A soulless plodge through space to make friends.

How you gonna compress the story beats of 3 games to stack against just one? C'mon zip. Don't let the genophage get you like this.

Andromeda is 60-100hrs of game time, longer than the entire OT, so this shouldn't be an issue. Unfortunately, it only has enough content for about 20hrs.

The only romances that were really paid attention to in this game were Cora, Peebee, and Jaal's, 2 of which are options for male Ryders. The romance options outside of those 3 were all trash. 

All you needed was "The Witcher 3 was better" at the end and you would have received Dutch's seal of approval. A missed opportunity.

Why shouldn't it be an issue? The game couldn't possibly put the equivalent of the entire Race Against Time, the Collector plot and Loyalty missions, the Reaper War along with the quarian/geth conflict and genophage resolution in one single game on top of all the non-critical activities that each game contains. The game would be friggin enormous. 

Blame Bioware.  They are the ones that said that the game was designed to be a stand alone game and not part of a Trilogy or something like that.  You may not see Ryder or the others again.  I know how it ends, but with Bioware, that doesn't mean anything.  If they want me to play it as a single story that won't be continued later on, then that is how I'm going to judge it.  It fails miserably in that regard.

Its been long enough to look at the game objectively now.

And say whats wrong with it.

Endless fetching aside, poorly animated fights aside. Entire alien races rendered chracterless and given gender issues to deal with aside. Barren uniteresting worlds etc.

Lets put all that in the obvious basket.



In the not so obvious basket.....



Bio have created a game whose sole point is to make up for the fact it has no story to begin with, it has been refocused around loyalty missions and tying those missions to sex for that purpose.

Probably targetting teenage boys with confidence issues.

In ME2 you could at least say lives were on the line. That you needed loyalty to secure victory. That there was a story driving these interactions forward and determining the fate of individual relationships.

In MEA you're replacing thought out main missions intended to progress the story, with closed ended friendship arcs that serve no purpose other than to unlock "non threatening friend who isnt human mode."

Or "lets have alien sex mode."

(At a ratio of 4 aliens to 1 human.)

A lot of people have fallen for it and heres why.

There is a group of people who play Mass Effect to make up for lost human contact.

Having a group of non threatening, non humans to have sex with is actually less scary than looking an actual person in the eye. Even better if they can make friends along the way.

This same group can often be found complaining about pronouns and campaigning for gender neutral toys or simply saying that life is too hard, believing it has an adjustable difficulty level that must be changed to suit then.

They do not want to have to choose between Mordin and the Krogan. They'd rather secure snacks for movie night.

They don't want to put the effort in to taking down the shadow broker.

Theyre too busy listening to SAM tell them the shadow broker is too dangerous to attack head on and they should scan for an access node and let him do it for them.

They don't want a game that requires any more effort than theyre willing to put into it and thats not much.

To those people the game is a flawless gem, because the game is catered to them. Go here, scan this, say that, have sex, make friends.

Thats Mass Effect Andromeda's thing. Never push the player, dont allow the player to feel overwhelmed by difficult decisions, for the love of gaming don't expect them to think for themselves.

Give them a walking tutorial that follows them throughout the game and call it the protagonist.

The main story in this game is non existent, if you removed the Nomad and planet travel, its likely about 10-12 hours long.

And thats where all of the above becomes annoying. I can deal with half arsey animations bad NPC VA and poor dialogue this is Mass Effect after all.

But I do that because I respect the games ability to draw me in and make me want to. This presents nothing of value to play through outside of combat.

But if I'd wanted that and nothing else I'd play Gears.


A familiar quote about people who've been trying to make things better by upgrading it with garbage that, in theory improves it and its kind.


"No glands, replaced by tech. No digestive system, replaced by tech.

No soul, replaced by tech.

Whatever they were, gone forever."


This game is outdated, out played by other games and aimed in the wrong direction.

They'll need help if this is to continue.


Zip, out.

This... pretty much applies to every recent Bioware game ever. OT included where Paragon Shep always saves the day, no matter how stupid it is.
I mean, especially ME2 where you're Arnold Schwartzenegger PhD. Behavioral Psychologist on the SSR Daddy Issues with the minor plot that gets thrown away come ME3.

I mean dude, the Citadel DLC...

Dunno why this dawned on you come Andromeda that's pretty much just trying to hit the same marks.

Let's not be dishonest here. The game spells out exactly why the expedition took place. If you don't really like the reason, then that's fine, but let's not pretend that there's no in-story explanation to the point where there's "literally" no reason at all.

As for a lot to compare to rather than just Mass Effect, I never really see any mention of anything beyond just the OT and The Witcher, so I don't see why other games matter. They are apparently the standard by which this game is largely measured. What other games did you have in mind? 

...aaand you lost me here.