[SPOILERS] My (long) Andromeda final review
Aug 15, 2017 12:41:09 GMT
themikefest, MPApr2012, and 15 more like this
Post by anarchy65 on Aug 15, 2017 12:41:09 GMT
Well, I said once in a thread I was going to make a review on every aspect of why I hate Mass Effect: Andromeda, so here it is. It's long because I want to show every little bit that makes this game horrible.
STORY
Well, almost every game begins with a good story. And Mass Effect begins wrong in that path. Because the story not only sucks, it also doesn’t make any sense and use too many deus ex-machina, especially near the ending.
You go away from The Milky Way, and as soon as you arrive, surprise! Trouble! And everyone acts as if they really weren’t expecting that, as if it was all going to be rainbow and butterflies. Seriously, you take 600 years to reach a galaxy, and you are surprised things aren’t going as expected, LOL. The whole idea of the Initiative is pretty stupid by itself.
Ryder doesn’t give a shit about his/her father’s death, LOL, Shepard cried over Kaidan/Ashley even three years after his/her death, but Ryder didn’t mourn his/her father even once. He/She’s just like “Hey, I’m the new Pathfinder, let’s get to the job”. Also, you’re arriving in what is supposed to be a new galaxy... and it looks so much like the old galaxy. The Nexus is basically The Citadel and the Tempest is your Normandy.
And then jumping a little foward, you find a giant kett spaceship (suddenly the kett can understand you and you can understand them, huh!) and escape with a help from the screenwriter by going through the Scourge. And even better, you accidentaly discover the capital of the only other civilized species in the Heleus Cluster! What are the odds! I’m not going about what you find after, because it’s basically the eugenistic cliché: kett want to transform other races on them to be the genetically perfect race, blah blah blah, and the Archon is the shitty-written villain that wants to be a god. Ugh.
But things get far worse when near the end. Suddenly the game starts throwing information at you and just doesn’t explain anything. The jaargan suddenly are revealed as the creators of everything and the Archon was playing you when he injected that thing on you in his ship (seriously, how didn’t anybody think that would be trouble? The villain injects some unknown shit on your organism and you don’t think you should check it out?). Ryder loses his connection to SAM, but by some supreme deus-ex machina BULLSHIT, he’s able not only to interface with the remnant, but he can control AN ENTIRE REMNANT FLEET (!!!!) to go fight the Archon, who got his/her twin to access the meridian through SAM. But through some deus ex-machina as well, his/her twin is able to lead the way and help kill the Archon. No decent explanation of the Scourge (just that it was some weapon that went wrong), why Ryder could control the Remnants, why twin Ryder could do all that, what the fuck are the jargaan, just pitiful cliffhangers for a next game that hopefully won’t come. Also, the epilogue takes too long.
CHARACTERS AND DIALOGUE
Probably the worst of everything on this shitty game. Dialogue is generic and cliché as fuck, as are most of the characters. Everything is like “Hope is all we have” and “You gave us hope, Pathfinder. You are the best!”, like it was written by a 12 year old. Take for example after you rescue the Moshae. Nobody talked to me about the religious thing the kett had going, nobody talked about my decision to kill the cardinal or save the angara, no, EVERY dialogue was something like “OMG the Archon is so evil, we have to stop him”. There are not any memorable dialogues.
And the characters are even worse, I’ll even talk slightly about them one by one. Liam is a piece of shit. He’s a fucking idiot who only likes to make bad jokes with some dialogues that seem to be written by a kid (Maybe because I shot him on the face!). But even worse is his “loyalty mission”. He didn’t like the angara and humans weren’t IMMEDIATELY getting along and so he had the brilliant idea to give vital informattion (including comm codes) to a random contact, and the contact got captured. And afterwards he calls you a jerk and acts like it was all a joke. If I had an option to kill or exile him for that, I would have, because that’s what he deserved. Many characters are about ONE thing only. Draack is there to say “badass” things and to make jokes about his age (hello Wrex, even your voice seems to be the same). Vetra only talks about her sister and Cora only talks about asari. Jaal has a variety of topics, but the angara are very uninsteresting because they have no real characteristic. They are basically a copy from humans with big families, and the “roekaar” thing just show how uncreative the creative team was, because that’s just a bad copy from nowadays politics. His mission also didn’t make any sense, his siblings joined the roekaar, but during the mission one of them betray the leader and says he hates him, LOL. Why the fuck did you join him in the first place, then? Peebee was the only character with a personality, individualistic and wanting to explore, she had some very good lines, but her thing in the end saying she wanted strings (romance) and feels like a part of the team seems to come out of nowhere. Kallo, Suvi, Lexi and Gil are not companions, so I’ll leave them out, but the Kallo memory thing was nice, a pity it ended there and was never mentioned again. SAM is a bad attempt to copy EDI (he’s even a blue ball, just like her). Your twin is absolutely useless (he/she stays in coma until before the last mission) and is just used to provide the deus ex-machina.
Oh, and about romance, I want to point out something that made me very pissed: The game FORCED me to cheat on Peebee! I flirted with her and Keri, and then Peebee told me she wanted to get serious, ok, we had passionate sex and said we loved each other, very beautiful. Then Keri calls me to a bar, I go expecting to say now I have a girlfriend, but... THERE’S NO OPTION! THE GAME FORCES ME TO HAVE SEX WITH HER BECAUSE I HAD PREVIOUSLY FLIRTED WITH HER, EVEN THOUGH NOW I’M WITH PEEBEE! WTF! DAMN IT BIOWARE, NOT EVEN THE FUCKING ROMANCE COULD BE DONE RIGHT!
GAMEPLAY
Well, this is the most interesting part of the game, but it’s still bad when compared with previous Mass Effects
Starting about combat: You can only use up to 3 powers (!!!!) at one time, you can’t give orders to your companions to use powers (you can’t even choose their weapons!), and the helpful mini-map was replaced by a very confusing north-south-west-east shit at the top of the screen. Autocover is terrible and most of the time it doesn’t help. No pause wheel as well. Jetpack is a nice addition though, and the AI has vastly improved, I was flanked a lot of times and shot from all sides, something other Mass Effect enemies never did. But the game is also easier, because there are consumables to restore your shields and melee attacks are very OP. I basically just charge blindly and shotgun and melee everything I see, tactic is pretty much gone. Your companions are SHIT in combat, they don’t kill anything, you basically solo it all. They are there only for the enemies to have something else to shoot at.
Exploration is shit, as usual, but they made it even worse. Scanning the planets are boring as hell, because there are some very long scenes every time you change system and planets, and on release version you couldn’t even skip the between-planet cutscenes! The Nomad is terrible because it’s even worse than the Mako: The Mako could climb mountains and had guns. The Nomad is developed three years later, doesn’t have guns and can’t climb a fucking hill without having to change it to “climb mode”, which makes it slow as hell. And you have to do it ALL THE TIME. It seems technology only goes backwards on Mass Effect. Oh, and when it hits something it’s HILARIOUS, because it hits a living creature 120 mph and it looks like it’s hitting a wall, the creature doesn’t even get scratched. Another funny thing is everybody else on the planet uses shuttles, but you’re stuck with a bad truck. Scanning planets and minerals is just uninteresting. There is even a system I remember with absolutely nothing worthy, to scan, you just click the right button on every planet to get the 100%, but get nothing. There’s even a planet (asteroid, actually), that is HUGE. And it had TWO, TWO FUCKING QUESTS ON THE ENTIRE THING! DAMN IT!
The character development is mostly useless, especially for your companions, because you can get every single skill to level 6 for them, you don’t have to make choices. Same thing go for those perks copied from DA:I, you can almost get them all. Inventory management and the menus are pretty confusing, it took me a lot of time to understand what was useful and what was not. Weapon crafting is nice, but a little confusing too. I didn’t bother much with it, just got my N7 armor, my OP Dhan Shotgun and my Cyclone VII, and that’s all I ever needed.
Oh, and the character creation is pathetic. As I recall, you have like 13 haircuts to choose, but I think I had over 40 options for some unimportant thing like scars or tattoos. Huge step backwards. Puzzles also suck on this game. The only good puzzle is the one they copied from real life: Sudoku. The jetpack outside of combat sucks to make the jump puzzles
QUESTS
Hold on to another TERRIBLE thing on Mass Effect: Andromeda. The side quests. They really don’t have a story, is a lot of fetch quests and “go scan that place for me” or “go find that person for me”. There’s a quest where a woman was looking for her sister. Her corpse was 3 ft way, I scanned it, came back, quest ended. It was hilarious. Other quests are so annoying because you have to keep going from place to place thinking “when this damn thing is going to end?” like that quest about finding the salarian traitor. And of course, the choices you make on the quests don’t mean shit. Go ahead, let a criminal with a genocidal virus escape, it won’t make a damn difference.
A lot of quests are also put “on hold” for A LOT OF TIME, and you just can’t remember the story anymore. Some of them don’t even make sense to be on hold. Liam wanted to make a “movie night” for everyone to get to know each other better, that was the initial purpose of the quest. And this quest you can only complete near the ending of the game, when the “know each other better” becomes pointless. The only good quests are the ones where you have to assault a base or something, or that leads you to fight with a great boss. I loved the first “Ascendant” I fought, and fighting the Architets was cool, I was waiting for more boss fights like that... but no, these are basically the only two bosses there are on the whole damn game.
GRAPHICS AND PERFORMANCE
The graphics are ok, I guess. There are 2016 games with better graphics on my opinion, but the problem is that ME:A demands too much of your PC and really doesn’t deliver that much. The environment is beautiful, I’ll give them that, but not worth what the specs they ask. Too granulate sometimes, especially on the Nexus.
I don’t need to talk about facial animations, right? Everybody knows how pathetic they are. And the asari clone face are the most lazy thing I’ve ever seen on a game. Not even DA2 was that lazy.
Do I need to mention performance issues as well? Sure, a lot were fixed by patch, but it was the most glitched and shitty-performance game released since Assassin’s Creed: Unity and Batman: Arkham Knight. Before patches, I just couldn’t play the game, because the cutscene of the ship arriving on the Nexus would just crash. After the patch, many glitches continue: Constant render delay, huge fps drops, stutters a lot (especially during cutscenes), everytime it stucks when exiting to desktop, camera loses the focus when you jump near a wall, during dialogue the person you’re talking to becomes invisible, your companion dies and you can’t find his/her corpse, I could go on for quite a while. There are also quests you can’t complete because the quest giver just disappeared (like Task: Cultivation).
SOME LITTLE SMALL THINGS
To finish, I wanted to mention some small things that alone aren’t THAT annoying, but when put together, contribute for the terrible experience that this game is.
First of all, NO QUICK SAVE. WHY?! And during a mission, many times I can’t save either! So if I have to leave, I’ll have to expect until a damn autosave triggers? Goddamnit! Also, there are too many cutscenes that could be just skippable.
Also, no renegade choices. Really didn’t make a difference to me, because I never play as a renegade, but WHY?! WHY?! Shepard had some badass moments, Ryder deserved some too. But no, we’re stuck between “four versions of a nice person”. Pathetic.
Also, fix this damn map and quest marker, will you? Finding those alarm disablers during the “invade the base” missions was absolutely horrible because the mark just wasn’t right.
And one last thing: Seriously Bioware, you put me to investigate Jien Garson’s murder, all that Benefactor bullshit FOR ABSOLUTELY NOTHING? YOU DON’T FIND OUT ANYTHING? WHY DID YOU PUT IT IN THERE? HAVE YOU NEVER READ TCHEKOV? DON’T DESCRIBE A DAMN GUN IN THE WALL IF YOU DON’T INTEND TO USE IT! And Ryder basically just forgets about it and doesn’t tell anyone, LOL! I know you are going to tell me that’s a cliffhanger, but that’s not how cliffhanger works! You don’t make a damn murder investigation in the game unless you’re going to solve it at some point!
FINAL VERDICT
Well, if you truly did read everything, I congratulate you. I know it sounds stupid, but I really wanted to show why I think this game is an absolute disaster in every aspect. I could have got even more specific, but I didn’t want it to write a review THAT long.
So the final verdict for this ABOMINATION is a 3/10 (release version). After patch: 5/10 (PC version, can’t speak for PS4 and Xbox).
Bioware will have A LOT to fix if they want to plan a sequel (which probably they do, because they didn’t explain absolutely anything about the plot and left a lot of cliffhangers) or even a DLC. If they release a new Mass Effect, I just hope they leave COMPLETELY ANDROMEDA BEHIND (just ignore it, shouldn’t be on Mass Effect lore) and start from scratch (or it can be in Andromeda galaxy, just ignore the Initiative and focus on something else). That would be my hope, but of course they won’t do that.
PS: Sorry about any grammar mistakes, english is not my first language, but I made the best to make the review understandable.
STORY
Well, almost every game begins with a good story. And Mass Effect begins wrong in that path. Because the story not only sucks, it also doesn’t make any sense and use too many deus ex-machina, especially near the ending.
You go away from The Milky Way, and as soon as you arrive, surprise! Trouble! And everyone acts as if they really weren’t expecting that, as if it was all going to be rainbow and butterflies. Seriously, you take 600 years to reach a galaxy, and you are surprised things aren’t going as expected, LOL. The whole idea of the Initiative is pretty stupid by itself.
Ryder doesn’t give a shit about his/her father’s death, LOL, Shepard cried over Kaidan/Ashley even three years after his/her death, but Ryder didn’t mourn his/her father even once. He/She’s just like “Hey, I’m the new Pathfinder, let’s get to the job”. Also, you’re arriving in what is supposed to be a new galaxy... and it looks so much like the old galaxy. The Nexus is basically The Citadel and the Tempest is your Normandy.
And then jumping a little foward, you find a giant kett spaceship (suddenly the kett can understand you and you can understand them, huh!) and escape with a help from the screenwriter by going through the Scourge. And even better, you accidentaly discover the capital of the only other civilized species in the Heleus Cluster! What are the odds! I’m not going about what you find after, because it’s basically the eugenistic cliché: kett want to transform other races on them to be the genetically perfect race, blah blah blah, and the Archon is the shitty-written villain that wants to be a god. Ugh.
But things get far worse when near the end. Suddenly the game starts throwing information at you and just doesn’t explain anything. The jaargan suddenly are revealed as the creators of everything and the Archon was playing you when he injected that thing on you in his ship (seriously, how didn’t anybody think that would be trouble? The villain injects some unknown shit on your organism and you don’t think you should check it out?). Ryder loses his connection to SAM, but by some supreme deus-ex machina BULLSHIT, he’s able not only to interface with the remnant, but he can control AN ENTIRE REMNANT FLEET (!!!!) to go fight the Archon, who got his/her twin to access the meridian through SAM. But through some deus ex-machina as well, his/her twin is able to lead the way and help kill the Archon. No decent explanation of the Scourge (just that it was some weapon that went wrong), why Ryder could control the Remnants, why twin Ryder could do all that, what the fuck are the jargaan, just pitiful cliffhangers for a next game that hopefully won’t come. Also, the epilogue takes too long.
CHARACTERS AND DIALOGUE
Probably the worst of everything on this shitty game. Dialogue is generic and cliché as fuck, as are most of the characters. Everything is like “Hope is all we have” and “You gave us hope, Pathfinder. You are the best!”, like it was written by a 12 year old. Take for example after you rescue the Moshae. Nobody talked to me about the religious thing the kett had going, nobody talked about my decision to kill the cardinal or save the angara, no, EVERY dialogue was something like “OMG the Archon is so evil, we have to stop him”. There are not any memorable dialogues.
And the characters are even worse, I’ll even talk slightly about them one by one. Liam is a piece of shit. He’s a fucking idiot who only likes to make bad jokes with some dialogues that seem to be written by a kid (Maybe because I shot him on the face!). But even worse is his “loyalty mission”. He didn’t like the angara and humans weren’t IMMEDIATELY getting along and so he had the brilliant idea to give vital informattion (including comm codes) to a random contact, and the contact got captured. And afterwards he calls you a jerk and acts like it was all a joke. If I had an option to kill or exile him for that, I would have, because that’s what he deserved. Many characters are about ONE thing only. Draack is there to say “badass” things and to make jokes about his age (hello Wrex, even your voice seems to be the same). Vetra only talks about her sister and Cora only talks about asari. Jaal has a variety of topics, but the angara are very uninsteresting because they have no real characteristic. They are basically a copy from humans with big families, and the “roekaar” thing just show how uncreative the creative team was, because that’s just a bad copy from nowadays politics. His mission also didn’t make any sense, his siblings joined the roekaar, but during the mission one of them betray the leader and says he hates him, LOL. Why the fuck did you join him in the first place, then? Peebee was the only character with a personality, individualistic and wanting to explore, she had some very good lines, but her thing in the end saying she wanted strings (romance) and feels like a part of the team seems to come out of nowhere. Kallo, Suvi, Lexi and Gil are not companions, so I’ll leave them out, but the Kallo memory thing was nice, a pity it ended there and was never mentioned again. SAM is a bad attempt to copy EDI (he’s even a blue ball, just like her). Your twin is absolutely useless (he/she stays in coma until before the last mission) and is just used to provide the deus ex-machina.
Oh, and about romance, I want to point out something that made me very pissed: The game FORCED me to cheat on Peebee! I flirted with her and Keri, and then Peebee told me she wanted to get serious, ok, we had passionate sex and said we loved each other, very beautiful. Then Keri calls me to a bar, I go expecting to say now I have a girlfriend, but... THERE’S NO OPTION! THE GAME FORCES ME TO HAVE SEX WITH HER BECAUSE I HAD PREVIOUSLY FLIRTED WITH HER, EVEN THOUGH NOW I’M WITH PEEBEE! WTF! DAMN IT BIOWARE, NOT EVEN THE FUCKING ROMANCE COULD BE DONE RIGHT!
GAMEPLAY
Well, this is the most interesting part of the game, but it’s still bad when compared with previous Mass Effects
Starting about combat: You can only use up to 3 powers (!!!!) at one time, you can’t give orders to your companions to use powers (you can’t even choose their weapons!), and the helpful mini-map was replaced by a very confusing north-south-west-east shit at the top of the screen. Autocover is terrible and most of the time it doesn’t help. No pause wheel as well. Jetpack is a nice addition though, and the AI has vastly improved, I was flanked a lot of times and shot from all sides, something other Mass Effect enemies never did. But the game is also easier, because there are consumables to restore your shields and melee attacks are very OP. I basically just charge blindly and shotgun and melee everything I see, tactic is pretty much gone. Your companions are SHIT in combat, they don’t kill anything, you basically solo it all. They are there only for the enemies to have something else to shoot at.
Exploration is shit, as usual, but they made it even worse. Scanning the planets are boring as hell, because there are some very long scenes every time you change system and planets, and on release version you couldn’t even skip the between-planet cutscenes! The Nomad is terrible because it’s even worse than the Mako: The Mako could climb mountains and had guns. The Nomad is developed three years later, doesn’t have guns and can’t climb a fucking hill without having to change it to “climb mode”, which makes it slow as hell. And you have to do it ALL THE TIME. It seems technology only goes backwards on Mass Effect. Oh, and when it hits something it’s HILARIOUS, because it hits a living creature 120 mph and it looks like it’s hitting a wall, the creature doesn’t even get scratched. Another funny thing is everybody else on the planet uses shuttles, but you’re stuck with a bad truck. Scanning planets and minerals is just uninteresting. There is even a system I remember with absolutely nothing worthy, to scan, you just click the right button on every planet to get the 100%, but get nothing. There’s even a planet (asteroid, actually), that is HUGE. And it had TWO, TWO FUCKING QUESTS ON THE ENTIRE THING! DAMN IT!
The character development is mostly useless, especially for your companions, because you can get every single skill to level 6 for them, you don’t have to make choices. Same thing go for those perks copied from DA:I, you can almost get them all. Inventory management and the menus are pretty confusing, it took me a lot of time to understand what was useful and what was not. Weapon crafting is nice, but a little confusing too. I didn’t bother much with it, just got my N7 armor, my OP Dhan Shotgun and my Cyclone VII, and that’s all I ever needed.
Oh, and the character creation is pathetic. As I recall, you have like 13 haircuts to choose, but I think I had over 40 options for some unimportant thing like scars or tattoos. Huge step backwards. Puzzles also suck on this game. The only good puzzle is the one they copied from real life: Sudoku. The jetpack outside of combat sucks to make the jump puzzles
QUESTS
Hold on to another TERRIBLE thing on Mass Effect: Andromeda. The side quests. They really don’t have a story, is a lot of fetch quests and “go scan that place for me” or “go find that person for me”. There’s a quest where a woman was looking for her sister. Her corpse was 3 ft way, I scanned it, came back, quest ended. It was hilarious. Other quests are so annoying because you have to keep going from place to place thinking “when this damn thing is going to end?” like that quest about finding the salarian traitor. And of course, the choices you make on the quests don’t mean shit. Go ahead, let a criminal with a genocidal virus escape, it won’t make a damn difference.
A lot of quests are also put “on hold” for A LOT OF TIME, and you just can’t remember the story anymore. Some of them don’t even make sense to be on hold. Liam wanted to make a “movie night” for everyone to get to know each other better, that was the initial purpose of the quest. And this quest you can only complete near the ending of the game, when the “know each other better” becomes pointless. The only good quests are the ones where you have to assault a base or something, or that leads you to fight with a great boss. I loved the first “Ascendant” I fought, and fighting the Architets was cool, I was waiting for more boss fights like that... but no, these are basically the only two bosses there are on the whole damn game.
GRAPHICS AND PERFORMANCE
The graphics are ok, I guess. There are 2016 games with better graphics on my opinion, but the problem is that ME:A demands too much of your PC and really doesn’t deliver that much. The environment is beautiful, I’ll give them that, but not worth what the specs they ask. Too granulate sometimes, especially on the Nexus.
I don’t need to talk about facial animations, right? Everybody knows how pathetic they are. And the asari clone face are the most lazy thing I’ve ever seen on a game. Not even DA2 was that lazy.
Do I need to mention performance issues as well? Sure, a lot were fixed by patch, but it was the most glitched and shitty-performance game released since Assassin’s Creed: Unity and Batman: Arkham Knight. Before patches, I just couldn’t play the game, because the cutscene of the ship arriving on the Nexus would just crash. After the patch, many glitches continue: Constant render delay, huge fps drops, stutters a lot (especially during cutscenes), everytime it stucks when exiting to desktop, camera loses the focus when you jump near a wall, during dialogue the person you’re talking to becomes invisible, your companion dies and you can’t find his/her corpse, I could go on for quite a while. There are also quests you can’t complete because the quest giver just disappeared (like Task: Cultivation).
SOME LITTLE SMALL THINGS
To finish, I wanted to mention some small things that alone aren’t THAT annoying, but when put together, contribute for the terrible experience that this game is.
First of all, NO QUICK SAVE. WHY?! And during a mission, many times I can’t save either! So if I have to leave, I’ll have to expect until a damn autosave triggers? Goddamnit! Also, there are too many cutscenes that could be just skippable.
Also, no renegade choices. Really didn’t make a difference to me, because I never play as a renegade, but WHY?! WHY?! Shepard had some badass moments, Ryder deserved some too. But no, we’re stuck between “four versions of a nice person”. Pathetic.
Also, fix this damn map and quest marker, will you? Finding those alarm disablers during the “invade the base” missions was absolutely horrible because the mark just wasn’t right.
And one last thing: Seriously Bioware, you put me to investigate Jien Garson’s murder, all that Benefactor bullshit FOR ABSOLUTELY NOTHING? YOU DON’T FIND OUT ANYTHING? WHY DID YOU PUT IT IN THERE? HAVE YOU NEVER READ TCHEKOV? DON’T DESCRIBE A DAMN GUN IN THE WALL IF YOU DON’T INTEND TO USE IT! And Ryder basically just forgets about it and doesn’t tell anyone, LOL! I know you are going to tell me that’s a cliffhanger, but that’s not how cliffhanger works! You don’t make a damn murder investigation in the game unless you’re going to solve it at some point!
FINAL VERDICT
Well, if you truly did read everything, I congratulate you. I know it sounds stupid, but I really wanted to show why I think this game is an absolute disaster in every aspect. I could have got even more specific, but I didn’t want it to write a review THAT long.
So the final verdict for this ABOMINATION is a 3/10 (release version). After patch: 5/10 (PC version, can’t speak for PS4 and Xbox).
Bioware will have A LOT to fix if they want to plan a sequel (which probably they do, because they didn’t explain absolutely anything about the plot and left a lot of cliffhangers) or even a DLC. If they release a new Mass Effect, I just hope they leave COMPLETELY ANDROMEDA BEHIND (just ignore it, shouldn’t be on Mass Effect lore) and start from scratch (or it can be in Andromeda galaxy, just ignore the Initiative and focus on something else). That would be my hope, but of course they won’t do that.
PS: Sorry about any grammar mistakes, english is not my first language, but I made the best to make the review understandable.
