March 28, 2017

Mass Effect Andromeda Review

Ha ha, wow, it's been YEARS.

So, the last time I talked about Mass Effect it was a long and angry rant about how the end of the trilogy was absolute garbage. It was bad enough to retroactively make a pretty decent game, terrible. And when Andromeda was announced a while ago, with no actual gameplay trailer but a "behind-the-scenes" kind of trailer, there were red flags everywhere for me. How do you justify advertising a game that's so unfinished that you can't even show off gameplay? Well, EA found a way.

And EA keeps on finding a way.

If you want my quick thoughts on the game, I'll say them here and you can skip the in depth portion down below.

Mass Effect Andromeda: 8/10 (Above Average)
It's a mixed bag, but pretty fun if you're a fan of the series. If you're a newcomer... just play the original trilogy instead.

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Gameplay: (7/10 - Above Average) This is the biggest change in the series so far. With each new entry in the series, Mass Effect tends to drift away from an RPG kind of game and more into a future-Call of Duty game. Or, I guess Gears of War would be more appropriate, since it's cover-based, third person shooting.

The gameplay is amped up a little from the previous entry (or from what I remember when I played Mass Effect 3 to completion once after launch. Movement has been left mostly unrestricted, including the new ability to quick-dodge and jump at any time. The Dark Souls fan in me loves the ability to dodge-roll. The Mario fan in me hates the jumping. It's slow and clunky, which is most noticeable when trying to do some of the platforming which is required at some points of the game. It's in those moments that you really feel like either they needed to commit to a more fluid platformer feel for the movement, or just leave these sections out completely.

Combat is more engaging, though, so that's a decent trade-off for the clunky controls. Not that I mind clunky controls all that much. It's a BioWare game. I know what I'm getting into. I digress; the combat is made more engaging by making engagements less pre-scripted. By which I mean, there are less hallways with chest-high boxes or suspiciously open rooms with a lot of computer consoles and chest-high balcony railing to hide behind. There's still an unmistakable moment of clarity when you enter a room for a "peaceful" mission only to see that there are a bunch of cargo boxes scattered around the room in what can only be deemed a tactical distribution. But maybe I'm finding combat more engaging and difficult (playing on Normal difficulty here) because the auto-cover mechanic is hit and miss. I've been killed in combat more than once by hitting reload while running towards a chest-high wall only to not immediately duck behind it. Instead, Ryder (the main character) stands around like he's waiting for the bus. There are also a few enemies that can bypass the cover altogether, which confused me when I first encountered them, since the camera didn't want to show me the guy firing at me, just a wall.

The biggest change in this game that has it stand out from the original Trilogy is it's now an "open world" game. Each planet you go to now has a vast area to drive around in and explore. More driving than exploring, unfortunately, as the worlds aren't all that interesting on their own. There are a handful of repetitive missions that are carried out in pretty much the same fashion on each planet, but there are also a slew of more engaging missions that keep each trip to a new planet feeling like a total waste. Although there is something formulaic about it all. Each new world you discover will slowly kill you until you visit three shrines and open up a secret bunker. The shrines usually need you to search the area around them for symbols which you then use to play a pseudo-sudoku (say that five times fast) kind of mini-puzzle. The bunker is a platform/puzzle/combat challenge. Accomplishing this allows you to explore the world without the planet itself as a health hazard. As such, it's usually one of the first missions a player will accomplish when arriving on a new planet. Other quests and tasks are of the collectible variety, like a slower version of Assassin's Creed. The open world concept fills up time. It's just filler between missions to pad gameplay length. HOWEVER, that being said, it does open up the combat a little more. The reason you don't have as many hallway skirmishes is because you are often allowed to approach an enemy encampment from any angle you'd like. (Though the side with all the cover is probably going to be your best bet.)

The strategy from earlier games is gone now, though. You can no longer have access to more than three powers at a time. This means that for the entirety of my game so far, I've only leveled up three tech abilities, since I know I'll never change to a new power, at the risk of not being able to quickly switch back to a different power at a moment's notice. Giving your squad-mates commands is gone too. You can have them target something, but that's it. No more ordering abilities. No more having one member use a pull ability while another uses a support ability and you destroy everything in between. The AI covers everything now, so that means that although you have two other teammates with you, you might as well be on your own.

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Graphics: (3/10 - Below Average) Everyone's seen the GIFs and screenshots and videos by now. The character animations are a train wreck. In a lot of ways, this game feels more akin to an early last-gen game than something that has come out at the beginning of the second wave of the current gen.

Let's start with the main character. Mass Effect games, like Dragon Age, offer you the ability to make your own character. Character customization has always been a key element in BioWare games since they try to act like a Dungeons & Dragons campaign, but on your console/computer. This entry was surprisingly lacking in character customization options. You're allowed to make any character you want, provided that they look like one of the 9 preset faces. There is a narrative reason for this: you have to look like your father in the game. (In-game dad, not real life dad.) It's kind of impressive the first time you see your father and you're like, "Oh, yeah, I can see a family resemblance." But then you get past the first mission, dad's gone, and suddenly you don't have much of a reason to be shackled to one of the preset faces anymore. For my part, I tried making a swarthy middle-eastern looking guy. He came out looking like a Pacific Islander or a Mexican. (Or a mix of the two). I'm happy with how he looks on the whole, but it was a far cry for what I was going for.

But, once you get your character out of the character creation screen, you have to deal with them being animated. And things start breaking down. First complaint people have is that in natural game lighting, the characters look terrible, even when they were looking nice in the creation menu's soft, calculated lighting. That's not my issue, necessarily. I knew I was getting a second-hand face. My issue is that my character's left eye keeps clipping into his brow. Or his eyelashes do. Either way, in normal dialogue, it looks like he's got an unhealthy eye twitch or he's just a little too drunk to be dealing with talking right now. Speaking of eyes and talking: during conversations, try not to look at your character's eyes. They'll tend to dart all around the place. Almost like they're reading from a teleprompter during conversations. More than once, I would be talking to crew and Ryder would suddenly look right, as though he expected to see a ghost and if he was just fast enough he could catch it. It's distracting in a major, and frankly, unforgivable way. This is 2017. There is no excuse for this kind of animation error. I can get custom-faces are going to have weird collisions, or whatever, but eye tracking isn't that hard to program. It hasn't been for over a decade now.

That's not getting into some of the more bizarre graphical bugs. The first time I attempted to climb down a ladder, My character suddenly jumped two feet higher than the ladder and pantomimed climbing down a ladder in mid-air. Another time, I saw a crew-mate leaning against a railing in open air. I even encountered an enemy in a T-pose, the default 3D model pose... And even that was fucked up as their left arm cut through their body and out the opposite side. How do you mess up a T-pose?!

Outside of the character animations, the worlds are... well.. pretty? They're unremarkable, to be honest. While they look nice as a backdrop, none of them are going to leave you breathless. Dark Souls 3 had vistas and viewpoints that made me actually gasp or say "wow". Mass Effect's alien planets leave me passive at best and groaning at worst. (Oh, boy! A desert planet! Can't wait to see all of the sand!) It's not to say they look bad, just that they don't look interesting. And they're sparsely populated. Very few trees, few plants, just mostly rocks. (With the exception of the jungle planet which is almost claustrophobically populated with trees.)

The view of the planets from the outside isn't much better. Gone is the Mass Effect 2 method of traversing the galaxy; puttering around in a cute little Normandy from planet to planet. Now, when you select a planet, you're given a short, 30 second cutscene as you watch from the viewpoint of your ship's nose, turning from the planet you were looking at, zooming across the galactic disk, parking yourself into a close orbit of the planet, and then, inexplicably zooming out to see the whole planet again. This is unskippable and kind of frustrating if you're like me and you want to get that 100% exploration rating for the galaxy as soon as you enter it. Why isn't this skippable? Obviously it's hiding load times. That's fine, I can understand that and I'll appreciate that it looks pretty while it does it. But why do we zoom in close to the destination planet, and then pull back out? Why not just go there in the first place? It's a visual design choice that I simply cannot fathom.

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Story (6/10 - Average) I'm saying that it's average compared to other Mass Effect games. And this is also acknowledging that I haven't finished the main story yet.

When Mass Effect 3 ended in the weird way that it did, I was upset because I loved the universe they'd made and they kind of put an official END to that entire universe. I was skeptical about how they'd pull off another game in the series without it being a prequel. Well, kudos to BioWare, they found a way.

You're part of a colonization effort to populate the Andromeda Galaxy, a different galaxy than the Milky Way. As far as I can tell, you left sometime between Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3, based on story-line clues and character name-drop cameos. But, it took 600 years to travel to Andromeda, so this technically happens after Shephard does what they do. Whatever it was. So it's a prequel/sequel/spin off. Either way, I'm fine with the concept.

What I'm not super fine with is how much they stripped down the Mass Effect Universe. Roughly half of the alien races are missing. Including the Quarians, which were my favorite race of mysterious space-gypsy-mechanics. There are Asari, Turians, Krogan and Salarians, in addition to the boring humans. On the table are two new alien races. The Kett, which are the bad alien guys (who honestly remind me a LOT of the Collectors from Mass Effect 2) and the Angarans which are the native, good alien guys.

What bugs me about the Angarans is that they aren't very alien at all. Each of the main alien races had an interesting story, culture, and biology. The Angarans are like humans: they're boring and predictable. There is nothing alien about the Angarans beyond their appearance. They apparently have the same cultural icons as humans, same infrastructure, same paranoia about alien races. At most, they seem to still be vaguely tribal and family-oriented as a social structure, but they're also a space-faring species, which, just throwing this out there, is a huge missed opportunity for a first-contact scenario. You show up in a space ship and they immediately know how to deal with you. There's not a "Strange alien visitors" moment. It's just immediately down to business for these guys.

And that's really the most endemic problem for this game: the writing is lazy. I'm not going say that the writing in the Mass Effect games before now weren't. They were trope and cliche filled to the brim. But the key players were interesting enough to make those tropes and cliches feel new. Andromeda, doesn't. There's a surprising lack of character diversity in your crew. They're all pretty snarky, with just a spectrum of "full-o-sass" to "politely sarcastic". While it's nice to see Ryder be less militantly formal than Shepard, it also means that the rest of your crew isn't all that interesting to interact with, unless you already have a vested interest in them. For me, the two crew memebers I had an interest in were the Krogan, who I always love in every Mass Effect game, and the Turian, who I'm hoping to bang. (There are some biological issues with cross-species sex that I would like a frank discussion of in-game, but I know that'll never happen.) The rest are two humans who are military trained, the Angaran who is all about honor, but kind of a downer, and an Asari who has commitment issues. Bleh.

The story itself is more about the struggles of establishing a network of colonies long after most people have just shrugged and decided to try it on their own for a while. There are a lot of plot points that I would love to dig into, but you're just not allowed to. Maybe I will further down the line, but for the time being, a lot of what happened before you got there just stays in the past. It's a backdrop that you're told in vague terms what happened, but you're not allowed to investigate yourself. Case in point: there was a mutiny on the hub-ship Nexus that was supposed to be the main center of operations. That informs a lot of why you're the one doing all of the scouting, building, exploring, and not a team of qualified scientists. But you're never given a lot of information about that mutiny. You get to talk to people who were key to the entire fiasco, but most of your dialogue options are limited to pithy responses. It seems like Ryder knows exactly what happened, so there's no reason to broach such a touchy subject.

On the other hand, less important dialogue, and more importantly, text, is still as entertaining to read as ever. I still enjoy, for the most part, reading the Codex entries, a feat that only Mass Effect has ever pulled off for me. And the logs you find scattered here and there and the public notices are interesting to read too. If it's written, it's pretty good. If it's spoken, it's middling to poor. A lot of the voice performances are stilted. Ryder, for his part (I can't say how the female voice does) has snappy dialogue, but sometimes is read a little too disinterested to really send home the sarcastic punch you need. Also, there's an issue with the audio mixing. I don't know where else to discuss it, so I'll throw it in here: the characters' volumes change the further away from the player's camera they are. While this isn't normally an issue, there have been a dozen times where the person I'm talking to glitches out and walks away, or a team member who has dialogue is stuck in another, nearby room. This makes them impossible in most cases to hear. If I didn't habitually play everything with subtitles, I'd be lost much of the time. Also, some of the dialogue doesn't want to cue correctly when out exploring. Interesting cross-talk gets cut off by a system message about a new outpost or something equally unimportant, and that cross-talk is never heard again. Or dialogue has large, unnatural pauses between lines, which is jarring.

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Miscellaneou

A few random gripes I have about the game:
~ The inventory gets cluttered up too much with random symbols. It's not like it's terribly confusing, but comparing items in your inventory is tricky to remember what is what. It makes doing things like shopping for upgrades a hassle, since it's hard to know what is the outdated equipment and what is the good equipment. Keeping a handful of weapon options requires memorization on the player's part to not sell equipment. Also, crafting supplies are counted in your limited inventory budget and there is no storage (as far as I have found) to drop off stuff to keep your inventory clean.
~ The APEX missions require you to be online, even for offline "send a team away" missions. If you get disconnected from the server, you can say good bye to resource harvesting in the background until you exit out to the title screen to reconnect to the server. Even if you switch to multiplayer and connect to the server, the game still requires you to exit to the title screen to be considered "connected" for the APEX missions to be accessed.
~ The crafting system is strange and confusing. In addition to crafting equipment, which is straightforward, if not well organized, there's a research panel, which expends a different resource to create blueprints to make weapons and armor in the equipment crafting section. Why these two are separated is beyond me. It just adds to the number of menus you have to navigate and understand in order to utilize a pretty bare-bones creation system. There's not a lot of freedom in this crafting system, no matter how convoluted the UI is.
~ Can someone PLEASE explain to me why I'm four Mass Effect games in and I still can't romance a Krogan? I got to bang an alien that could die by touching me, but the hardy and sex-starved Krogans are off limits? I thought we were better than this, BioWare.

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Conclusion

So, it's not a perfect game. The visuals seem dated and distracting. The gameplay is largely improved, at the cost of losing RPG elements. The story has potential but is lacking the depth that is expected from a Mass Effect game. I mean, it's fun. I've devoted more than 20 hours into the game and I'm not stopping soon. But the game severely lacks polish and a lot of the mistakes seem like rookie mistakes that shouldn't be in any game in 2017, much less a game with as much funding and backing as a BioWare game would have, being published by EA. It seems like a lot of "good enough"s and "no one will even notice"s went into the game's development, and it definitely shows. It's not nitpicking if it's glaringly obvious, right?

If you're a fan of the series, you'll enjoy what it has to offer for what its worth, and the potential for the narrative. If you're not, this isn't a great jumping on point. It offers a watered down universe that could be arguably as expansive as the Star Trek universe (given enough time). The other Mass Effect games show a lot more care and love for the games and feel much more cohesive, if a little dated. Give those a shot first. It'd be a shame if this was your first exposure to the series.

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