I finally finished Mass Effect: Andromeda, after starting it earlier this year. The original Mass Effect trilogy is one of my favourite series of all time, especially Mass Effect 2, which is in my top five games ever. I oh so bloody love it. However, I put off playing Andromeda when it came out, due to the intense furore surrounding it. I find it hard sometimes to enjoy a game, or any media really, when everywhere you look it’s being attacked. I decided to leave some time before playing to give the experience some space (tee-hee). Anyway, after first starting it initially on the Xbox One, I stopped and restarted on the PS4 Pro, as playing anything on the base Xbox is just awful. Overall, I enjoyed it, but it’s by no means a great game. That said, it’s also not a bad one. At least not as bad as the internet masses would have you think.

It struck me recently that this generation has really been about uneven games, which I think is a by-product of massively open worlds. Every game now is so large that it can’t help delving down to lower depths. Even extremely good open world games, like Red Dead Redemption 2, have missions or areas that, if fairly assessed, would come in at two or three out of ten. Really, when reviewing games these days, or critically assessing them, you’re really assessing the median experience. Mass Effect: Andromeda is one of those games that runs the gamut of experiences from the highs of maybe not pure tens, but nines down to threes or even twos. But really, it’s not a bad game.

Firstly, the elephant in the room is the animations. Now, Bioware may have spent a lot of time improving them, but really, they were fine. Yes, there are a couple of moments of weirdness, but no more than something like AC: Odyssey. I do think that sometimes the internet decides in advance they’re going to give something a kicking, and then they look for things to focus on. In many ways Andromeda was doomed the minute that ME3 became the internet hate thing of the week. And that mob was vindicated when Bioware chickened out and changed the ending to acquiesce them. The facial animation this time round was the culprit, but really that was just a proxy for the horde’s frustrations. I get that of course, I wanted Andromeda to be the best game ever, an improvement on ME2, but sadly that was not to be. But the animations aren’t the problem.

There are some things to write home about, the combat being one of them. Like previous ME games the combat sings, especially combined with the new movement system. While the original games had quite stilted movement, here you can whoosh and zip around both in and out of combat with few limitations. You can jump up into the air and also dodge using cool jump-jet things, and they are used both in combat and exploration. The combinations of weapons and powers, and along with a new ‘combo’ system that gives you extra damage when combining powers in certain orders/ways, is great. That said, it really deluges you with weapons, many of which are useless, while also preventing you from swapping weapons easily, forcing you to return to a loadout point, making it hard to experiment and find what suits you. Also, like seemingly every game these days the enemies are proper bullet sponges. This is the Destiny-fication of gaming. In order to make big battles in an MMO shooter seem substantial enemies were given insane health pools. Every enemy takes ages to kill in this. That’s not a problem unique to Andromeda but sad to see its ugly mug herein.

The worlds are impressive too, and the visuals frequently brilliant. The little car thing you drive about too is very fun, and much easier to control than the old mako. Exploring the worlds and dealing with some of the light survival elements, such as high/low temperatures, or other environmental issues were a nice part of the game, ever if the AI voice that informed you of the changes was gratingly repetitive. It’s not really a true open world game, instead comprised of various smaller open worlds that you can explore as needed, in your new spaceship The Tempest. Again, this is a nice part of the game, and the new ship makes you feel more like you’re in space, by rendering your location on the galaxy map around you. So if you’re next to a red giant it will appear through the various windows and ports. A nice touch.

Of course, Mass Effect is mostly about the story, and moreover the characters. Mass Effect 2 doesn’t really have much of a story, it’s all about assembling your team gaining their loyalty. In Andromeda this really is a mixed bag, with some of the characters being quite fun and enjoyable, and some being absolute worstcunts. The storytelling as well gets clunky, as dealing with all the different characters, locations, and events seems to have been a struggle for the developers. You can feel that this is a game that was pulled apart and reassembled a lot during development, as there are things that work, and others which obviously feel wrong. And it gets worse the more the game goes on.

While the opening twenty of so hours have a definite momentum, it eventually loses this, and have you jump back and forth between different worlds completing not very interesting tasks in a pretty piecemeal fashion. Also, it never feels like these tasks have any impact on the world, even substantial things like loyalty missions. Unlike in ME2 the loyalty missions just unlock some extra abilities and have little effect on whether your final mission is successful or not. Overall the main plot is pretty good, but the sidequests are mostly pretty forgettable, and that’s bad for a Mass Effect game. This is pretty apparent in the spacefaring races around you. It abandons some of the more interesting races from the first game, even the brilliant quarians, and introduces the angaras. Possibly the blandest race they could have thought of. Gah, I can’t even be bothered to write about them they are so bland.

Anyway, I’ve written an awful lot about the game, much more than I intended. I did enjoy it for the most part, especially the combat, exploration, and mostly the main story, but there are some definite rough patches. The main thing is that, despite a few hiccups, it’s definitely not the utter disaster that people would have you think. And actually a pretty fun romp in places.