First off, I hated this game before I even played it. I did. The reviews were bad and everything I care about in Bioware’s games (mainly the writing and the characters) took pretty hard criticism.
And then I actually played the game.
Sure, the facial animations are not great. They’re bland compared to, let’s say commander Cullen’s face of frustration when he closes his eyes and looks upwards, stroking his hair, you know, that one? And sadly, there’s no commander Cullen jumping around in a tight space suit with you, but there are other, decent characters like Jaal, a new raspy voiced alien that wears his heart in his sleeve and on top of it a poncho- sorry, I mean a cape. If this is your first Bioware game, I’m sure you’ll even think of what I call decent characters or decent writing as great. And now that I’ve played for 40+ hours, I am starting to think they’re kinda great too.
I think this game is a tough piece to swallow for people that have previously played Bioware’s games, because well, they were excellent. Near god damn perfect. I’d even go as far as perfect. So now that we don’t have our loved commander Shepard or our badass space boyfriend/bff Garrus, we are being super critical and quite frankly, scared of the new. Hats off to Bioware for having the guts to even touch this franchise anymore and to try to make new characters as good as in the previous games. Even half that good would be a win in my books, and in my opinion, Bioware has succeeded. Being critical is a good thing to some extend, as it helps the people develop games more in the direction that we that play them and pay money for them want, but hey there’s a thing called going too far.
I’m not defending Bioware’s generally lazy facial animation (I’d like to point out that there are some good animations as well, and I haven’t experienced any glitches, just you know, blandness) or the fact that every krogan, turian and asari have the same face or some of the seriously cringe-worthy lines Ryder delivers (there are seriously great ones too!), but those are just 3 aspects of a HUGE game with hundreds of aspects. But those are the first things you see if you’ve only played the 10 hours Bioware courteously granted us, which was good for us, really bad for them.
From what I’ve seen in my 40+ hours of gameplay, the story is great. I mean looking for a new home in a distant galaxy? A great starting point and then it just keeps getting better, a weird dark matter surrounding your new home, none of the planets are habitable, and it’s your job to make it home for your people as the human Pathfinder with the help of your AI, SAM.
The character interactions are great. Whenever you leave your by the way, gorgeous spaceship Tempest and come back, the companions have moved to different places and are hanging out together, chatting away. There’s great banter no matter if you are on a mission or just riding around in your new Mako, the Nomad (to which you can buy a paint job called Archangel and then proceed to curve up to a ball, drop on the floor and cry a little, thank you Bioware for acknowledging our favorite characters even in some tiny way).
The worlds and places are gorgeous. My personal favorite is Kadara post, the outpost of Nexus exiles and criminals. It’s cool and there’s some seriously cool characters but you don’t reach it in just 10 short hours. Also the music in the bars there is bangin’.
And speaking of banging, true to Bioware, there’s definitely that too. But you probably already knew that so moving on.
What I am saying is, I think Bioware made a huge mistake granting us 10 hours of gameplay before the release because this game is too massive, too complex and too full of everything to understand in just 10 short hours. If this game had been released by anyone else than Bioware, and they had not called it Mass Effect at all, just Andromeda, I’m sure the ratings would be through the roof. I’m not saying our criticism is totally unfounded, some things just seem really lazy, but we have to understand how massive this game is. I’ve played 40+ hours and my journal has so much quests left I’m not sure even another 40 hours will be enough to cover them and so far, nearly none of them have felt like stupid and repetitive fetch quests.
Bioware has set the bar so high with their previous games I’m not sure if it they can ever meet it again so yeah, Andromeda lacks that special something that we’ve gotten used to seeing from the company. But it’s no excuse to completely trash the game and give it 1-star ratings out of 10. Mass Effect: Andromeda is a great game that lets us have another Mass Effect experience in a really smart way, setting us off to a whole new galaxy but still keeping some familiar aspects of the previous games that we’ve grown to love. And based on the amount of low reviews Andromeda has gotten from us gamers, maybe we’ve grown to love them just a little bit too much.