PC Gamer Top 100

Looks like she gives a lot of fucks to the guy right behind her actually.

Mass Effect 2 came in 7th, Witcher 3 was first. Not surprisingly, Andromeda didn’t make the list.

Where would Andromeda rank in your - let’s say, top ten games? Or does it?

Mass Effect 3 would probably be in my top 5 overall.

Andromeda doesn't crack my top 25. (I haven't played The Witcher 3 yet, which is why it isn't here.)


Top 10 - I love all these games equally. So while these are my "top ten," they're not in order of preference.

Max Payne 2

Saints Row 2

Mass Effect 2

Dragon Age Origins

Batman: Arkham City

Borderlands 2

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood

Red Faction: Guerrilla

Tomb Raider: Legend


15 more to create the Top 25 - Again, I love these games, but this is not a ranked listing.

Batman: Arkham Knight

Batman: Arkham Asylum

Borderlands

Just Cause 2

Mass Effect 3

Mass Effect

The Witcher (the first game)

Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag

Max Payne

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

Assassin’s Creed: Revelations

Saints Row IV

Tomb Raider (2013)

Alan Wake

Dishonored


There are so many more games that I enjoy that aren't included that I wonder if MEA would make it into my top 50. But this is a list of at least 25 other games I'd rather play than MEA. Take that however you will.

Neither did KOTOR. KOTOR2 scored 97...

Eh? They put Skyrim and New Vegas in the 20's, favoring them over classics that are still actually RPGs? GTA V 12th? Who made this list?

Shit, dawg, I don't think that list's worth a lot.

From my review:
+/- Enemy AI is quick to flank. Otherwise, dumb as a rock.

+/- Characters are a mixed bag. Scott / Sara are betas who take make sure everyone is comfortable, and rarely get the chance tell someone to go to hell. Peebee, Vetra, Lexi and Jaal feel genuinely different, and are fun to talk to. Suvi’s “deep” conversations reminded me too much of Ashley, but otherwise she and Kallo were unexceptional. Drack is a (mostly) funny old krogan, who was angry that I chose to save the salarian pathfinder instead of saving three krogan scouts (it’s not like the Pathfinder is an avatar of the species or anything). Liam’s an annoying little shit who talks nonsense and is clearly meant to be funny. On his loyalty mission, he clearly doesn’t know what he is doing, and doesn’t explain anything, but Ryder goes along with him after some half-hearted admonishment. Then later on he has the gall to tell Ryder, “You’re a bit of jerk sometimes”? I wanted the option to kick Liam off the ship. And Cora… well, Cora trained with asari commandos. Did she ever tell you that? Because she did. Asari. Commandos. Just let that sink in for a minute. Asari commandos. Wtf. Wait, sorry. Here’s some poetry written by an asari commando to make you feel better.

+/- A more personal gripe, so not an outright negative: all colony installations are bespoke. If the point of the game is building colonies and creating a new home, I hoped for a little more than, “Do side missions to accumulate randomly assigned ‘viability’ points, go to a location, hold E to settle.”



- I have logged over 1k hours in Mass Effect 3’s multiplayer. Andromeda’s is built on many of the same principles, but now with jump-jets! Good, right? It would be, if the maps weren’t so small and confined. While jump-jetting, am always worried about running into walls, pipes, boxes, other players... Lack of enemy variety was an issue in the single-player campaign, and multi-player highlights the issue even more. In addition to all of this, the netcode is a buggy, laggy mess.

- Bugs and glitches abound, from your pilot fusing with his chair to all guards on the Nexus crouching (instead of standing at attention). Once I even had the Nomad spawn in a vault.

- Had a few corrupted saves. Good thing there are half-a-dozen autosave slots.

- Frequent crashing on loading – usually when loading during a pre-rendered cinematic.

- Crafting. Cumbersome number of components, poor interface.

- Combat “profiles.” You can create and choose from up to 4 “profiles,” each of which contains only three skills (from any skill tree). Switch between profiles to access the different skills. But switching to a different profile immediately puts all your skills on cooldown, largely defeating the purpose of switching profiles in combat. Obvious console-itis.

- Core biotic skills from the previous games aren’t present – like Warp, Reave, or Stasis.

- Pointless sidequests (there’s a navpoint for that!). Go to X, complete Y, and return to X to receive reward Z. Mass Effect was good at making side-quests a part of the narrative experience, whether it was dealing with a Geth incursion or trying to get biotic extremists to stand down. So many side-missions in Andromeda gave me flashbacks of scanning all the keepers in ME1.

- Scanning in general is over-used. In a new area? Better scan everything, that gets you points for upgrades. Crashed shuttle? Scan. New mineral? Scan. What’s that over there? Scan. Oh, it’s a data hub. I’ve already scanned a dozen of those, but I haven’t scanned THAT particular one before – glad I did, that was 50 points. To be fair, scanning is also used to track footprints and occasionally to solve crimes (like in the Batman games), but otherwise it is leaned on far too often.

- Sudoku. You have to do at least one sudoku puzzle for every major Remnant vault, and sometimes there are optional ones as well. There can be multiple answers to a sudoku puzzle, but there is only one that will unlock the vault. I hate sudoku now.

- The same enemies on every planet. Kett, human pirates, anti-human angara, and a few monsters / animals. Some have extra health to make them bosses. That’s it.

- Respawning enemies. Clear a camp, drive past the camp to do the thing, do the thing, turn around to drive back, oh look, all the enemies in the camp respawned, let’s fight them again. This happens EVERYWHERE on every planet. A cheap way of padding the play-time. Driving / running past enemies sometimes works; though there was that time a Fiend followed me across half the map and killed me while I was locked in conversation with a quest-giver...

- Cannot customize squad-mates’ loadout.

- No pause screen in combat; the tactical interface is completely gone. Can tell squad-mates where to move, but cannot issue combat orders.

- Squad-mate AI is a step back to Mass Effect 1 levels of awfulness. At least in ME1 you could pause the combat and micromanage your squad if you had to.

- The Paragon / Renegade character system is gone. Perhaps not bad in itself, but there’s nothing to take its place. Without the ability to role-play as a particular type of character, it’s hard to meaningfully role-play – which means there’s little reason to replay.

- Audio logs don’t continue playing as you explore; they’re location bound. If you walk away from a datapad playing an audio log, the sound will fade away. You have to stand there, doing nothing, while it plays. You can’t even loot stuff nearby to pass the time while the log plays, because bringing up the loot menu pauses the audio log until you exit the menu. Wtf.

- SAM (the AI) never shuts up, and frequently cuts off / interrupts squadmate dialogue.

- Near-constant duck-face when humans are talking. Not as bad as it was, but still jarring.

- All asari have the same face (except squad-mate Peebee).

- No quarians. There are turians, asari, humans and salarians on the Nexus, irrespective of the status of their Arks. Krogan are present too. Why no quarians?

- Awful male turian designs.

- Facial animations are still bad – when compared to Ryse: Son of Rome (CryEngine), Batman: Arkham Knight (Unreal 3) and even BioWare’s own Dragon Age: Inquisition (Frostbyte 3).

- Sub-par voice acting. Vetra, Lexi and Peebee are fine. MaleRyder is quite decent (sounds like a young Nolan North at times), but FemRyder is – disappointing (that’s being kind). Cora Harper is one of the worst performances I’ve heard in a while; I didn’t like Cora’s VA in the original Witcher game (as Triss Merigold), and she’s awful here. One of the worst moments in game occurred during Drack’s loyalty mission – the actors sounded completely bored while reading their lines. We’re talking Gangstas in Space levels of bad. At least in the Saints Row 3 DLC, the awfulness was on purpose. Sad to see how far BioWare’s standards have fallen.

- A music soundtrack that, except for a few specific moments, is nearly invisible. The galaxy map theme is clearly based upon themes from the previous games, and one particular combat theme sounds inspired by the combat music from Overlord. Noticing the similarities made me nostalgic for the old games; it didn’t help me enjoy the new one (Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel suffered from a similar issue in a few places). Musical gestures are frequently the same as well – like the big swelling of music when you see your ship for the first time (that bit of music is criminally over-used btw). But the actual music is mostly motivic, not thematic like previous Mass Effect scores. The composer and design team tried to keep the same spirit in the music while changing the method used to express that spirit. I’d even argue that that sort of stylistic change was antithetical to the more “Hollywood” feel of the original trilogy’s soundtracks. If nothing else, the music is a boring ostinato underneath all the action.

- The childish conversation writing. A teen’s dream of what explorers would say. The mature tones of previous Mass Effects – even deliberate B-movie stylings like in the ME3 Citadel DLC – are completely gone.

- The story works, but never surprises. Perhaps because so much of it is borrowed or rehashed from the previous Mass Effect games.

- Kett threat is a retread of the Reaper threat

- I thought the outrage over the lack of Quarian DLC was just fans over-reacting. A story involving the Quarian Ark is teased in the final moments of the main campaign. Fuck you, BioWare.

- Treatment of Mass Effect lore. Female krogan did not mix freely with the males (they kept themselves separate and even formed their own clans). An AI fuses with the protagonist (you can hear BioWare laughing at forcing Synthesis on us in this way). No mass relays, so how is the Tempest traveling between systems? (Never explained.) Turians in Andromeda are way too friendly (many turians are highly distrustful of humans – said distrust being a relic of the First Contact war, of which Alec Ryder was a part). And some asari apparently prefer the male pronoun instead of the female (nonsensical because it was established in previous Mass Effect games that masculine terms (such as “father”) simply don’t exist in asari language and culture). There’s more, but hopefully you get the idea. Some people attribute this to SJW-ism. To me, it looks like the people making Andromeda simply weren’t as conversant with existing lore as they should have been. Blame that on whomever you want.


Before you say anything, you DID ask.

New Vegas is actually a pretty good RPG (Obsidian is a good company) and is respected by a diverse range of RPG fans. Much better than exploration sims Fallout 3 and 4. There's far more choice with how you solve quests, stats matter, dialogue is good, story is better and etc etc. Bethesda could learn from Obsidian (instead of denying them their bonus because they missed out by 1 point on their target Metacritic score.)