Mass Effect Andromeda Impressions

There are no story spoilers below, but I totally understand if you’re on complete blackout and want to skip. (I was, and did, and still do.)

I finished the first three Mass Effect games and finally started Andromeda.

First, if you’re like me and were way behind on the series, there is no connection between the original trilogy and Andromeda. Much to my chagrin, there is no need to play the first three or know anything about the previous story. I can’t explain why without spoiling the very beginning of Andromeda, but it’s a clean break and the start of a brand new thing. (And it makes sense, too, it’s not something like, “It was all just a dream.”) You don’t get to import your game from Mass Effect 3, so it doesn’t matter what you did in the past.

Still, you should play the first three games, because they are awesome, and you probably have them anyway since they’ve been on sale for years. (I did.)

Andromeda’s gameplay is also brand new in the series. It’s not like any of the previous three. It’s a much more open world game. Combat is similar to 2 and 3, but a bit more complex. I’m playing on Normal this time, so it’s considerably harder. Everything is now a bullet sponge.

My cynical side wonders if they started out making an entirely new intellectual property and then halfway through, the bean counters decided they had to put the Mass Effect label on it to sell it. It really feels like a ground-up rewrite.

I saw the buzz from the Internet about terrible animations, but that didn’t deter me in the slightest from buying it. As of this writing, I’ve played about 12 hours and I haven’t noticed anything even remotely justifying Internet outrage. To be honest, I think people are still mad about the end of Mass Effect 3 and projecting that anger onto Andromeda. There’s nothing wrong with the animations. Since the Internet pointed it out, I’ve been staring at everything, intently waiting for something bad to happen, and maybe there’s 1 second of “bad” animation for every hour of gameplay. If this weren’t the age of Twitch and memes and replaying of video clips, I doubt anyone would have noticed anything.

The facial tech is vastly improved from ME3. Better than Fallout 4, in my opinion. Skin tones are amazing. There’s a bit of oddness in the eye movements and blinking-they aren’t quite as realistic as previous games. They are sluggish, almost slow motion. You can sort of see the pupil move from side to side, and it moves farther than I think it should. So it ends up looking just a tiny bit cartoonish. The blinking looks sort of exaggerated, as when you blink on purpose instead of involuntarily.

Hair is also a tiny bit weird. It’s as if they are all in low-gravity environments, because the hair doesn’t quite “settle” on the head as fast as it should. The “waviness” is really exaggerated. Almost like Disney animation.

Is that what “hyper-realism” is? I don’t know. It doesn’t detract from the game at all, it’s just an odd thing I noticed. (I notice these things because the entire time I played Mass Effect 1, 2, and 3, I wondered how I would go about programming facial animations, because I always wonder that about software, so I kept looking at eye movements and changes in expressions.)

The game chugs a bit on my GTX 1070. On the default settings it picked (ultra, no resolution scaling), it doesn’t quite maintain 60 fps but it seems to stay over 30.

As for the story, there is a distinctly different tone to the writing. A “younger” tone, if you will. Sometimes it sounds like a blogger or a “social media expert” wrote the dialog. There’s a lot of modern vernacular slang. (It was in the old games too, but it’s really obvious in Andromeda.) Here’s a fun drinking game: Take a drink every time you hear, “We’ve got this.” Have an ambulance standing by. “It gets better” gets repeated a lot, too. I actually heard a character say something like, “I don’t want to do that … for reasons.” For reasons. I also heard a random line, “These ones don’t seem hostile.” Presumably somebody wrote that line, and an editor okay’ed it, and then the voiceover guys said, “Yeah, that sounds normal.” Meanwhile I’m over here having a grammar stroke. I’m old, and that writing sounds wack, yo.

This is still space opera, by the way. Science is noticeably lacking in this science fiction, more so than any previous game. It doesn’t bother me, but sometimes I chuckle when they try to pass things off as realistic instead of magical.

I can’t say I’m feeling as much of a hook for the story as I did with Mass Effect 1. I wrote that the ME1 story was very focused from start to finish. Andromeda’s isn’t, although I can only vouch for the start. Perhaps it’s because of the new open world nature. I have an overwhelming urge to complete every zone before moving on, but the overall story does not progress that way. (To be fair, I felt that way in the previous games too, but in Andromeda there is a thousand times more to see and do per zone.) You have to leave zones behind to continue the main story.

So far the story beats are good, but not quite great. I’m not fond of their attempts to explain open world game mechanics within the narrative. (Collect all these things out in the world for reasons.)

I’d say Andromeda is a solid triple, if not the home run of Mass Effect 1. I’m definitely planning to finish it. (And that’s despite the new Dark Souls 3 DLC being available!)