rate issues moving around in the NOMAD, and occasionally the game actually freezes for about a second. This always happens in similar narrow areas, so again, I think it’s hiding loading zones. I also experienced a load of huge frame rate issues when engaged in combat. This doesn’t happen exclusively on Kadara, but it does happen the most consistently here. It’s not just the game’s performance in this area that bugs me. Kadara is a huge mess narratively. Remember, this is a planet basically run by exiles, those who tried to overthrow leadership on the nexus. I don’t believe we were even given the population number of people on the nexus, but I expect it’s a few thousand. Maybe about ten thousand. The exiles are a small percentage of that number. Let’s just say one thousand, although I reckon that’s on the high end. On Kadara, you will regularly have to fight these exiles at small camps dotted around. These exiles will respawn if you come back to the area later. It’s actually possible that I killed more humans than were ever actually exiled. And that’s not the worst bit. Kadara has some toxic liquid on the surface, but otherwise it seems perfectly livable. The exiles are getting on just fine. They’ve built a society and they’ve been here less than a year. You’ll regularly find man-made structures around the planet. There’s even a large science lab that looks a hell of a lot like the outposts. It feels like a place that’s had people living on it for years. And don’t forget about all those people up on the nexus. They’re worried about rations running out, when Kadara is clearly a perfectly habitable planet. The exiles have it better than those they left behind. This planet demonstrates the lack of quality control with both performance and worldbuilding. It reeks of sloppiness all round. In one more perfect example of Kadara showing off the overall shitness of this game, you are tasked with tracking down a kett transponder and then need to go back to your ship to discuss it with your crew. At this point, I was getting used to the game constantly putting missions on hold, so I went and dealt with the monoliths, and activated the vault which purified the water. Kind of. The water still has the same toxic fumes coming from it, and the crew refer to it as being dangerous, even though it’s not anymore. It’s a shame Kadara is such a mess, because one of the best side characters in the game, Reyes, is here and his quest line gives you one of the more interesting set of side quests to work though. If you can persevere with the planet then I recommend doing his story. You talk to Gil on the ship and he points you to another planet. Just to be clear, for the main story, all we had to do was fly down to this planet, talk to a couple of people, and grab a kett signal that was lying around. There’s no reason for this planet to exist other than Bioware wanted there to be an exile base where all the criminals are hanging out. You find a kett ship, but it’s not alone. The kett ship has captured the missing Salarian arc. You board the arc and find out that the salarian pathfinder is still alive as she hid under a fake name. She works on freeing other salarians while you kill more kett and head towards the Archon’s office. Yep, even big bad guys have an office. You also need to take out the guns because otherwise the salarian ship is just going to get blown away the second it tries to leave. I’m glad the writers thought of that at least. The Archon captures you and there’s some more painful dialogue. The only way to break from from the archon’s trap is for SAM to kill Ryder and then resurrect her. This is supposed to feel dramatic I guess, but clearly Ryder’s not going to die. Why not do something interesting here? Perhaps SAM’s actions strip Ryder of all her biotic powers for the rest of the mission. That would at least get the player interested. Once free, we see evidence of the kett experimenting on salarians and krogans. They’re certainly a curious bunch. We make it to the Archon’s office and find the relic that gives us the coordinates to Meridian. The archon pops up via a hologram and tells us that he now knows Ryder isn’t special--it’s her AI doing all the work. He seems to be on top of things, so it’s awfully convenient that he only showed up after we got the coordinates. He releases a krogon that has been partially transformed into a kett and needs killing, much to Drack’s dismay. On the way out, we have a big decision to make. The salarian pathfinder needs our help to make it out alive, but Drack wants us to go and free the krogan scouts that are on the ship and about to be experimented on. This didn’t seem like a particularly difficult decision to me. Save a pathfinder or save some scouts who were presumed dead. I chose the pathfinder which meant Drack got pissed with me. I suppose I don’t blame him, but surely once I explain myself, he’ll come round, right? Well, you never get the chance. Even though it was a 50/50 decision, and I had a good reason for saving a pathfinder, namely that saving her life would save plenty more, I never got to talk it through with Drack. I started worrying that perhaps I now wouldn’t be able to do his loyalty mission. It doesn’t matter. After a quick rant, this decision never comes up again. It makes a tiny difference to what happens at the end of the game, but that’s it. To be clear, this is the only major decision you will make in the game, and it’s barely acknowledged. Shortly after this quest, there’s a cutscene with the Archon and another kett called Primus. Here we get final confirmation of just how badly thought out this whole story is. Primus scolds the Archon for being so obsessed with Meridian. Their orders were to exalt the sector--turn everyone into kett--not study the remnant tech. The archon thinks that Meridian will help them do that quicker. At one point he says that all subjects will either submit to exaltation or be annihilated. Sounds like typical bad guy stuff I suppose. There’s a problem though. Why do they want to exalt everyone in the helious cluster? They must have a reason, otherwise why risk so many kett lives and resources to do it. I’ve been assuming that there’s a problem with the kett race--maybe they can’t reproduce anymore--and the exaltation is the only way to continue the species. That’s never confirmed though. Let’s assume they do have a reason for doing all this. He says that if species refuse they will be annihilated. Why would they do that? If you need these people, then you’re not going to kill them. This makes me think the kett have zero motivation other than just being bad people who want to cause chaos. I totally buy that some individuals want that kind of power, but this mission is being done with the permission of an even higher power than the archon. There has to be a reason for the exaltation, and if there is, then you wouldn’t just annihilate the races that refuse to exaltation. The Archon reads Ryder’s memories and gets the coordinates to Meridian for himself. Maybe this was why he let Ryder get the coordinates--so that he could steal them off her. So now there’s a big rush to get to Meridian. You need to beat the Archon to get there. Or not. Look, I get that open worlds need to let you take your own path occasionally. If I want to break the narrative and go off doing side quests, then I suppose that’s on me. I wouldn’t mind the lack of urgency if the game didn’t insist on giving me two new priority operations that are anything but a priority. Once you go down to the two planets in question, the task is cleared from your log with no fanfare, and you can ignore it from now on. The game wants you to go to these planets, but can’t be bothered to come up with a decent narrative reason for you to do so. The laziness here is undeniable. I went to Elaaden first. This is the planet that the Krogan went to after they left the Nexus. Again, they’re surviving here just fine. The planet is another dry desert that looks a lot like Eos, further adding to the feeling that this planet is just a complete waste of time. I guess the developers wanted the Krogan to have their own base, but couldn’t be bothered to integrate it into the story. There are loads more raiders here as well, adding to the number of humans you’ll kill over the course of the game. There’s plenty to do on this planet--more monoliths, a vault, lots of side quests, etc. None of it is essential for the story, so I’ll move on to discuss the next pointless location that we don’t really need to visit but the game tells us to anyway. This is an asteroid called H-047c. You can’t get out on foot, because the atmosphere is too dangerous. That’s okay because driving around in your NOMAD is actually a lot of fun in this low gravity environment. While here, we can go track down outlaws by going to small groups of outlaws and collecting parts of a password until we can access the leader of the outlaws. I’m just going to slide right on past the ridiculousness of these parts of passwords being in databases. There’s a bigger problem. These outlaws are here on this asteroid for minerals. These outlaws were also part of the group exiled from the nexus. That’s becoming quite a big group, isn’t it? I know I’ve harped on about this already, but fuck it, I’m going to do it again. The Nexus arrived in Andromeda 14 months ago. In that time there was a rebellion and the losers were exiled. Since then, these outlaws were somehow able to set up bases on planets and then make it to an asteroid with the appropriate technology to ensure they could maintain a breathable atmosphere. Or they just landed here straight from the nexus and just happened to have the right tech on them. Either way, it doesn’t make a blind bit of sense. There’s a vault here as well. If you activate it, then the asteroid will start producing an increased amount of helium 3. I guess that will be useful one day. We’re getting close to the end of the main story so this was where I started doing the more interesting looking side quests and loyalty missions, so let’s take a look at them. The first one I want to discuss isn’t technically a loyalty mission but it feels close enough. Just before he died, Ryder’s father transferred SAM to her instead of Cora, who was next in line. This was supposedly because he wanted Ryder to get access to certain memories from his past, however he also locked these memories because… well, who knows. Ryder needs to find memory triggers to open up more memories and get encryption codes to files. I think the logic behind hiding the memories is to stop Ryder getting them too soon, but I’m not sure. There’s plenty of potential here. We might have to solve clues to find the memory triggers, or maybe look in some of alec’s favorite books. Or maybe the triggers could be related to experience. As we become more accomplished, the memories open up. Or maybe Alec’s friends, like Addison, reveal little titbits of information through conversations. Yeah, none of that happens. The memory triggers are scattered randomly throughout the planets you visit--planets that Alec himself never visited--and you simply go to a point on the map to find them. For every three you find, you unlock a new memory. This is such a grand display of wasted potential that it actually pisses me off. I don’t like that I feel this way, because some of these unlocked memories are quite touching. The first memory shows you the moment that Alec first learns his wife, Ellen, has a terminal disease. We also see that he wants to develop AI even though it’s prohibited in the Milky Way. The encrypted logs are an awesome touch for anyone who has played the previous games as there are a couple of cameos from people we know in there. The memories are the main reveal though. The next one shows Alec refusing to accept that his wife his dying, and we also see an early version of SAM. There are some touching scenes with the Ryder twins as they say goodbye to their mom and then the really good stuff gets revealed. Alec had been in touch with a person known as the Benefactor. The Benefactor encouraged Alec to work on the Andromeda initiative to give humanity a chance to survive. He mentions the reapers and all the shit that we know went down at the end of the original trilogy. Combine this with a couple more encrypted logs and Ryder finds out that every living species in the Milky Way probably got wiped out after they all left. Huge news. What do you think she did with that information? If you still think that Mass Effect is in any way any RPG then you might think this information will open up a whole load of new conversation options with your crew. There’s not much you can do about it, but they deserve to know what happened to their species. Of course, Mass Effect is not an RPG anymore. You can’t do jackshit with this information. You just keep it to yourself. As far as you know, billions of people have been wiped out and Andromeda is the only chance to maintain the human race, not to mention the ansari, krogan, salarian, etc, but you don’t do or say a single thing. That’s the sort of game we’re dealing with here. While on this topic, let’s talk about the benefactor briefly. Who is he or she? The most obvious answer is the illusive man from the trilogy or perhaps a close relative, like his son. That would certainly be in keeping with the topic at hand. We know he had the money, and obviously he knew about the reaper threat. However, if that’s the case, then why not just show the illusive man to the player? There’s no point waiting until a sequel. That wouldn’t be a dramatic reveal for series veterans, and it wouldn’t mean anything for those starting at Andromeda. We’re 600 years into the future. There’s not much point of it being the illusive man. I suppose he could have cloned himself. He brought Shepard back to life, so I wouldn’t past it him. Anyway, narratively, I don’t think it makes much sense. Whoever the benefactor is, I think they’re still alive and are likely in Andromeda. We still don’t know who killed Jien Garson, and that was done to cover up a benefactor related conspiracy. I don’t see any obvious culprits right now. That could make for a great reveal in a sequel, but you’ll have to forgive me if I’m not all that optimistic about Bioware’s ability to nail a big story moment. Ryder gets one more piece of information from these memories. Her mom is still alive. Alec had her placed into cryo sleep with the plan being to wake her once there was a cure for her disease. Scott is awake now, so Sara goes to deliver the good news. The Ryder twins are pleased, I suppose, although you can barely tell from their dialogue and animations. I suspect most people saw this coming a mile off, or at least something similar. I thought it might be more along the lines of her spirit being maintained in the AI, but this works too. I don’t mind her being in cryo sleep. It makes sense. I just don’t understand why the hell Alec kept these memories from Ryder for an indiscriminate amount of time. What if Ellen got woken up by Ryder? She would have died because the disease wouldn’t have been cured. Okay, loyalty mission time. First of all, I’m going to point out that every single one of these quest lines has the huge problem of being put ‘on hold’ at random times, and requires you to go down to planets for a 30 second conversation before going back up to the ship and then moving to another planet to repeat the process. It’s absolutely tiresome and drags the quests out through a number of unnecessary loading screens. I encourage you to look past this is if you can because the loyalty missions are the best part of Andromeda. If you can’t enjoy these, you won’t enjoy anything. I’m going to gloss over a lot of the pointless travel for the sake of finishing the video in 2017. Let’s start with PB. I expect she’s a polarizing character among players. You’re either going to think she’s fun or incredibly annoying. I expected to find her annoying, but she does at least have a clear personality. That can’t be said for all your crewmates. I liked taking her along on missions because she would pepper the other teammate with inappropriate questions. Sure, it gets repetitive after a while, but it’s better than nothing. PB is obsessed with remnant tech, so you help her gather enough until she can build a friendly assistant called Poc. Poc is stolen by an ex-lover of PB’s called Kalinda. You go and rescue Poc, but there’s another piece of remnant tech that PB wants to get her hands on. PB doesn’t give you much choice in the matter. She jettisons her escape pod with you in it, and you crash land in the middle of a volcano. Kalinda is here as well, so you race to be the first to get the tech. At the end, Kalinda needs saving and much to my surprise, PB chooses saving her friend over saving the remnant tech from falling into the lava. You can shoot Kalinda if you want and that frees up PB to save the tech but PB isn’t too pleased with you afterwards. You escape on Kalinda’s ship, but it’s not quite over. Slightly later, PB talks to the group and thanks everyone for being nice to her basically. She’s going to move out of the escape pod she lives in and requests some help to tidy up. This scene is a little cheesy, but I actually liked it. PB’s story isn’t exactly subtle. She’s worried about commitment and makes that blatantly clear by telling that she might not hang around, and then by living in an escape pod. It’s not exactly subtle. I definitely get why people don’t like PB, and I think in other games she would annoy me, but like I said, there are so many boring characters in here that PB is a welcome breath of fresh air. Jaal wants you to help out his brother and sister who have joined the roekarr against his advice. Again, there’s a shit load of twoing and froing, but eventually we end up on Havarl and find his siblings. Out of nowhere, his sister shoots his brother, although it’s clear his life isn’t in danger. You come up against the roekarr leader and if you keep your cool, you’ll end up with them on your side as the effectively disband. Jaal isn’t the most exciting of teammates in the series, but he played an important role in getting the angara on our side and I always felt like I owed him for that. Helping him in this mission felt natural enough. What pissed me the hell off was that the second I went back to the tempest, Jaal invited me to join his family for a meal back on Havarl, the planet I had just left a few seconds ago. Again, this is ridiculous. I’ve no idea why this had to wait until I was back on the ship, and I’ve no idea why I have to be on the ship to read my damn email. Anyway, you meet his mom and have a meal with his family, which was a decent ending to his loyalty mission. Vetra’s is next, and it’s pretty bland. She needs to save her impetuous younger sister who’s gotten herself in trouble on that asteroid. I’ve got to say, I found Vetra kind of boring, and this loyalty mission didn’t do much for me. Both Vetra, Jaal, and Cora are fairly serious and dull characters. Jaal just about gets away with it because he has this ‘older than his years’ feel to him that I liked. Cora’s loyalty mission is significant, so her boring personality doesn’t matter much. Perhaps it’s also because I did the Vetra mission just after Jaal’s. I’d just rescued his brother and sister and now I had to rescue another sibling. It’s hardly all that imaginative. Anyway, I saved her sister and we eventually got to meet. Cora’s loyalty mission has more significance than any other because she has a lead on the missing asari arc. Cora’s ability to use biotic powers is so strong that back in the Milky Way she used to train with asari and she’ll never let you forget it. This mission is a real mixed bag. You land on the asari arc and meet the current pathfinder. It’s not who Cora was expecting, but the original pathfinder died and the second in command, Sarissa, stepped up. We later find out that Sarissa left the original pathfinder to die because she had a choice between saving some data and saving the pathfinder. Sarissa seemed to genuinely believe that the data they had on the kett was more important than saving the pathfinder. It’s hard to say whether she made the right call, but Cora certainly doesn’t agree. I don’t mind a few shades of gray. It’s also interesting to note that Sarissa hasn’t told the other asari what happened because she doesn’t want to be blamed for the pathfinders death. There’s some decent combat with kett here. You’re effectively fighting in open space and I’m not sure how realistic this is, but the sound effects are incredible so it’s worth suspending a bit of disbelief. What I didn’t like is the way the kett just come out of nowhere in these battles. You see them spawn out of thin air sometimes and it’s incredibly sloppy. I also suffered another of those one hit kills from the guys with the shields. There’s a weird scene at the end where Cora and Sarissa put up a massive force field that deflects the kett missiles. I’ve taken Cora on a few missions, and let me tell you, she never did anything that awesome in the field. Cora’s still pissed at Sarissa and thinks she’s putting her status as a hero over the truth. I guess I can see where she’s coming from, but I chose to keep Sarissa’s actions a secret. This mission is clearly worth doing for the asari arc. It didn’t change my opinion on Cora though. She’s yet another member of the crew that fits firmly into the boring category. There’s a small epilogue to her story where you go back down to Eos to start a garden with Cora. I’m probably just a heartless bastard, but nothing about this had any emotional impact on me. I never developed much of a connection to Cora, so this just washed right over me. It didn’t help that I had to do this twice as the game hard crashed right after I finished it the first time. I did Drack’s mission next because I knew that would provide a bit of light relief. I know I said I’m skipping most of the preamble before the stories started, but it’s worth checking out this incredible fight scene. This loyalty mission once again another go to a planet and save a person mission, however this one had a bit more punch to it. The krogan you need to save, Vorn, is important not just to Drack, but to the krogan as a whole. He’s the key to their future. There’s a big conspiracy story surrounding this whole story involving a guy called Spender back on the Nexus. You do some digging and eventually find out where Vorn is being kept prisoner. There’s some decent quad related dialogue from Drack, just as I’d expect, and the mission is much better paced than some of the others. There’s also a much better closer where you and Drack fight some thugs in a bar. Ryder does her best to ruin it with fucking awful dialogue and delivery, but Drack keeps the scene going. I’ve got a soft spot for krogans in Mass Effect games and Drack keeps that run going. Finally, there’s Liam. Oh christ, Liam. I’m not going to lie, I hated this character from the moment he opened his mouth the first time, and I didn’t change my mind when he kept sending me emails telling me which films I should watch and books I should read. Liam further dug himself into the shit, by giving confidential data to an angara who has now disappeared. He’s worried that pirates could get hold of the information and use it against them. Thing is… this mission has got some of the best level design in the game. Now, I admit, that’s not saying a lot, but still. There are a couple of great visual gags to start, and the gravity starts shifting and you have to work your way through the level dealing with walking on walls and ceilings. I didn’t really care about the story here. I mean, the situation seems to have sorted itself out, so that’s all good. Before finishing off the main quest, let’s just sum up these loyalty missions quickly. Drack and PB are vaguely entertaining characters and I’m fine spending more time with them. Jaal, Vetra, Cora, and Liam are all various degrees of boring, but Jaal gets a pass from me possibly because he’s a new race and that gives him a bit of a boost. The summaries of the stories I gave were quite short, so it’s worth emphasizing that there is a lot of build up to them. Unfortunately that build up tends to just be moving between planets for thirty seconds on each one. Still, the loyalty missions have clearly had more thought put into them than any of the other side missions and I’d argue most of the main missions as well. People have put thought into these stories, however there’s not enough variety. Three of the stories are about rescuing people, which can get repetitive. So yeah, they’re good, but they’re not mindblowing. What would be nice is if these missions somehow played into the ending like they did in Mass Effect 2. No such luck. The loyalty missions used to serve a purpose. They were called loyalty missions for a reason. You needed the loyalty of your teammates for the final battle. Not so here. One final point before we get back to the main story. I want to emphasise how much of a disjointed mess this game is. While playing the game, you are encouraged to get five planets to 100% viability. You only need 40% viability to build an outpost, so it’s just a little extra thing to do. It doesn’t make any difference, and strangely, you don’t need to complete every task on a planet to achieve it. I didn’t intend to go for 100% viability on all the planets, but it’s actually quite easy and I did it on three planets without even trying. I went and completed the other two at roughly this point in the story, well before completing the game and doing the loyalty missions. Watch this short scene closely. How nice. A planet gets named after Ryder. Notice anything else weird? Yeah. The game references opening a channel to talk to the people on Meridian. That place we haven’t found or been to yet. I’ve no idea how this slipped through. If I had to guess, I’d imagine that it was originally much harder to get 100% on all the planets, and maybe it was even impossible to do before completing the story. Whatever the reason, this kind of thing is unacceptable. It’s particularly annoying, because so many other missions get put on hold for no reason. This mission is the one that actually should have been put on hold. Crazy. Let’s get this main story over and done with. Tamm and the rest of the Nexus team refuse to support Ryder and don’t understand the importance of Meridian. Ryder rebels and decides to go there anyway. This might be a big deal if we in any way feared the nexus. I went ten plus hours without even going there and I’d forgotten all about it. The Journey to Meridian quest is one long puzzle vault for the most part. When you finally get to the main control panel you find out that Meridian is not about terraforming planets--it’s about creating life. Specifically the angara who were created by another race called the Jardaan. The Jardaan created the remnant to keep the planets habitable, although that does make you wonder why they shoot at everything on sight. I guess they’re protecting the vaults. Still seems a bit aggressive though. The system can create life, but it can also destroy it for… reasons. The next reveal is that this place isn’t actually Meridian. It’s just part of it. They need to get to the central core, which is an artificial planet that looks a bit like, well, you know what it looks like. You have a mini boss fight on the way out and then make it back to your tempest. In order to find Meridian you need to go to a few random places and do some scanning. You didn’t think you were going to get through the entire game without doing some planet scanning did you? You have to go back to a previous vault, which feels a little odd, but then you reveal the location of Meridian. The Archon hacks into SAM which leaves Ryder in a bad way. We already know that SAM is intimately connected to her, so when he shuts down she dies as well. The archon has control of SAM and with that he can wipe out all life in the cluster. He seems to have given up on the idea of exaltation. He also now has the location of another SAM--the one connected to Scott on the Hyperion. I liked this next bit. The kett attack hyperion and you get to control Scott, or Sara if you were playing as Scott in the first place. There’s a sense of urgency because Sara is going to die if Scott can’t reboot the system to reactivate SAM in Sara. Scott succeeds, but he’s captured by the kett shortly after. Now everyone heads to Meridian. The tempest can’t land so you’re thrown into a linear driving section which to be fair looks absolutely gorgeous. You don’t get long to enjoy the scenery before you’re in another vault. I should have known that the game would end in one of these bland and boring places, but I hoped for more. Naive, I know. At one point, the captain of the tempest gives an emotional goodbye as she crashes the tempest. This big goodbye doesn’t work on many levels. First, we’ve barely spoken to the captain and don’t give a shit about her. Two, she doesn’t die anyway. Or at least she doesn’t in my play through. I saved the asari, so Sarissa throws up a shield to stop the tempest blowing up on impact. There’s so many problems with this. First, the biotic shield coming up is an absolute blink and you’ll miss it moment. It doesn’t even seem to be there when the ship hits the ground. Next, you never see Sarissa. She says over the comm that she’s close enough to throw up a shield, but you should at least be able to see her. We saw her block missiles with Cora’s help earlier, and this is on level with that. Surely she should have been in view. This scenes feels like it was added late so that Bioware could pretend there’s more player choice than there actually is. Sara keeps moving into the vault. The archon has beaten her to the source of all the power. He needs Scott there because, well, he doesn’t really. The game needs Scott to be there because it gives everything a little more urgency. You defeat more of the same enemies that you’ve been fighting for the entire game, plus the archon in a weird snake like form. This is a tough fight, but mainly due to the sheer quantity of enemies. You don’t have to do anything new and there’s no real trick to killing the main boss. He’s actually quite easy. It’s the sheer quantity of enemies that are the problem. I don’t know about you, but I was expecting to fight the archon in some way. Instead he projects himself through this weird tentacle which you have to shoot at a bit while you go and activate more consoles. It’s a pathetic way to end the game. I guess we should just be thankful that we don’t have to do a sudoku puzzle while under fire. Again, it’s impossible to overstate just how little imagination and enemy variety there is on offer in this game, and never is that more obvious than in the boss fights. After defeating the archon, it’s all over. Meridian starts terraforming planets to make them livable. Except, uh, haven’t we already done that? There’s an attempt at a cool ending, but it’s completely ruined when Ryder opens her mouth. Andromeda hasn’t finished being shit. After the credits there is one of the worst sequel or DLC teasers I have ever seen. Seriously. What the fuck is that? I’m guessing that kett is Primus. Are we supposed to care about him? Why? He seemed to be under or equal to the archon. At least give us a bigger bad to worry about. I swear, the people writing this game know nothing about storytelling. But wait, there’s more. Ryder has to choose who should be an ambassador for the nexus to help when dealing with the outposts and angara. I guess this choice will play out in a potential sequel. Finally, you have to go and talk to all your crew. The game makes you do this, because it knows full well that if you had a choice you wouldn’t bother. I’d talk to suvi and maybe PB, Jaal, and Drack. That’s it. The game is actually over now. Fortunately you can go back to planets and keep shooting kett as if none of the previous forty hours ever happened. Aren’t you lucky. I could sit here and rant into my microphone about how much I hate this story, but anyone can do that. Unlike graphics and combat, there’s no real way I can support my arguments with evidence. The best thing I can do is give you my own ideas for the story. The first thing I’ll say is that in an ideal world, Bioware would pick a canon ending to to the trilogy and have this take place after that. It doesn’t have to have the same crew. In fact, it shouldn’t. Have it take place 200 years later. 500. Whatever. The approach taken here is a cop out. Bioware wants the benefit of the Mass Effect name, but it doesn’t want to do the hard work and build on the previous games. It throws in a few references to get hardcore fans feeling all tingly, but that’s not enough. However, there’s not much point in me coming up with a completely different story. I want to throw out some ideas for how I would improve this story. Obviously storytelling is one of the most subjective parts of a game, so I don’t expect everyone to agree. I’m doing this because I think it’s only right to put suggestions forward when I’ve bitched so much. Let’s keep living in that dreamworld slightly. Four arcs travelled to Andromeda, but three of them barely played any part in proceedings. The result of this is that we only really see three main races in the game: humans, kett, and angara. The Andromeda galaxy somehow manages to feel less diverse than the milky way. Good work Bioware. So here’s my idea. You’ve got four different arcs making the trip. Why not let the player choose which race they want to play? Depending on which one you choose, you get a different story at the beginning. You always end up becoming the pathfinder, but it happens differently each time. You’d also be treated differently depending on which race you were and it would give a decent reason for having varied combat skills. If we want to use biotics we play as an asari. Best of all, if we pretend the Krogan get an arc, we could play as a tank like Drack. This might sound like a lot of additional work. Maybe it’s far-fetched to think a developer would go to this sort of effort to give the player an interesting origin story and a choice in how they play the game. It would take extra work, I admit, but it’s been done before. What’s that game called? Ummm. Dragon Age: Origins, that’s the one. Now fair enough, that was done by a talented team of developers. We can’t expect everyone to reach that level so… oh hang on. Yeah… Alright, let’s imagine that budgetary restraints mean my idea is a no go. You can still improve the core story in Andromeda. Let’s fix the start of the game. It’s a mess. You could speed up the intro a bit. How about instead of the slow scene where you wake up on the ship and meet your father, you skip straight to the bit where you’re falling onto habitat 7? The details can be filled in later. That’s not what I want to do though. People think Andromeda starts slow, but games can start slow and use that time to build relationships and make the player care about other people in the game. Horizon Zero Dawn did this. That game started slow as hell and had you picking up rocks, however it let you get to know Rost and understand the world. How about this? The game starts with Alec Ryder talking to the benefactor. The speech is full of mysterious stuff like “We have to move forward with Project Andromeda. The Milky Way is doomed.” You could even take some of the stuff we saw in the memories. The key thing is to set up the initiative as being important as opposed to just a random trip to another galaxy. After that we cut to Sara and Scott getting ready for what looks like an obstacle course. Basically, this is the tutorial. You learn basic platforming, shooting, and biotics. But there’s a point to it. Sara and Scott are competitive and talk as if one of them is going to win. As the player, you will beat your sibling but it will be close. You think you’ve won, but the actual winner is Cora. Alec Ryder congratulates Cora and is strict with the rest of the team. At no point do you think Alec is Sara and Scott’s father. The siblings keep messing around and then Alec gets a message. He looks at them glumly and walks off. They follow him to their home where their mother, Ellen, is about to pass away. There’s a nice scene where they say goodbye and the mother dies. What we don’t see at this stage is that Ellen has already agreed to go into cryo sleep. She wants to say goodbye to her kids in case something goes wrong and she never gets woken up. The next scene is Scott and Sara getting ready for Andromeda. A large group of rebels attack the base after finding out that humanity is doomed and want on the voyage. You have no choice but to kill the rebels as you defend the ship. This serves as another combat tutorial. The attackers keep coming, so the arc is launched early. The human arc was the first to leave and therefore it was the first to arrive. Forget all that nexus crap for the time being. The humans have to fend for themselves. Ideally, the player would only be a member of the crew initially, not the pathfinder. This doesn’t need to be dull. You can still be the one in charge of missions, but ultimately you report to your father. This isn’t all that different to reporting to Tann in the Nexus. In the first act, you come across a hostile alien species and get into a few firefights with them while doing your pathfinder thing. At the end of this act, let’s say about a quarter or a third of the way through the game, everything goes to shit. A bigger, badder enemy appears and you end up having to fight alongside that race you were previously fighting. At one point, Ryder is given a decision to make and the player will either be gung ho and reckless or calm and collected. If you act reckless, then your father will have to save you and he will die in the process. You then have to deal with that guilt, and people hating you for the rest of the game until you prove yourself. If you act calm, then it’s your sibling who fucks up. You will be worshipped, but your sibling will be despondent and hated. This is a decision that means something and yet won’t change the game so much that it makes it impossible. I don’t think much needs to change about how you become the pathfinder. As your dad dies, he should pass it to you but it should be made clear that he’s only doing this because Cora is not close enough. SAM needs to be passed to someone immediately or he loses power. Something like that. Okay, so now your Ryder is pathfinder and there’s a new threat in the galaxy. There are more things I would change. First of all, let’s not have everyone worship Ryder because of her title. There’s nothing all that special about a pathfinder team. They go down to planets and explore. That’s it really. As it turns out, SAM is the key element, but that doesn’t become clear until later. Now then, let’s talk about that new group of aliens. I’ll refer to them as the kett because that’s the role they’d play. The kett have a story and a reason for being. They need this cluster because their own world, or worlds, are no longer liveable. They’ve destroyed their own planets and their looking for someone else to live. Let’s throw in another issue as well. They can’t reproduce. That’s why they convert the angara into kett. Humans will make a truce with the angara and agree to help fight the kett. One of your teammates is an angara, but he’s actually working against you. His brother, sister, whatever, died fighting humans before the truce and he wants to get revenge. If you form a bond with him then he won’t go through with it. Otherwise, he’ll blow up something important and you’ll have a harder fight at the end. Other elements of the story can stay the same. I’m fine with the Jardaan creating the angara in the first place. I’d suggest one further element of friction. The Jardaan created a safe zone around the helious cluster that the kett couldn’t penetrate. When the humans clumsily burst onto the scene, they broke this protection and therefore they are the reason the kett are here in the first place. In other words, the arrival of the kett are not an accident. In my opinion, that’s a decent enough premise to move the story forward. The bad guys have an actual purpose and in their heads they might even think they’re doing the right thing. There’s plenty of conflict between the angara and humans, and I love the idea of one of your teammates betraying you. Imagine getting into a romantic relationship with that person and then finding out that they were going to blow up the ship. That’s one of the main ways Andromeda fails. There’s no conflict. Even where there is conflict, it’s quickly brushed away. Cora is kind of annoyed that Ryder gets promoted above her, but she quickly gets over it. The angara have already met humans so you don’t get to experience being ‘new’ to the galaxy. There are hints that not all angara like humans, but it’s just background noise. It’s not enough. You can keep the terraforming stuff in there if you want, but let’s make it more dynamic. If you don’t go back to a planet, then there’s a chance your outpost will get attacked by kett. There could be some time pressure as well. The other arcs start showing up and you need somewhere for them to live. And let’s make 100% viability mean something. If a planet is 100% viable then it’s safe and cleared of bad guys. It means you added military troops to defend it, and scientists to build powerful anti-air weapons to stop kett getting close. The bad guy, let’s just call him the archon, needs more depth. We know that he’s not in charge of all the kett. Why don’t we see him get torn out by the boss? Make him feel under pressure to gain control of the helious cluster. At least that way we might end up sympathizing with him a bit. None of this will work if the dialogue is flat. I can’t do much about that in this video. I know it sounds profoundly arrogant, but I genuinely believe that the ideas I’ve just discussed are better than what is in this game. However, Andromeda has more problems than just it’s story. Separate from the story and the animations, the dialogue and its delivery is another huge problem with Andromeda. The dialogue is always functional. It moves the story forward and imparts information to the player. It just never does it in an interesting way. Ryder is the most obvious culprit because she’s the one you’ll spend the most time with. She’s supposed to be a leader. To be fair, she’s supposed to be a new leader, but she talks like how sixteen year olds think adults talk. There are weird pop culture references, and I even heard Ryder threaten to ‘turn this car around’ if my teammates wouldn’t stop arguing in the back seat. Humor is more subjective than any other type of writing, however that doesn’t excuse an entire game of this crap. I think the writers were trying to capture a firefly feel, with witty banter between all the crew. They don’t succeed. Worst of all, the conversations between Ryder and the archon are benign and devoid of any suspense or tension. The game is already struggling for narrative, so when the two main characters can’t get any decent dialogue going you really have a problem. I should also touch on the delivery of the dialogue. I’m not experienced enough with voice acting to know for sure where the problem lies, but there is definitely a problem. I’m tempted to lay the blame at the door of the director. Ryder sounds almost identical, regardless of the gravity or levity of the situation. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the voice actor just went in the booth and read off the script without any direction. When you do notice a change in her voice, it’s often in the wrong place. You can tell that sometimes sentences have been pieced together where the dialogue has been rearranged. It’s quite jarring. Your teammates are just as guilty with bland dialogue. Nearly without exception, you get a character’s complete backstory the first time you meet them. Isn’t that what the loyalty missions are supposed to be for? It’s like someone has read a book on how to write a story, but has never practiced actually doing it before. The obvious advice is show not tell. That should be easy to do in a video game where you are encouraged to go on side missions with your crew. That’s when we should learn about the characters, not through painful exposition. The less said about the flirting the better. I decided to have Ryder flirt with Suvi and that gave me some of the worst dialogue in the game. It does lead to one funny moment though. There’s this dialogue and then Kallo voices what we were all thinking. I even wonder if this line is an editors note that accidentally slipped into the game. Other dialogue is annoying because of how much you hear it. On a couple of planets there are extreme temperatures that you can’t survive in forever. SAM warns you when you’re changing between safe conditions and dangerous conditions. That might sound harmless enough, but in practice… My God this gets annoying. Dialogue also loops in fights as well. Overall, the dialogue is so disconnected from the narrative that I wonder if it was outsourced. It’s like Bioware said ‘this is the character, write lines for them.’ Writing is much harder than you think. I’ve written a few TV scripts in my time because I thought I could do better, but it’s not that easy. With practice, you learn how to avoid exposition, and how to make characters have distinctive voices. The writers of Andromeda do not have writing experience. I’m convinced of that. This is the sort of writing you knock out when you think it’s easy to do and don’t realize how bad it looks in the end product. It’s the equivalent of a novel written during National Novel Writing Month. The quantity is there, but the quality isn’t. Bioware used to have good writers. They also used to make role playing games where you made choices that impacted the story. Mass Effect 2 had an incredible ending that changed significantly depending on which loyalty missions you had completed and other choices you made. Andromeda does not do that. Over my fifty hours with the game, I made two choices of note that impacted the ending, and I’d argue that impact was minimal. The choices in Mass Effect 2 dictated who lived and who died. In Andromeda the main choice decides who helps you out at the end. This is the decision you make between saving the salarian pathfinder or the krogan scouts. It’s a negligible difference that you might not notice if you’re caught up in the combat. Drack will have a few words with you afterwards if you don’t save the scouts but he’ll quickly forget all about it. The other choice is whether or not you save the asari arc. This might result in a death, but it’s a character we’ve barely interacted with. I talked about that scene while going through the story. If you do want to see some good writing then I recommend you check out the emails. You might think that random emails from crew would be a dumping ground for the worst of the game’s writing, however it’s actually some of the best. A highlight for me was Drack getting caught out by a Nigerian Prince email scam. Of course, Bioware isn’t stupid. It’s a developer full of intelligent, hard working people. They know there’s a lack of decision making here. I expect they just didn’t want to deal with implementing these choices in the other two games of what I’m sure is a planned trilogy. You don’t even get to choose what type of person Ryder is. The game pretends you have a choice over what Ryder says next, but much like Fallout 4, all you’re really doing is choosing how you say yes. The paragon/renegade system from the previous games has gone. That’s no loss in my opinion. When presented with the choice of being a good person or a bad person I always end up playing the good person. It’s too black and white. In Andromeda, you answer in a particular manner, choosing between passionate, logical, casual, and professional. That sounded like a good idea at first. Depending on the circumstances, I would answer in all four ways throughout the game and I liked knowing that I wouldn’t put any of my character relationships beyond repair, just because I disagreed with them once. The other side to that coin is that none of your decisions make a blind bit of difference. People used to replay Mass Effect games, and not just to screw different aliens. There was a real tangible difference between paragon shep and renegade shep. As I said, I think it’s a good idea to get rid of the binary choice, but I didn’t intend for it to be replaced with no choice at all. I made two shocking decisions during the game that took me completely by surprise. Not in a good way though. The first one was when I accidently shot PB’s former lover in cold blood. An R2 prompt pops up on screen sometimes and you don’t get any time to think. I accidentally hit the button and took this shot. This was definitely not something my Ryder would have done. It shouldn’t even have been an option. I’ll say it again, there’s no renegade system here. You can’t play a bad guy or girl, so why did this choice come up? Something similar happened at the end of the game. I had these two dialogue options. I’ll admit that I knew there was a sniper nearby covering me, but I still didn’t expect this to happen when the woman I was talking to did absolutely nothing to suggest she was a danger. That choice shouldn’t be there in a game where you rarely get the choice to be a dick. Okay, I can’t avoid talking about the graphics and performance issues forever. I’m going to try to limit the amount of time I spend on this section, because most of you will already know that Andromeda has its performance problems and graphical hiccups. That said, I can’t ignore them when they affect gameplay this much, and they do affect gameplay. I played on PS4, and from what I’ve heard, the problems aren’t as bad on PC. Take that into account if you’re still considering buying this game. Patches. Let’s start with frame rate dips, because that is about as objective as anything in this video. I experienced regular frame rate drops while in large scale combat and travelling around planets in the NOMAD. That’s not unheard of, but it is unacceptable in a $60 game with this kind of a budget. Obviously frame rate drops in combat are a problem, but even when you’re not in combat it’s distracting. When moving around planets, you’ll often see Kett drop down from spaceships. They move at about five frames per second. It reminds me of playing Halo back in the original xbox days. I’ve already mentioned some of the more glaring errors, but just for reinforcement, here’s some footage of the NOMAD randomly stopping while moving around the planet. This happened a lot. There’s also some major issues with collision detection and general interaction with the environment. I’ve seen animals get stuck in rocks and so many floating enemies that I would start checking the skies during combat just in case. The pop in is also so bad that it is actively distracting. In my Horizon video, I mentioned that there was a horizontal line running across the screen and that if you looked closely you could see additional texture detail being added as Aloy moved. This was so subtle that you can’t actually see it on the YouTube video. Andromeda’s pop in isn’t quite so subtle. The effect is so bad, that I have to wonder whether the game would have been better off just removing the vast majority of these environmental effects altogether. Then there are the conversations. Not only do the characters look like shit but they are so badly positioned for any in-game conversation it’s infuriating. You’ll also need to turn subtitles on because you won’t always be able to hear your teammates talking. If you start the conversation while they’re quite far away then they’ll join in but their voices will be so quiet they’re almost inaudible. You can also get attacked and even killed during conversations. This happened more than once. Honestly, I could make an entire video with the performance issues in this game, but plenty of people have already done that and it this point it feels like flogging a dead horse. A dead horse I paid $60 for. I’m not going to dwell on the animations here. You’ll be able to see for yourself just how bad the animations are, so make your own mind up on how big a problem that is for you. My final point on the game’s performance. In addition to dealing with all the crap I’ve talked about, I also had to endure three hard crashes that lost me nearly an hour of game time thanks to Andromeda’s awful save system. That’s all I’ll specifically go through. Other people had far worse experiences than me, but I had my fair share. The bugs mentioned above happened many times. The best way I can explain it is to tell you how I write notes while playing games. When I see something that really stands out, I’ll make a note and put an exclamation point at the end. That means this is footage probably worth including in the video. After a while I had so many lines with exclamation points that I had to step it up a notch. I put three exclamation points--no idea why I skipped two--at the end of a really really bad glitch. But that wasn’t enough. Things kept getting worse, so I resorted to underlining the really really really bad glitches. Finally, and I swear I’m not kidding, I had to added an asterisk to the beginning of the sentence for one final measure. This game is a mess. I’ve been ragging on the game for ages now, so let’s talk about one of the few things the game does right, or at least, not badly. The combat. Superficially, at least, the combat is a lot of fun, especially for the first half of the game. The gunplay provides a challenge, although it’s far from insurmountable, and there’s a real thrill to hovering in the air and raining hell down from above. Your melee attack is a pain in the arse to use while on the ground, but in the air it turns into a ground pound that’s as effective as it looks. There are some camera issues, especially when trying to use that melee combat, which is annoyingly mapped to the triangle button, however it’s largely decent. While the combat is the best part of the game, I don’t really have a lot to say about it. Don’t take that to mean it isn’t good, it is, it’s just not all that special. I’m going to be really lazy here and just compare it to other games. The combat on offer here is a lot like The Division, with its bullet sponge human enemies and general lack of punch to the weapons, with a bit of Destiny thrown into account for the sci-fi powers on offer. The hitboxes are incredibly generous so any initial desire to be accurate, quickly gets thrown out the window when you realize you can just aim in their general direction and fire. After levelling up a few times, you’ll be able to equip tech or biotic based skills. You can also improve your survivability and skill with weapons, but the skills are much more fun. I went with incinerate, concussive shot, and shockwave, however there’s plenty to choose from. You can pull in enemies and push them away if you want to feel like a jedi, or just go for a flamethrower and freeze combination. You’ll do the most damage by using a skill that primes enemies and then another that detonates them. The game does a woeful job of explaining this, so much so that you might be forgiven for thinking it’s an advance technique that you only need on the higher levels. That’s definitely not the case. I can’t for the life of me understand why the game doesn’t give you a decent tutorial on this system. I’d love to know what new players to the series thought about this and when they noticed you could use the skills in this way. There is some text in the skill description, but I still don’t think it’s well explained. I said earlier that combat is only good for roughly the first half of the game. That’s because it quickly wears thin and the problem areas rear their badly animated heads. The automatic cover system worked well for me at first, and when it didn’t, I rarely suffered all that much. I might have just been unlucky, but later on in the game the lack of cover started becoming a huge issue and I died a few times because of it. The thing is, it genuinely does work well nearly all of the time. I think this is more my issue, but I like hitting a button to go into cover. It feels more satisfying and it’s nice to know that I’m definitely in cover. The biggest issue is what you’re taking aim at. The enemy types get incredibly repetitive. The kett and humans might as well be interchangeable. Remnant largely stay the same throughout. The native animals could have provided some variety, but there are only a couple of different models and they get recycled on every planet. Apart from a few battles, the animals tend to move around by themselves. They don’t feel like part of the world. How are they surviving in these environments. I played most of the game on medium difficulty, however I also played on hard and easy at times. The change in difficulty obviously affects the damage dealt and received, but it doesn’t affect the AI. The kett and human outlaws are dumb as hell, so much so that I suspect it might be a glitch. Now’s a good time to talk about the skill tree and class system, because this mainly impacts combat and I think it could be improved. You pick from one of six classes, however you can change between them whenever you want. The classes give you tiny boosts to different skill sets, so some classes are better with guns, others biotics, others tech, or a mixture of the three. First up, I’d rather have a class system based on my earlier idea about being able to play as different alien races, but I guess I have to accept that ship has sailed. The current class system seems pointless. The difference is so minimal that you might as well just not bother. As it stands, you can use your skill points and split them between the three different types of skills. By doing this, you’re already developing your character into a type of class, it’s just not labelled as such. The issues with the skill tree go a bit deeper. You need to level up each of your skills. Obviously you don’t want to be using level 1 incinerate near the end of the game. That somewhat discourages you from acquiring new skills because you know you’ll have to level them up first before being able to use them effectively. Now, I should point out that you can reallocate your skills at any point. This feels weird in a game when we’re supposed to be building a character to role play as. It’s also implemented poorly. You have to pay credits to do it, but it’s not really enough to bother you. You also have to reallocate all the points in one go, so if you just want to shift your skill points from incinerate to shockwave, you have to redo your entire character. I think the better approach would be to have the character just allocate their points to either combat, biotics, or tech. Certain skills can be restricted so maybe you can only use the freeze ability when you are level ten in tech. However, the strength of your skills is always determined by your overall level in the three main areas. I think Bioware has drastically over complicated the skill tree and that has a detrimental effect on the game by discouraging players from regularly switching up their skills. It’s a shame, because the skills are a lot of fun and I wanted to mess around with all of them. Another reason combat became boring in the latter half of the game isn’t directly related to combat per se, but it’s close enough. There’s a distinct lack of enemy variety in Andromeda. The kett are humanoid enough that you can’t tell the difference at distance, and when you’re not fighting kett, you’re fighting actual humans. There are some beasts thrown in there, however they are also woefully lacking in variety. Despite the incredible difference in weather and terrain between the planets, the enemies rarely change in any substantive way. There are fiends, which i just referred to as space gorillas, a few insects, and a couple of dog like creatures. The worst culprit is this dinosaur raptor looking thing. How do you think this attacks? Did you answer ‘it fires a fucking laser out of its mouth?’ because that’s what it does. This reminds me of the shitty steam games that Jim Sterling covers on his channel. The ones where loads of random assets are dumped into the unity engine with no attempt to build a coherent world. Now, I know that these creatures were created by the Jardaan and therefore didn’t technically evolve as such, but we all know that’s a bullshit excuse. I’ve already mentioned that there should be more enemy races in the game, but at the very least there should be more native creatures thrown at the player. The ones we have are poorly designed. Look at the projectiles coming from this one. They look ridiculous. Why don’t we have enemies attacking in packs for example? The creatures feel like a complete afterthought, which in addition to leaving the worlds feeling underbaked, also places more emphasis on the repetitive combat with humans and kett. Eventually firing at bullet sponge enemies becomes boring. This is just an estimate, but I’d say that a third of the way through the game you will have faced nearly every enemy type there is to see. A few new remnant machines pop up and you’ll face armored kett, but none of them feel any different. I rarely changed my tactics depending on the enemy. The only exception of note is those annoying kett with the shields. You need to keep your distance against them, and a sniper rifle is useful. Combat has enough potential depth that I want to recommend you play the game on the hardest difficulty you can foreseeably handle. I want to tell you to do that, but I can’t. The game has a dreadful save system, so if you die you’re potentially going to lose a lot of time. You can’t save at all during priority missions. For those of us with lives, this is a ridiculous thing to do. Shit happens, sometimes you need to stop playing. When you’re exploring planets, you can start side quests and make progress only to lose thirty minutes of game time because the game hasn’t saved. That might not be so bad if there weren’t so many bugs. I had to reload a save when the NOMAD got stuck on the asteroid with no way to get back to the surface. If you deliberately killed yourself, it just brought you back to the same place. I also somehow respawned in the NOMAD while precariously balanced on a platform in a vault. Bizarre. Save your game and save often. I want to be clear. The combat isn’t bad. In fact, I’d say there’s an incredibly strong foundation here. The issues I’ve listed above aren’t really the fault of the combat. They’re the fault of the weird skill system and the lack of enemy variety that is indicative of the lack of care spent on the final product. I’d wager that the combat is the best part of the game for most people and I wouldn’t argue with that. I just wish the same care had been placed in other parts of the game, because those issues bleed into the combat and detract from the overall experience in my opinion. Okay, enough of all that excessive positivity and praise. Let’s get back to the bullshit. Navigation might sound like an odd subject to go into detail about, however it’s possible that this is the part of the game that annoyed me most. The times I came close to throwing the controller out of the window, followed by the PS4, and then myself, were when I was trying to navigate my way around the fucking dreadful maps. I’ve already mentioned the maps on Harvarl, but this navigation issue is a problem on every single map. Dragon Age Inquisition had similar issues and it blows my mind that this wasn’t fixed. Navigation can fail on even the most basic level when there’s so little information on the map to plan your route with. It’s okay knowing that you need to go East, but how do you do that when there’s a huge, impassable mountain in your way? Bioware loves to make you take one specific route to get to places, so you’re going to come across a lot of dead ends. At first, I was prepared to give Bioware the benefit of the doubt. After all, maybe they just see this as the most realistic way to build the terrain on the planet. If so, why not give us a bloody waypoint to follow so that we know we have to go north, then east, then south, for example. Anyway, I don’t think Bioware’s going for realism. I think you’re forced to take these set routes around planets because Bioware is hiding loading zones. That’s definitely the case on Kadara judging by the constant freezes as I move around. Look, I get it. These are big planets and there aren’t big official load screens to deal with. I don’t mind the odd loading zone. However, I do mind driving around for hours trying to figure out how the bloody hell I’m supposed to get around a mountain. Even more annoying is when a navigation point is on a mountain. Or is it under the mountain? I’ve had quests where the marker has been on the peak of a mountain, only to find out that I actually need to find a cave entrance somewhere else entirely and drive through the cave to get to the quest. Why not just point me to the cave entrance in the first place? This sort of crap is unforgivable in 2017. To make it even worse, I did actually get a couple of quests where you do in fact need to get to a point on the top of the mountain that any reasonable person would assume was impossible to reach. This point just so happens to be above a cave, so if you remembered that there was a cave under there then you would naturally assume that’s where you need to go. By the way, when you are driving around, you might be tempted to run over kett, outlaws, or even just bugs. Don’t bother. The NOMAD is surprisingly useless at doing any damage to enemies it hits, even if you run over them. If this part of the review were proportional to the pain and suffering caused, it would take up 50% of the video, but I think I’ve made my point. It’s another example of Andromeda suffering compared to the last game I played. Horizon nails navigation around it’s world, so Andromeda is left feeling distinctly last generation. While of the topic of navigation, I want to hammer home a few other points I’ve only hinted at so far. Andromeda has a lovely map of the Helios cluster, but moving around it is a bitch. If you want to move from one planet to another, you’ll need to first move to that star system which has a long load screen tagged onto it. You then select the planet and get another load screen. There’s even this weird feature where the game zooms in on the planet and them zooms out again. I guess someone spent a lot of time on this and no-one had the balls to say no. These load screens are more than enough to put me off moving to all the planets for planet scanning although I’ll be honest and admit that doesn’t take much. I can’t even begin to understand how planet scanning is still in the game. It’s utterly pointless at the best of times, and all it does is frustrate the player with additional load times. Not even the most devoted player would want to put up with this crap. Andromeda has even managed to take a step back from Mass Effect 3 in this respect, because there are no reapers chasing you around to add a bit of pressure. Interplanetary travel is at its worst when you want to go back to the nexus. It works the same way as other planets, when the game desperately needs a quick option. Why bother with this screen for example? Can’t the game just automatically take you to the nexus without you needing to click on landing bay? Travelling between planets wouldn’t be so bad if you didn’t have to do it so often. I’ve mentioned this already, but it really does bear repeating. So many of the quests require you to go down to a planet for a very brief time, then go back to your ship and take off, then go to another planet, then back to your ship, and repeat ad nauseum. This isn’t just the insignificant side quests either. You have to do this in priority missions and loyalty missions. In fact, loyalty missions are the worst offenders. PB’s was dreadful. Again, this is one of those things that is so flagrantly bad that it deserves an entire fifteen minute rant, but I don’t know what else to say. It’s awful quest design. That’s all there is to it. Let’s talk about the UI. Hear me out. Like navigation, I wouldn’t usually dedicate an entire section of the video to such a dry topic, but holy shit, the UI here is on another level. I want this on video for posterity, because just reading about it isn’t enough. I’m also going to touch on all the different currencies at play in Andromeda, because that’s part of the problem with the UI. I’ve already covered the UI around the quest log and the skill tree, so this will mainly focus on weapons and armor. Before I go into detail, I’m going to list out the different types of currency and XP you can earn in this game. Obviously there is the basic XP for levelling up your character. Your teammates also level up with you, even if you don’t take them out into the field. There are also credits of course. That’s enough in my opinion, but not for Bioware. You can use your credits to buy weapons and armor, however the best gear needs to be developed. Actually, first it needs to be researched. As you progress through the game, you’ll find blueprints for gear and will then be able to allocate research points to them. You get research points by scanning stuff. There isn’t just one category of research points though. Oh no, that would be far too fucking easy. You have to collect three types of research points. If you want to develop milky way weapons, you’ll need milky way research points. Likewise helious points for helious gear and remnant points for remnant gear. Once you’ve researched the gear, you’ll need to develop it with minerals, and there are a lot of different types of minerals. Stepping away from gear for a minute, as you complete tasks on planets, you’ll earn Andromeda points, which are another form of XP really. As you level up with these points, you’ll gain the ability to open additional cryo pods. Remember how big a deal that was at the beginning of the game? Now you just do it via a computer and no one ever mentions it again. The rewards--which you have to go back to the ship to collect--are so pathetic that you’d never notice if they weren’t there. I’m convinced this whole cryo pod thing was a bigger part of the game earlier in development. There’s simply no point to it in it’s current form. So we have credits and three types of research points, two different XP systems, and a crap tonne of minerals to collect. What else? Glad you asked. There are also strike teams that have their own XP bars and can be sent out on missions. These teams gradually level up and successful missions grant a small amount of additional credits. You’ll also earn mission points, however you can only use mission points to hire more strike teams, which in turn allows you to earn more mission points. Again, it’s utterly pointless. It’s filler of the lowest possible value. What’s worse? You need to be online to send out your strike teams and connection to EA’s servers is finicky at best. Bioware doesn’t even give you any story to go with these strike missions like it did in Dragon Age Inquisition. It’s another step back, although not one I can muster the energy to be angry about. I’m saving that anger for the UI. Look at this fucking mess. I’ll start with the research page. Everything is split into the three different types of gear, so good luck comparing weapons and armor before deciding which one to research. The developers also thought players would care more about the lore behind a gun than it’s statistics. Let’s say you’ve found an outfit you like and want the full helmet, chest, legs, and arms for it. You’ll need to go into each section to see how many research points you’ll need for each level and add up the numbers to figure out how high you can go with your research. I ended up with a level 10 chest, but only level 7 for the others because I ran out of points. That might sound like my fault, but here me out. The gear only went up to level five--or six maybe--and I had enough for everything I wanted. However, after hitting level five, the game suddenly opened up levels six to ten. Why not show me that before? In addition to keeping an eye on your research points, you’ll need to look at the amount of minerals that you’ll need for each piece of gear. This is fine if you build one thing at a time, but if you want a set then you’re in trouble. Once you’ve researched the gear then you can develop it by going into a different menu. Here there’s a list of gear you have the required minerals for in order of level. If you’re short of minerals then you’ll need to go digging through more sub menus to figure out what you need. You can find minerals all over the planets and even buy them in shops, however vendors are so rare that it’s not worth bothering with. I ended up choosing my gear based on whether or not I already had the required minerals. Overall, the economy in Andromeda is a mess. If you want to research and develop your own weapons then you’ll need minerals, but they’re never all that hard to find. The asteroid level has loads of the rare stuff if you need it. Furthermore, if you go this route then you won’t need credits to buy weapons, so you can just buy the minerals from vendors. It wouldn’t take much effort to get all the research points and materials you need to build high level gear at the midpoint of the game. The developers know this so they’ve put level requirements on the higher level weapons and armor. I know these kind of restrictions are common in games, but it’s always a sign that the game's economy is slightly borked. Even The Witcher 3--one of my favorite games--has this restriction, so I am in no way singling out Andromeda. It is silly though. Why should I have to be level 40 to wear a level 8 chest piece when an identical looking chest piece is fine at level 7? Obviously the answer is that you could break the challenge in the game, but a stronger in game economy would fix this problem. I assume all these options were designed to provide depth, but that’s not what we end up with. This isn’t depth. It’s just noise. It’s options for the sake of there being options. The time and money spent developing these systems, especially the online one, would have been far better dumped into things that actually matter. Story. Gameplay. World building. Speaking of which. There’s one other tiny thing that bugged me. You’ll see data logs lying around in random places. Nothing new there. Most games have them. They aren’t particularly interesting, but that’s not the problem. My issue is that they never disappear and there’s no way to tell which one’s you’ve read and which ones you haven’t. You’ll go back to the same places and not know which data logs you’ve already read. It’s a minor point, but symbolises the impression that this game lacks attention to detail. Most of the reviews I’ve read for Andromeda say that the most disappointing thing about the game is the story, and they usually take a dig at the performance issues are as well. I agree with that sentiment. Obviously I find the story incredibly disappointing, and the dialogue is dreadful. I’ve also highlighted performance issues that plagued my entire experience from beginning to end. However, if I had to pick one problem with Andromeda it would be the worldbuilding around the Andromeda galaxy itself. I don’t think Bioware should have taken the game to a new galaxy, but if that’s what it’s going to do then at least make the most of the opportunity to be inventive. Do something new. All rules are out of the window. The possibilities are endless. What do we get? The kett--who are almost indistinguishable from the protheons--and the angara, another bipedal species who don’t add much to the experience. Is that it? The angara are paper thin, and I don’t feel like I know anything about them. At times, they appear to be a basic culture who are incapable of doing anything to defend themselves against the onslaught of the kett. However they’ve developed space travel and clearly have the means to defend themselves. But what’s unique about them? Every race we met in the original trilogy had unique characteristics and history beyond just looking different. The asari are excellent with biotic weapons. The Krogan have a fleshed out history where they became so powerful their destroyed their own planet and needed the help of the salarians to develop again. The krogans became a threat and so the turians injected the females which led to the genophage. That’s a ridiculously abridged version and I’m leaving a lot out, but it makes my point. What do we know about the angara? They were created by the jardaan and are now being kidnapped by the kett. There are a couple of splinter groups and that’s about it. Obviously the other races had an entire trilogy for their histories to be fleshed out, but I’m fairly certain we already know the vast majority of what there is to know about the angara. The missed potential is infuriating. I’m not even asking Bioware to come up with anything particularly original. There’s nothing wrong with being heavily inspired by other media, but it’s best you don’t copy your own previous material if you want to keep people interested. Instead of replicating the citadel by having the nexus, why not have a cool planet like Coruscant from Star Wars. It might take some work to squeeze it in narratively, but look at the mess that is the Nexus story. I’d use the Coruscant planet as the Angaran political center. They can give the humans a small section of it as part of a treaty agreement. They are all working together after all. Taking another cue from Star Wars, Andromeda definitely needs more variety in its intelligent lifeforms. Why not have aliens that don’t walk upright on two feet. Have species that communicate via signals which humans can’t understand. Have a species that is vastly more intelligent than humans and who we actually see. Let’s have some real, multi-layered conflict between all the different species like the genophage situation. Andromeda is barren of excitement and conflict. In addition to the lack of intelligent species, there’s also a huge dearth of cool animals. That probably seems like a minor complaint, but I don’t think it is. Any semblance of immersion is destroyed when you see re-skinned versions of the same creatures on ice planets, desert planets, and tropical planets. Each planet has a creature that feels like it could be native to that planet, but then all of those creatures are replicated on each other planet. I know that the Jardaan populated this galaxy, so there is technically a lore reason for animals to be repeated, but are we really supposed to believe that the Jardaan created about 5 different creatures and then just fucking copied and pasted them all over the place? The animals even attack in the same way. Bioware must have been worried that players would try to stay at range when fighting these creatures, because they all have a bloody acid spit attack. This is an entirely new galaxy. Bioware could have done anything they wanted. The first three main planets are cool enough. Eos is a dry, desert, Havarl is tropical, and Voeld is snow and ice. But then Elaaden is another desert, and Kadara isn’t too far off--it’s just got some more grass textures that pop in when you’re on top of them. Why not have a smaller area like a destroyed city? Perhaps the angara used to live somewhere else before Aya, but the kett destroyed it. Ryder could head there to recover information. Anything to make the game feel different. I also can’t get passed the lack of care paid to the story surrounding the nexus. That crap about the rebellion doesn’t explain why humans are littered around all the planets and getting on just fine. I’m sure I killed more humans than were ever on the Nexus to begin with. Also, how the fuck did outlaws get access to all these mechs! Everything to do with the Nexus annoyed me. The people on board. The pain in the arse it is to get there. The way they pretend that settling on planets is crucially important because rationing is running out. Everything. Let’s also discuss the scourge briefly. You probably noticed that I didn’t talk about it much. There’s not much to say. It’s used as a plot device right at the beginning to give a reason for the Hyperion arc crashing and for why the planets are no longer habitable. It rarely plays a part after that. We know that it’s synthetic so someone put it there. This feels a bit ridiculous, given its size, but whatever. It’s nothing to do with the kett. The scourge appeared 400 years ago, but the kett only invaded 80 years ago. It wouldn’t have been the jardaan, since it goes against everything they’re trying to accomplish. This means there is a third party out there who we know nothing about yet. That could be interesting, I suppose. But why dump the scourge here? I really hope there’s a reason beyond ‘the scourge kills planets and we like killing planets’ bad guy nonsense. The Mass Effect games have never had the best combat. They survived on their characters, the story, the world, and the way you as the player interact with all of that. Andromeda has decent combat, but it needs the rest as well. The characters have all the depth and witty dialogue of a Twitter troll, and the story is genuinely inferior to a lot of fanfiction. Even with those problems--and it’s performance issues--Andromeda could still have maintained a shred of credibility if the world had been fun to be a part of. This is how MMOs work. If there had been four of five functioning planets with different cultures and inhabitants then perhaps the game could have been entertaining on some level. You could lose yourself in the worlds and enjoying messing around. It still wouldn’t be a classic game, but it would be something. Instead we get five planets--three of them varying degrees of desert--and very little of note to do on them. Sure, there are plenty of tasks to complete, but they have all the soul of procedurally generated content. They are only one tiny step up from the radiant quests in Fallout 4. I love exploring new worlds, but only when there is the potential to find something interesting. If I wanted to wander around barren landscapes I’d play No Man’s Sky. Ultimately, the Andromeda galaxy offers up a whole load of nothing. If you completely disagree with me but have survived this long into the video then thank you for hearing me out. I know it’s genuinely tempting to stop listening when someone seems to hate something you like. I enjoyed the original trilogy, so I take no pleasure from hating this game. It’s so depressing--and yet predictable--to see the EA effect taking place again. I like to think I’m a realistic guy when it comes to business and making money. I’ve been trying to understand how EA makes a profit from buying companies, making them release a shit game, and then dumping them. Presumably Bioware will join other talented developers like Maxis and Bullfrog the second one of their games doesn’t meet sales expectations. I wonder at one point someone at EA will turn to his colleagues and say, ‘do you think maybe we’re the problem?’ I don’t want Bioware to fail, but I don’t see where the Montreal branch can go after this failure, and yes, I do think it’s a failure. I’m sure pre-orders were high enough that the game made it’s money back, however EA doesn’t spend $40m or whatever it was to make its money back. DLC is usually profitable, however I can’t imagine many people will be excited to continue this story. I’m going to take a risk and go on record as stating that we’ll only see one piece of story DLC for Andromeda. There just isn’t the excitement to warrant any more. Obviously I could be wrong, but I think resources are stretched between fixing this mess of a game, and producing post release content. So what about a sequel? I can’t imagine a world in which we get an Andromeda 2. Disappointing games can be followed up by decent sequels. Watch Dogs 2 is a recent example. However sales for that game were disappointing, presumably at least in part due to the mess of the first one. And that’s with games that are not connected narratively. For an Andromeda sequel to succeed, the first game has to have a passionate fan base. Mass Effect 2 managed to win over people like myself who hadn’t played the first game, because fans were so enthusiastic about the journey, the world, and the characters. The first Mass Effect game was flawed, but it wasn’t ridiculed. Andromeda 2 won’t be able to escape the controversy and general shitness of this game and that’s why it will never happen. I haven’t decided what the title of this video will be, but I’m fairly sure the word ‘bad’ will be in it, or something similar. I’m also fairly sure that people will think I’m being dramatic or exaggerating. After all, Andromeda might be disappointing, but surely it isn’t really bad. It is. In my opinion, anyway. I genuinely believe this is a bad game and not just a disappointing one that deserves a six or seven out of ten. I’d give it 2 stars out of five, which is my preferred rating scale. This is probably controversial. Triple A games just don’t get bad scores. A bad triple A game gets average scores. Even the bad ones tend to be packed with content and Andromeda lasted me 50 hours. If you like the game enough to do side quests or replay it, you might hit triple figures. Games like this have big budgets and there’s an expectation that they will always be good at worst. Compare this to the movie industry. Movies always last somewhere between 90 minutes and three hours and they all cost the same. It’s much easier to compare the quality of a big budget movie to an indie one. It comes down to a simple analysis of which one you found the most enjoyable. Games are more complicated. How do you compare a two hour experience like Gone Home to a 50 hour game like this one? It’s tough. Regardless of how you feel about Batman v Superman, I don’t think many people would complain if a critic gave it 2 out of 5. That had a huge budget and made lots of money, but it’s not good. I love Superman and I even enjoyed Man of Steel. Batman v Superman is terrible and deserves bad reviews. You don’t see movie reviews saying it was disappointing and giving it three or four stars to respect the effort that went into the game. Anyway, that’s just another little rant to try to preempt some of the comments I might get if anyone watches this video. I genuinely don’t like this game. As always, I don’t mind if you do like it, and I’m more than happy to discuss my critique in the comments. I’d appreciate it if you could hit the like or dislike button as appropriate, comment if you have anything to say, and share the video if you want more people to view it. I’m undecided on my next video. The current plan is to do a shorter video on the new Planescape Torment enhanced edition just to mix things up a bit. After that, I think I’ll do Prey. If you have any other ideas than let me know. Hit subscribe if you want to see what I do next.

Channel: Chris Davis

Views: 1,889,373

Rating: 4.4583154 out of 5

Keywords: mass effect andromeda story explained, mass effect andromeda story details, mass effect andromeda analysis, mass effect andromeda spoiler discussion, mass effect andromeda review, mass effect andromeda detailed summary, mass effect andromeda story summary, mass effect andromeda critique, mass effect andromeda detailed review, mass effect andromeda in depth analysis, mass effect andromeda criticism, analysis

Id: eQsPu2tAy6w

Length: 143min 50sec (8630 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 13 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Well as a quick aside I had no idea there was any sort of combo system with the spells and I finished the fucking game so that says something about the tutorials.

I think the biggest thing I'll take from this video is the point about how there is just absolutely no world building whatsoever in this game.

I think the fairest comparison is if you take this game on it's own and compare it to solely Mass Effect 1. ME1 wasn't perfect, it's story wasn't Oscar worthy, but what won the hearts of millions of fans was its relentless effort to build an interesting world with unique personalities in it.

This flows into your point about the Angaram. What is there Unique Selling Point (USP)? They're "Emotional" apparently. That's it. We know nothing of their culture, how they are different, how long they life for, what their attitudes are towards mating, their politics, their attitude on war, their approach to other life forms.

All the original races from ME1 : Human, Asari, Salarian and Turian . I can give you answers for all those points. Because they fucking went to the effort of writing the details.

Anyway rant over, good video. Subscribed to see there is more in the future.

[u/cdavis_games]

Full disclosure: I’m posting a link to my own video. I didn’t see anything in the rules prohibiting this, but mods can feel free to delete if inappropriate. I’m pretty new at this, so I’d love to get feedback on the content.

This video is an in-depth look at Mass Effect: Andromeda. I go through the entire story, while talking about what I like and (mainly) dislike about it. Obvious there will be major spoilers. I also take a stab at coming up with my own idea for how to improve the existing story. There’s also more typical review discussion in there like combat, navigation, UI, etc.

Thanks for your time.