Game Review - Mass Effect Andromeda

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Game Review: Mass Effect Andromeda by Bioware
Score: +9/-18 / FAIL
Mass Effect: Andromeda takes players to the Andromeda galaxy, far beyond the Milky Way. There, you'll lead the fight for a new home in hostile territory as the Pathfinder, a leader of military-trained explorers. This is the story of humanity’s next chapter, and your choices throughout the game will ultimately determine humanity's survival.
Mass Effect Andromeda is the game every game designer needs to play because it is full of examples of what to do. Sadly also many examples of what NOT to do.

-1 / FAIL Release a game with commonplace interactions that are bugged (and not fix them after many years).
  • Six years later players are still struggling to do certain common tasks because they are inexplicably glitched (see video below), or just plain clunky.
  • The story is still really good and you can feel they fully fleshed out the world, and the before and after of the main quest. But people will focus on the faults they stumble over, and ultimately that's what killed the game. A pity because the story is worth experiencing.

+1 Overall the main story is good and it starts out with a strong hook
  • +1 Additional mysteries and revelations paced throughout the main story arc tries to keep things refreshed and players engaged.
  • +1 Visible changes to the world reflecting story progress and player choices.
    • +1 Some really good attention to detail here, such as the contents of the pantry on your ship. As the main quest progresses, it will have foodstuffs first from supplies brought over by the initial voyage, but later will have local products from the colonies established in Andromeda. The various details, big and small, help contribute to feeling like the world is evolving.
  • +1 Interesting side quests add lore and immersion to the game.
    •  How are people living and coping in Andromeda? What are the aliens like? What are various people like? Little slices of life.
    • +1 Sidequests and other interactions that explore what happened before major events and what happened after.
      • This has two big benefits;
        • This way not everything interesting has to be explained during a major quest.
        • Some lack of explanation carefully handled can become an intriguing mystery to pique the player's curiosity. Some of this can be handled with various audios and texts that can be found during a mission, for example.
        • In combination, you can basically tell a bigger story with spinoffs and have richer events.
      • An Epilogue after the fantastic finish to the main quest is really useful, especially in conjunction to the details that demonstrate and acknowledge that the world has changed. Too many games just conclude and then dump you back into a open ended state to tie up unfinished quests, feeling like nothing just happened.
        • Very few games do this, which is unfortunate when some of the best stories, like Tolkein's Lord of the Rings have an epilogue after the key action. Despite such examples of storytelling in the past, very few games take after them.
  • -1 Many side quests are boring.
    • Mostly fetch quests and nonsensical random-chance-triggered quests. Such as when a camp you were just at a couple of minutes ago and you passed by several times may now have a quest object. And you can just travel back and forth to one camp until you find the required number of quest objects.
    • The payoff for these quest after the time investment is poor. Usually you just kill something and collect treasure. And there's no way to really know which ones have a good experience at the end until you reach the end.
    • When sidequests are boring, there are various negative outcomes:
      • A sense of wasted time.
      • A distrust of future sidequests.
      • A severe reduction to the momentum of following the story or enthusiasm for playing the game.
    • Definitely there is a less of quality over quantity here. Some of the little meaningful quests are just going to a location and getting a scripted cutscene, but they still feel much more impactful and worthwhile even if the player barely has any interactions or choices.
      • +1 Even the many post-quest follow-up emails and conversations with companions feel better and you just read those without any interaction at all. These are a fairly low-resource way to add a lot of value to the game. You just need good story writers, which Bioware seems to have.
      • Unfortunately very few games before or since Mass Effect Andromeda have learned this lesson and all too often we just get low-impact no-payoff mediocre-experience boring quests to fill time. Especially in live service games which rely on keeping players repeating content; and games that try to appeal to players who like an "open world" by simply having a large map.
+1 Brings companions to life and helps you emotionally invest in them
  • Such as party banter that's actually interesting to listen to while you are walking from A to B (which also helps fill the dead time in travelling to quest locations).
  • Even party banter on ship, making the space feel populated by characters with character instead of just mannequins.
  • Emails from the crew, a message board used by the crew. Little touches that add a lot of atmosphere but without a lot of production cost. You just need good writers immersed in each character to bring the characters to life.
    +1     Romances that end in sex
    • Okay, not raunchy porn vid sex but actual nakedness, even exposed nipples on female characters. If you're going to make a game for mature players, then treat them like mature people who can handle seeing loving people engage in sexual behavior.
    • It's nothing worthy of repeated replay in a scene gallery (like almost every adult visual novel has nowadays) but at least they dared to go there, even though it's long after movies have already dove deep in those waters.
    -1/FAIL Talking to people is tedious
    • You have to frequently circle around and move slightly further because it appears there is not only a valid arc but a valid distance that is not too close and not too far before the keypress prompt will appear.
    -1 Companions are too strong:
    • On Normal difficulty -- presumably the benchmark for how they think most players will play the game -- you barely have to do anything and your companions can finish the fight for you. Getting upstaged by NPCs is generally an unsatisfying experience for players.
    • When there are too few enemies you might not even be able to do anything because they've finished the fight while you were getting into cover and getting your bearings.
      Reward Timers are terrible in so many ways
      • -1 If you are in another menu such as looking at your Inventory, the timer stops You have to pass multiple loadscreens to go back to your ship or the space station to access the appropriate terminal. This wastes as lot of time as you are going there for no other reason.
      • -1 You cannot see the timer while you are elsewhere, so you have no idea how much time is left, especially as various things such as being in the game menu will pause the timer.
      • -1 / FAIL All these contribute to highly interruptive play in a role-playing game meant to immerse you in a world and role; as well as highly inefficient use of time.
        • This should not be underestimated. In fact the pauses and interruptions exacerbated by not knowing exactly how much time is left contributes to the feeling of boring time spent in the game and can easily taint the overall perceptions of the game.
      • A better way would have been to give less per unit time but let it accumulate automatically without having to periodically collect it and restart the timer.
      • -1 You can "upgrade" it this perk further to collect every 30 minutes but in fact this makes it worse:
        • More interruptions, more context switching, more travelling and load screens, more micromanagement.
        • Other timers are still at 45 minutes so if you go back every 30 minutes your next timer is only 15 minutes away.
        • Increasing the rewards by 33% would have been a better choice. Instead this option tricks players into wasting two perks they could have spent elsewhere.
      -1 Various systems discourage or penalize you for not doing things promptly
      • E.g., Research.
        • You acquire research by scanning and you can scan things only once. Many are in locations you cannot revisit or situations you cannot replay. But there are two Cryo Pod Perks that increase the value of your research scans. So to maximize your value of this valuable and limited resource you can do various things:
          • Not scan immediately and scan later when you have the perks.
          • Rush gameplay to acquire the perks so you can start scanning for maximum value as soon as possible.
          • Limit your research to the "best" options -- Go online and research ahead of time what to get so you won't be short on points.
        • All of these behaviors pull the player away from being immersed in the game and maintaining the momentum of engaged gameplay.
      • E.g., Treasure
        • Treasure containers don't respawn, including the special ones revealed by a Cryo Pod Perk. So to maximize their value should they give equipment, you would want to collect them when you are at a level where gear is at the Tier X cap. This is very late game and you might not even get there when you finish the main story (rendering all future activities more or less pointless).
        • Instead these containers should give loot that is not scaled by level, such as materials or research points. While this also means players can't get gear from it, other systems gain relevance such as Research and Development, which are fuelled by acquiring research points and executed by spending materials.
        -1         APEX missions are badly thought out
        • APEX Missions let you send out sorties to do missions. If they succeed you get a little bit of loot.
        • If you get negative traits due to mission failure you cannot get rid of them ever.
          • This wouldn't be so bad if there were a point to disbanding a team that, for example, accumulated too many bad traits.
        • There is no point disbanding a team because it does not reduce the resources to acquire another team. So your third team will cost 80 Resources whether you currently have two, one, or zero teams.
        • There is little point upgrading a team except with the highest tier general bonus upgrade.
          • Every gear upgrade destroys the previous one without even a partial refund or possibility of reassigning gear.
          • Success is capped at 94%.
          • Maximum success of gold difficulty missions is around 60%, more if you have the correct traits for the mission. But at that success rate you really don't even want to try it because a failure can attach a permanent negative trait to your team.
        -1 Big and frequently overlapping icons on the map.
        • Very often it makes it really tedious or nearly impossible to pick the one you want, which really undermines the whole point of having icons on a map.
        • And if you think the overland map has clumps of icons getting in each other's way, try looking at the map of the small Tempest ship space.
        • Why did anyone think it was okay to release the game this way?
        -1 Mining Zones are tedious
        • You drive around clumsily in your Nomad land vehicle, frequently going up outcroppings of rock because the mineral meter tends to spike higher there. After finally locating a good location with a high mineral concentration and you finally commit to mining, you get about the same as two nodes of minerals you might come across from wandering around.
        • Worse, you can just pick up the Cryo Pod passive that gives you resources every 45 minutes. You just leave your game open and collect a pile of rewards every 45 minutes while doing absolutely nothing in-game.
        • If you frivolously waste your resources on too-frequent development of items, just spend all that money you accumulated to buy resources. There's nothing much useful to buy anyway.
        -1 Weapon classes have no character
        • Even without using weapon mods and researched augmentations, the weapon classes have far too much overlap: Such as pistols that can do more damage than shotguns and fully automatic sniping rifles. You can choose any one weapon class and have a versatile loadout. Might as well just have only one weapon class.
          -1 Enemies constantly scale to your level but your development is limited
          • There are only so many skill slots and non-overlapping passives. Gear can only be upgraded so much. But enemies will continue to get stronger when you level up even when your development has basically plateaued.
          • Fortunately (?) Normal difficulty is so laughably easy and companions are so strong that character development barely matters.
          -1 Loot from defeated enemies can disappear right before your eyes
          • There are situations where enemies respawn repeatedly. When the game cleans up a wave and starts another, it removes the bodies -- and any loot from those bodies that the player hasn't picked up.
          • Perhaps this is to prevent players from farming loot, but in such a case, why let them drop loot at all?
          -1 Scripted events take you away from one-time locations and events when there's loot on the ground.
          • In the long run, the loot is not critical. But it sure is an irritating experience.
          • And most of the time (unless you've played through it before) you have no idea there's a scripted event coming that will do that.
          -1 The protagonist has to use a land-bound landrover when everyone else is using a shuttle to bypass terrain limitations

          -1 The sudoku puzzles at Remnant sites accept only one solution when some puzzle boards have more than one valid solution according to the rules.

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