As part of my summer ritual of clearing out the backlog of games I pick up for cheap during Black Friday and Christmas sales, one of the titles that’s been in the pile for a bit is Mass Effect Andromeda. I included it on my Backlog Barbecue Cookout list specifically to force me to actually play it. It’s been a hard sell too, for a number of reasons, the lack of Fem Shep being a big one. I love me some Fem Shep.
Anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock since 2016 knows what a train wreck of a reputation Andromeda has, and for good reason. The game released practically broken, the character models are kinda goofy, and the voice acting is pretty terrible. It gets off to a fairly slow start too, with the prologue setting up your Ryder character to be the next Pathfinder in a fairly predictable manner, and then followed by one hell of a lengthy errand-running session on board the Nexus. By the time I got through all the conversing and meeting people and investigations, my trigger finger was itching something terrible. The Citadel was always my least-liked part of the original Mass Effect series, mainly because it was too big, but also because running around it was fucking boring. The Nexus is built to be Andromeda’s Citadel, and that’s not a good thing in my book.
Thankfully, thankfully, once I got down to my first planet, Eos, and starting actually shooting some shit, the game started to feel much better. I haven’t yet experienced any major glitches, though I have witnessed my squad mates fall through a few floors here or there. Nothing game breaking, yet. Hopefully the patches cleared most of that up.
I will say this though, so far, Cora and Liam have been pretty dull characters. Neither have the intrigue or mystery that Garrus or Miranda commanded, nor are they even as annoying as Kaidan was. So far they’re pretty flat and uninteresting. PeeBee, on the other hand, is exactly the opposite. I do hope her bubbly personality has a bit more depth, especially since she displays about a thousand times more personality than any Asari I’ve ever encountered.
By this point I’ve spent a bit of time on Eos, enough to terraform it and open up other side quests, and I do like how some of the quests are left for you to discover and not just highlighted on the map. I am tempering my expectations on the quests themselves though, because I have already heard that they all pretty much break down in to going to X location and scanning Y object. That’s kind of a bummer, but we’ll see how it goes. As long as I get to shoot some stuff, I should be alright.
