Mass Effect: Andromeda (PC)

Developer:

BioWare

|

Release Date:

2017

|

Systems:

Windows, Xbox One, PlayStation 4

---

Today on Super Adventures I'm celebrating N7 day by writing about the Stargate: Atlantis of Mass Effect games - Mass Effect: Andromeda! Not to be confused with the Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda of Mass Effect games, that would be something different. If you haven't seen Atlantis or played Andromeda, I'm referring to the fact that this is a spin-off that jumps over to a brand new galaxy to start its own isolated story where the events of the main series theoretically can't reach it.

The game went through a troubled development process, but then it's by BioWare so that's no huge shock. This article you're reading also had a troubled development though, as I started the first draft way back in 2017, when the game was shiny and new. I don't generally write about new games, as I figure that the rest of the internet's already got that covered, however I'd already written about the original trilogy and felt that I should complete the set. But then I shut Super Adventures down for a year and the draft got shelved. I got back to it in late 2019 and nearly got it into a publishable shape... but I figured people would rather read about Super Mario 64 and Suikoden etc., and it got buried again. Now I'm finally finishing it in 2021, exactly six years to the day since I wrote my epic four-part Mass Effect 3 article. I won't be dragging this one out to epic proportions though, I'll be trying to keep this brief.

My gimmick for 2021 is that I'm only playing games which have appeared on someone's top 10 list, and I found Mass Effect: Andromeda at #2 on Screenrant's '20 Most Disappointing Video Games of 2017' list, just beaten to the top spot by Star Wars: Battlefront II. The game came out five years after the controversial Mass Effect 3, and received a very different reaction from players. Mass Effect 3 got fans emotionally invested and then pissed them off to the point where they started campaigns to get the endings changed, but Andromeda had them laughing out loud at the awkward dialogue and dodgy animations. Then people just kind of lost interest with it as far as I can tell. Maybe people still play the multiplayer, I dunno, but it didn't sell well enough to even get DLC, never mind a sequel.

Okay, I'll be sharing screenshots of the first few hours of the game so there might be SPOILERS here for things you don't want to know. Just giving you a heads up.
 

---

I always appreciate it when games put their character creation at the start of the game, instead of locking it away behind a long prologue with unskippable cutscenes (looking at you Mass Effect 2).

This time around I'm not just picking my own character's appearance but also my twin's. My dad's appearance as well actually, through the magic of reverse genetic inheritance. This isn't Commander Shepard this time by the way, instead I'm playing as a brand new protagonist with the last name Ryder. After three games playing as a human I'm ready to play as an alien for a change, maybe a Turian or Asari... but I can't. Ryder's always human.

Speaking of Commander Shepard, there's a 'Customise History' option that lets me customise them as well! Well, I can choose their gender anyway. And I can also upload or import my character data, which is good seeing as they've taken out shareable face codes.

Xbox One

Turns out the Xbox One version looks pretty much the same as the PC game, huge shock. Though I have to use the triggers here to rotate the face, which is kind of weird.

I wish I could say that this face editor is a huge step above the earlier games, but it's not really. You pick a preset face and then you get to slide the features around a bit (though not too much). There are about 20 hair styles shared by male and female characters, with some proper anime colours available if you're into that. There's also some weird makeup and futuristic tattoos to stick on if you want to attempt a bit of individuality. It lets you stray a little bit from the military grooming regulations this time.

It's an adequate editor if you just want to make a pretty character with limited fuss, though it is possible to make them ugly instead if you put in a bit of effort.

The intro begins with a scene straight out of J.J. Abrams' Star Trek with our heroes gazing out the window of their shuttle as they fly up to dock with a gigantic new starship parked in space.

It's currently 2185, the same year as Mass Effect 2, but there's no mention here of that fleet of sinister sapient spaceships currently on its way to wipe out all suitably advanced life in the Milky Way. It makes sense that the developers would've tried to make the game accessible to new players and not bore them with backstory, but I won't be hugely shocked if it's revealed later that there was an ulterior motive for this huge one-way expedition to the Andromeda galaxy, especially as each of the major races have an ark of their own. When Reapers is reaping it's best not to keep all your eggs in one galaxy.

634 years later, in 2819, the human ark Hyperion finally arrives in the Andromeda galaxy, 2.5 million light-years from Earth. That's actually pretty damn quick, considering they didn't use a mass relay. To give you a comparison, it would take Star Trek's USS Voyager 2500 years to get there if they had the pedal floored the whole way.

They also picked a decent name for the ship, instead of trusting all their lives to a vessel called the Icarus, or Prometheus, or Mary Celeste or something. You know what sci-fi stories are like. In Greek Mythology Hyperion was the Titan god of heavenly light, who also ended up being cast into a void. Though it's possible the writers may have just taken the name from a ship in Babylon 5 (which got its name from the web address of a B5 fan site).

My character Ryder is part of the Pathfinder team tasked with finding humanity some new homeworlds so she's one of the first to be woken up from cryostasis when they get there. But she's barely out of her cryo pod before she's given dialogue choices to make. C'mon guys, at least let her finish her coffee before expecting her to form sentences.

The first three games have a morality system inherited from Knights of the Old Republic and Baldur's Gate, where you could either play as an outright hero, or more of an 'ends justify the means' type who punches reporters when they make disingenuous assertions. Though by Mass Effect 3 a Renegade Shepard was basically the same as a Paragon Shepard except they were slightly ruder to people (but not much), and Andromeda is seeming a bit limited as well. This screenshot claims that I've got four different tone choices to define my character's personality, but right now it feels like Ryder comes with a cheerful friendly nature pre-installed and all I can do is pick their mood at the moment.

Ryder's mood is currently pretty upbeat, at least until the ship hits a space coral reef made of unstable dark energy and everything goes to crap. Then the game hands control over to me and expects me to deal with it!

Fortunately Ryder is equipped with something Commander Shepard never had: a brand new game mechanic that lets me scan through walls and find the damage. Well it's new to Mass Effect anyway; it should be very familiar to anyone who's played the Metroid Prime games. I point the orange rectangle at something that's glowing and the ship's AI, SAM, tells me a bit about it. AI's aren't entirely legal in the Mass Effect universe, not since the robot uprising, so it's a good thing we're currently 2.5 million light years away from anyone who gives a damn.

After sorting out the immediate crisis I got dragged into some cutscenes, with the characters discussing how screwed they are. Turns out that Ryder's dad Alec is the vessel's Pathfinder, responsible for finding humanity a home... which is good because we've just arrived at Habitat 7, the 'golden world' picked out for us before we left, and it looks rubbish. A real trash planet. We need a better one.

First though Alec's going to bring a team down in shuttles to investigate Habitat 7 and we get to come too! Unfortunately Ryder's twin brother has been left in a coma so there's no chance of co-op play.

LOTS OF CUTSCENES LATER

The bad news is that my shuttle got torn apart during descent due to the crazy weather, the air down here is poison, there's lightning everywhere, and humanity could never survive on this world. The good news is that I'm still alive thanks to my suit's jump jets. That's something else Commander Shepard never had.

It's just me and a guy called Liam at the moment, so I went for a jog across the alien landscape with him. He seems like a decent bloke, but the dude just can't get his head around the floating rocks. I guess they are pretty cool; these are some nice graphics for 2017. The map's not as open as it looks though, as right now there's exactly one direction I can go.

I went jogging down the path (trying not to get hit by lightning) and it soon told me that I had to use my jump jets to make a short jump over a chasm. So that's the second new gameplay mechanic. Not really a game changer but it's definitely not an unwelcome feature. Sadly my beloved combat roll seems to have been replaced by a jet-assisted dodge move.

I've found a second shuttle survivor, plus some brand new aliens! And they're holding guns!

First contact is a delicate situation and if you screw it up you can end up with an interstellar war. Humanity already learned that lesson after the First Contact War, so it's been drilled into me by dialogue and datapads that I shouldn't take any action against these guys until hostile intent is clearly demonstrated and we're at obvious risk of injury or death. So I've chosen to walk up to them with my hands well away from my guns in the hopes that we can have a chat. Do they even have a universal translator device in the Mass Effect universe?

Then the shooting started... and I started it. I couldn't really see what the guy on the right was doing with our survivor and I started getting seriously concerned that one of us was going to eat a space bullet. We might not be able to understand each other's words, but I did not like what they were saying with their body language.

The good news is that Fisher's alive, the bad news is that he's broken his leg and can't join my space hero squad. But he's safe at least so now I need to press on and look for the others. There's still a shuttle and a half left to find.

Lots more unfriendly aliens just down the road. Fortunately I have an ally: this rock. As long as I'm standing close enough to it for the shield icon to appear in my HUD, third person cover shooter rules apply and I duck behind it whenever I'm not aiming. Plus it apparently makes my shield regenerate faster, which is nice.

Seems a bit unfair that I've got a regenerating shield and the aliens don't, but it doesn't last long and my health only regenerates up to a third, so recklessness isn't encouraged. The aliens are plenty reckless though, always sneaking out of cover and trying to flank me.

Fortunately there are resupply boxes lying around with Quake III pickup icons above them. Some have health, some have ammo (heatsinks), and some have a lightning bolt in a circle which I guess replenishes your Speed Force if you're playing as the Flash. There are no ammo pickups lying around anymore and no medi-gel for healing, but just running next to a box gets me an instant refill (while stocks last) so it's not been an issue so far.

These aren't the only kinds of boxes I've been finding though, as there are also ones with loot inside them.

In fact I came across another container inside an ancient alien ruin along the way. It contained two strange alien devices: an ancient pistol barrel and a shotgun receiver, both entirely compatible with my weapons. All our stuff was built hundreds of years ago as well, now that I think about it, so I suppose we're pretty ancient ourselves.

It's around this point that a message popped up on screen saying "You have lost your connection to the Mass Effect server. You will be unable to access online features of the title until you connect again." It had me panicking for a split second, before I realised that the 'online features' were apparently making absolutely no difference to my single player gameplay. I wasn't kicked back to the menu or anything.

SOME GAMEPLAY LATER

You know, those last few shoot-outs would've gone very differently if I'd remembered I'd picked 'Biotic Charge' as my starting power. I could've been slamming into enemies from across the battlefield and cutting them up with my omni-blade!

I've just levelled up so now I can invest my points into unlocking a second power, or maybe upgrade some numbers.

Previous Mass Effect games had you picking a class and then choosing from the skills available to it, but this is letting me put points in any combat skills, biotic skills or tech skills I want. Seems like the system is backwards now, as I actually unlock classes by investing points into the various skill groups and I'll be able to switch between them at any time. Works for me.

Though there doesn't seem to be a way for me to manually fire off the skills I've assigned to my teammates and I'm less keen on that. And I can't freeze the action to issue orders and use skills anymore either! How am I supposed to set up and detonate combo primers when I can't choose what my sidekicks are firing off? What the hell game?

MORE GAMEPLAY LATER

 

I met up with Dad Ryder and got to show off my Biotic Charge power by darting all over an ancient alien structure, killing off all the other aliens. The thing has some serious range to it, it's awesome.

Then we found a triangle!

It seems like the bad aliens came to this place to investigate a structure built by other aliens hundreds of years ago. Everyone's always after ancient alien relics, as if you can figure them out you can push your own technology forward by hundreds of years. That's how humanity got FTL drives.

Dad Ryder manages to activate the device with the help of SAM, and dissipates the dark energy field trapping the Hyperion! So it's bloody handy we crashed right here rather than anywhere else on the planet really. Unfortunately the Ryders are hit by a blast coming from the machine and my character's helmet is wrecked. Not good when the air is still poison. Dad Ryder realises there's only one thing to do to save his kid, and gives her his helmet.

RIP Dad Ryder, you were played by Michael Ironside and that made you awesome. That, plus the fact that you were really competent and knew what you were doing.

Ryder sees flashes as she's taken back to the ark, and I actually managed to press the button at the right moment to screenshot one! Seems like it's the Ryder family playing with a telescope. Unfortunately two of the four people in this image are now dead, one's in a coma, and the other's currently having a seizure.

Fortunately my Ryder survives! Plus it turns out that Dad Ryder was doing some questionable things with AI, and had SAM linked directly to his brain. Now that link has been transferred to me, giving me the power to be the hero everyone else in the game relies on. That means I'm now the Pathfinder in charge of finding a new home for 20,000 humans.

Ryder needs time to process the fact that her dad died, she nearly died, she's got a computer in her brain, and everyone's now counting on her to save them. So the others give her a whole two hours to rest while the ship heads to the Nexus.

Meanwhile Alien Darth Vader has arrived on Habitat 7 with his troops to investigate why the machine's on and all his people are dead. He copies Dad Ryder's arm move shown in the holographic surveillance footage, but the triangle remains unimpressed.

I think he's supposed to come off as menacing, but he's closer to being adorable, with his Baby Yoda eyes and oversized spacesuit. I just want to wave back at him! It doesn't help that the scene plays out in silence, so if he's got a deep menacing voice we don't get to hear it. Probably better than having him rant like Saren in Mass Effect 1 though.

Mass Effect (PC)

"I'll get you next time Shepard, and the rest of your meddling team!"

Alright, the Hyperion has arrived at the Nexus.

Bloody hell that thing's huge! It's utterly dwarfing my giant ark. Why did they even bother putting the colonists on separate ships when they could've all travelled in that thing? I guess there's probably a datapad somewhere that explains it, but right now the only reason I can think of is 'don't put your eggs in one basket'.

The Nexus is apparently just under 10 miles long, so only about a third of the length of the Citadel from the earlier games, but still plenty big. It's twice the length of Babylon 5, the circular section is over three times the diameter of Deep Space Nine, and you could lay 18 copies of the Burj Khalifa skyscraper on it end to end. I mean if you had nothing better to do.

Unfortunately it seems practically abandoned right now, with most of the lights off and a skeleton crew running the place. Turns out that they've had a bit of an uprising, they're running low on supplies and power, none of the other golden worlds panned out, and they had pretty much given up on waiting for any of the arks to finally show up.

Addison in particular is being really pissy with me because her face is tired.

I've got to be honest, some of the dialogue in this has been a bit... strange. Not all the time, just sometimes. Though I was expecting the animations to be the real issue and they actually haven't been. There's been a rare bit of glitchiness with characters sliding around or appearing in the air and dropping to the deck, but the rest of the graphics have been pretty solid for me. Either I'm easy to please or they've done a lot of work to fix up the animations since release. I'd even go as far as saying they look at least as good as those other Mass Effect games that were released years earlier!

Anyway the folks at the Nexus are going to give me a scout ship so I can go check out a planet called Eos and do what I can to make it viable for a colony. They've already tried it themselves, but all their efforts have failed and everyone's going to die in space at this rate, so now it's on me to make it work somehow.

Man I love those reflections. Who even needs RTX!

Wait, why is this woman asking me to help her husband? Oh, this is how it's going to be isn't it? I'm the Pathfinder so that means everyone's looking to me to solve all of their problems. It's nice to finally see a female Turian though. Only took them four games!

Well I'm not going to be suckered into getting side-tracked with side quests, not when I've got a planet to make viable! Though I do have to go ride the train all the way back to the Hyperion to speak with SAM first, because RPGs just love to waste your time.

SOON

Some nice reflections in Dad Ryder's room as well, plus he apparently got hold of Batman's old computer.

I decided to sneak in and listen to Dad Ryder's messages and found some audio recordings by Dr Liara T'Soni, making a surprise appearance! Makes me wonder what other Mass Effect characters are going to have a tiny pre-recorded cameo. I doubt we're going to find a way to make contact with the Milky Way though, as that'd step all over Mass Effect 3's multiple choice ending.

Anyway I've spoken to SAM, learned about Dad Ryder's secret memories I can unlock by collecting memory triggers or whatever, and now I'm finally ready to head to my scout ship and go sort out Eos! Though an NPC asked me to hunt down a saboteur and that sounds kind of serious, so I should really get that out of the way first...

SOME SIDE QUESTS LATER

Right, I've finally got my scout ship, the Tempest, and man she's beautiful. She's a bit like someone took the Normandy SR-2, flipped her over and sanded the corners off, but in a good way! It's so rare to see a spaceship with an underslung bridge and almost completely flat roof like this.

I do have one tiny little issue with it though, because I always have this problem with every spaceship in every video game: the interior doesn't fit inside the exterior.

I mean look, you can actually see rooms sticking out above the top of the hull if you stand here!

Also this area I'm in now is right under that observation dome sticking up at the back of the ship between the wings, and I can see the ship's exterior stretching off into the distance, but the interior isn't anyway near as big. That oval-shaped corridor down there leads to the cockpit and the big window looking out into space at the front of the ship, but it's so short that it doesn't even reach the front half of the ship.

This is pretty much how the interior would have to be placed within the hull for it to fit.

I know this was a deliberate choice by the designers so that they didn't have to compromise on the look of their ship, and it is a damn fine looking vessel inside and out, but it still bothers me.

And what's up with this corridor anyway? You go down three steps onto a narrow glass walkway with no handrails, then back up again on the other side. That's just weird and unnecessary!

They could have at least moved it off centre and stuck a staircase along one side to save me from having to use the ladders every time I want to go down to the plastic surgery machine or use my wardrobe.

I haven't got a whole lot of outfits to pick from here, but I can at least change the colours of them. Plus one of them is a space vest with Blasto on the front and enhanced arm holes. If they'd cut those arm holes any bigger it would be an apron.

There are also other gadgets here on the Tempest for convenient access to all the game's extra features. Like the APEX terminal (send strike teams off on missions, presumably get something in a few hours if they don't die), the AVP terminal (unlock perks as a reward for making planets extra viable), and the research and development terminal.

This screen lets me use the resources I've collected to create better weaponry and armour, which seems nice I suppose. I doubt I'll ever use it though. I don't even visit the shops in the Mass Effect games except to sell off my excess items and get stuff for side quests. Oh and to give them endorsements in exchange for discounts, obviously... not that they've given me the option in this one. In fact now that I think about it, I'm not sure I've even seen a shop yet.

I'm seeing a lot of classic guns though, which is cool. It makes sense that they're using familiar designs seeing as they departed the Milky Way at the time the other games took place. It'll be best for me to carry as few as possible though. I mean it would be nice to have a sniper rifle at least, but carrying more guns lowers your power recharge speed, so there's a trade-off. Being a better equipped soldier makes you a less effective space wizard, and I'm all about Biotic Charging at the moment.

Right, time to set a course for Eos to save everyone from a horrible death in space.

Actually first I just need to scan this whole system for anomalies and then I'll be ready to go to Eos.

The planet scanning is basic to the point of being there to waste your time, as you just follow the arrow and get a thing, but it's the movement between planets that's really bothering me. Every time I click to go somewhere else the camera zooms out a little to show me the world I'm orbiting before giving me a first-person view of the FTL jump. That I have to sit and wait during. Then when I'm at the new planet it wastes just a tiny bit more time by zooming back out again. It's like it can't make up its mind whether I'm looking a map screen or the window at the front of the ship.

I can skip some of the journey, but not all of it, and it's really putting me off going anywhere I don't have to. Not really what you want in your space exploration game. At least I don't have to worry about fuel in this one.

Look, I finally landed on Eos! Then I got out and used the jump jets to get onto the hull of the Tempest. I love angles like this that make the ship look absolutely massive (even though it's probably smaller here than it was when I was walking around on the inside).

I've been wanting the Mass Effect games to let me go climb over the damn ship for years. Seriously, the last line of my Mass Effect 1 article before the conclusion was a complaint about the game not letting me walk on the hull, and now I actually can!

Okay, time for us to go and find a way to make this planet viable. That way our next attempt at a starting a colony here should work out a lot better than this one did. Fortunately the game's giving me clear objectives so I don't have to do any thinking for myself.

This place seems a lot more open than Habitat 7. There's a bit of lethal radiation outside the failed colony however so first I'm going to need some way of traversing the landscape without my flesh burning off. Hey I wonder what's in that crate down there...

I've found a Mako! Actually this is a different vehicle called the Nomad, which is missing the big cannon on the top and likes to get stuck in gaps. I haven't given up yet though! I am going to make it out of here... eventually. I just need to keep driving backwards and forwards, hitting the boost and firing up the jump jets until I get it onto some terrain I can work with. Switching to six-wheel drive would probably help too, as the thing's useless at hills without it.

To be honest I never had a problem driving the Mako (either with a controller or a keyboard) and I don't really have a problem driving this either. I do miss being able to shoot things though.

I'm also not keen on how they've moved the orbital planet scanning down to ground level, so I've got a scanner telling me when I'm getting closer to precious ores I can mine. I didn't like playing the 'hot and cold' game in space and I don't need it here either. Please, BioWare, come up with better minigames!

I took the Nomad a little bit down the road and found a shield bubble keeping the radiation away from some ancient (Remnant) alien structures. I also found a weird Asari who leapt at me out of nowhere.

Mass Effect 2 introduced Paragon and Renegade triggers, which are like QTEs except optional. Plus you only have to press one button and if you do, something awesome happens. Seems like this game has something similar, though it's only come up this one time, and all it did was shove my new friend off me.

Peebee here seems to be a scientist, the kind that wears black makeup across her eyes and has 'QUIRKY FUTURE COMPANION' written across her forehead, and she's pretty amazed that I can actually get this old equipment to do something. Though it doesn't look like I'll be getting the ruins to do much until I scan the area and locate the glyphs it wants me to input.

Actually first I need to shoot the ancient robots guarding the structure, and by 'shoot' I mean 'Biotic Charge into them and then use Nova to blast everything around me'. Then I need to run for cover while my powers recharge. Thankfully there's still no mana to worry about, just individual cooldowns.

Though I do have to worry about how I'm going to get to these bloody glyphs, as my scanner says the conduits go up to the top of those wonky pillars and they're a bit hard to get onto.

Ah I see, there's another console that raises boxes I can jump on. Okay cool, I've got this.

Okay what the hell does it want me to do now?

Oh I get it, it's just Sudoku! It's a bit awkward to do it with symbols instead of numbers, but this isn't going to be a problem. Hopefully it's not going to ask me to do it too often though; I was enjoying the complete absence of hacking minigames.

This isn't the most intuitive map I've ever used but I think I'm getting the hang of it now. Seems like I've got room to stray from the road and go off exploring, a bit like the worlds in Mass Effect 1. Though I can only get out and visit places protected by a shield bubble, else the radiation will get me.

I've been activating forward station pods along the way, as they act as fast travel and resupply points. I can even use them swap out my characters, which is really convenient. Sometimes you don't want to do an entire planet with just the same two people, especially as they chat with each other and have different conversations depending on their different combinations. They sometimes interject when you're chatting to someone else as well, though not as much as I'd like.

Hey those asshole aliens we met earlier have a base on this planet as well! I learned from my friends at the Nexus that these guys are known as the Kett, and they've been bothering us for a while. They want to press all the buttons on the ancient relics the same as us, but they want to do it for evil!

That's why I'm going to snipe that guy way over there with my fist. I've mentioned it before, but I love the range on my Biotic Charge. I should probably be more mindful of the fact that it's going to drop me right in the middle of a crowd, a high risk, high reward playstyle is less viable when your health doesn't come back on its own, but hey that's what my jetpack-assisted dodge move is for. Also I've learned that I have consumable shield boost items I can use for emergencies.

The long road filled with people who needed shooting eventually brought me to this gigantic underground atmosphere processor straight out of Total Recall. So that means more ancient Remnant hardware, more conduits and more Remnant robots trying to kill me. Also more scanning.

My R&D terminal back on the ship requires two things before it'll spit out new gear: minerals and research data, so every time I see something new I've got to whip out the scanner and see if it glows yellow. I don't think it really captures the feeling of being an explorer in the way it's meant to, but extra optional lore is nice. It all contributes to building a world.

Anyway I pressed the button on the ancient machine and this time I got to a safe distance afterwards! It's always a gamble when you turn on an ancient device, as it's often the case that the creators never dared turn it on, or they were all killed off by it, but I got a good result this time. It immediately started clearing up the radiation outside, making the planet significantly more viable. I thought the game was going to be about driving from shield bubble to shield bubble, but now I can go anywhere! And my friends at the Nexus can start their colony!

A FEW HOURS LATER

I've met some friendly local aliens! Unfortunately the Angara are a bit of a let-down compared to all the Milky Way aliens. It really makes me appreciate the work the developers of the earlier games did to make the Turians, Salarians etc. sound distinctive, as these guys basically sound like ordinary humans for the most part. I can hear a bit of distortion in their voice, but they're just too normal.

They've got some great creases in their clothes though. Crease technology has improved significantly since the earlier games. I could really believe that this is a photograph of real action figures.

But a lot of the original aliens are still around and look so much better by comparison. Though I suppose Jaal's alright.

Also this is my whole team, every recruitable character in the game. It doesn't seem like much, but Mass Effect 1 and 3 both had six squadmates to pick from as well (not counting DLC). They've taken away the option to change their outfit or equipment now though. All I can do is choose how to distribute their points on a level up. Well, plus I could date them I suppose. The 'flirt' option shows up all over the ship but characters do have a fixed sexuality and many of them will only be interested in one of the Ryders.

I've got a few more places on the galaxy map to visit now and new NPCs to talk to. Most are silent, but sometimes they want me to go rescue people, or scan a dozen things scattered across the galaxy, and if I'm lucky they'll have a dialogue wheel of conversation topics. There's a lot of talking in this game if that's what you're into (and a skip dialogue button if it's not).

There are also a lot of enemies protected by energy bubbles, with a floating weak point that needs shooting to disable the barrier.

Pretty much every Kett boss fight so far has been against a guy like this and they're getting a bit repetitive to be honest. Though I'll take these guys over the occasional difficulty spikes of Mass Effect 1.

Hmm, what else am I getting tired of doing over and over again? Well there's those transitions on the star map, that's one thing, but I've already mentioned them. Plus there's the loading transition on the Nexus when I'm going between areas. Basically I don't like sitting around and waiting.

Man, the star map's really filling up at this point. Seems like every time I get a new destination to visit, a bunch of other systems appear around it to give me more things to scan. And more transitions to sit through. Well I'm not falling for it, I'm only visiting systems I know will have somewhere for me to land.

The game was originally intended to have No Man's Sky-style procedurally generated planets to explore, but I'm not all that disappointed they couldn't pull it off and dropped the idea. I bounced off that game pretty hard, even after the updates. What I really want is another planet full of actual missions that I can eventually build a colony on once I've gotten the viability high enough.

This is only a star cluster by the way, not the entire galaxy, so it's not too weird for the ship to be travelling around without using mass relays. The Andromeda galaxy is 2.5 million light years away and we reached it in 634 years, so we can theoretically cover 11 light years a day. It'd take us decades to cross the galaxy, we can't go jumping around from one side to the other in hours like in the other Mass Effects, but we can reach plenty of local stars with just regular FTL engines.

Each new world means a new kind of barren terrain to hike or drive across! It looks so pretty though.

It's weird though, how I'm always going to places which have already been settled by others and swiping their minerals from right under their noses. I don't mean from the planet they live on, I mean from right inside their own outposts (though I am mining the hell out of their landscape as well).

By the way, I like how the Tempest always lands on planets instead of sending a shuttle down, as it sets her apart from the two Normandys. Plus it gives the game endless opportunities to show her off, not that it needs an excuse. I think I've seen more of the Tempest in this game than I've seen of all the Normandys in other the other games combined. My poor hard drive is struggling under the weight of all the screenshots I've been taking of it.

I'm also seeing a lot of this Nomad, mostly from the back.

This planet's cool though as it's lost a lot of its mass due to exploding, so I'm jumping around in low gravity. It reminds me of driving around on the Moon in the very first Mass Effect. It's funny how there's 10 years between the games, but when you're driving around outside they don't really look that different.

Oh. Turns out the original pre-Legendary Edition version of Mass Effect doesn't look so pretty anymore. Well, at least it'll always have Garrus... and Andromeda glaringly does not. If I was going to list my top 5 Mass Effect companions I don't think a single Andromeda companion would make the list. Not because I don't like them, but because I wouldn't even remember them. It's a bit of a shame seeing as the companions are supposed to be the most memorable part of the game.

Anyway I'm going to stop playing now. Again. Every two years I get a little further in the game, then stop and forget to get back to it. But hey, I've got a while left before the next Mass Effect comes out, so there's no need to rush.


CONCLUSION

---

The biggest thing that surprised me about Mass Effect: Andromeda is how much it feels like a proper Mass Effect game. They may have left the world(s) they built over three games behind, and there isn't a whole lot new in Andromeda to find, but they brought (most of) the classic aliens, the gameplay, and the fantastic art design. In fact they've brought back parts of the first game that were abandoned for the sequels, giving me back the driving and exploration I'd missed.

It's a little like a remix of the first three in gameplay, with the main new features being the jump jet and the scanning. Plus it's been Far Cry'd up a bit, with reasonably big open worlds full of icons to deal with, objects to scan, and areas to play the 'hot and cold' mining game. But I don't mind the occasional drive across a beautiful empty wildness so I was fine with that. Could've done with less missions taking me between loading screens though.

Everything I read about the game beforehand said to only do the tasks that seem important or interesting and not get stuck trying to do every menial time-wasting side quest, so I took that to heart and I feel like I've been having a better time because of it. Mass Effect is all about guns and conversation, so if a job didn't seem to involve one or the other I wasn't interested. I was also able to ignore all those baffling research and APEX squad terminals. It's not like the game's short on content without them. In fact I'm not surprised that the developers had so much trouble with the facial animation, considering there's like a million scenes and two billion lines of dialogue in the game. I'm was just making up numbers there, but it does apparently have more dialogue than Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3 combined.

People suspected that the game had a troubled development well before it came out, and then we got the GIFs to prove it. The game was memed to death; whenever I've talked to anyone about it they're the first thing that gets mentioned (and the only thing, as it seems that no one actually tried playing the game themselves). But to be honest the animation seemed mostly fine to me, aside from the occasional NPC sliding around or falling from the ceiling. Maybe they've fixed it, maybe I'm just easy to please, either way I got no hilarious GIFs of my own to share. Sorry about that.

Another thing people had a problem with is Ryder, as they're cheerful, friendly, and a little out of their depth, and there's nothing you can do about this. If you want to play as a veteran badass, or a grumpy asshole that pisses everyone off, you're out of luck. Most conversations give you two kinds of responses and it's either a choice between compassion or logic, or between casual or professional, and either way you're basically the same person. Personally this worked for me, as my Ryder turned out exactly as I wanted them to, but it doesn't give you much scope for role-playing when you're only fine-tuning how jokey you are.

I think this might actually be a step up from the previous games, where you'd decide if you wanted to be a Paragon or a Renegade at the start of the trilogy, and then pick the matching option every single time in every conversation afterwards. At least Andromeda doesn't pressure you into being tediously consistent. Also the important decisions have no icons to guide you, no clue to which of them the game feels is good or bad, so you're left to make the choice on your own.

Overall I'd say that Mass Effect: Andromeda is a Mass Effect game with some noticeable (but not game-breaking) flaws that can be enjoyable if you focus on the parts that you find entertaining. Just like the other three games. In fact I'm even going to give it my 'Wins the Prize' badge, because I can see myself sticking with it to the end and then coming back for more. I'm a sucker for sci-fi shooter RPGs though to be honest. I mean I'm The Outer Worlds' biggest fan and I'm still hyped for Bethesda's Starfield even after the Fallout 76 saga. I'm even enjoying Ghost Recon: Breakpoint at the moment and that's barely even sci-fi. It did start off as a buggy mess and get improved by patches long after all the reviews came out though, so it does have that in common. I wouldn't say that the negative reviews are necessarily wrong about Andromeda, but it's not quite as mediocre as its reputation suggests.

---

Thanks for reading all of that, you've passed the test, congratulations! As a reward you now get to leave a comment underneath. You could share own thoughts on Mass Effect: Andromeda, or take a guess at what the next game will be. I feel like I might have made the clue a little too obvious this time, but I'm never sure.