Okay, I had to break my own rules for this one. I was using the random number generator for a while to determine which game I was playing for any given session, but I reached a point where I drew the Mass Effect Andromeda “card” and I realized I was going to need a bit more time for that one.
MEA was a long game, quite a bit longer than I expected. One or two hours here or there just wasn’t gonna cut it. So I bent the rules a bit and decided I was going to settle in and grind it out. And I’m thankful I did, it took me at least a good 30 hours from the time I decided to finish it to actually finish it. If I would have waited for it to pop up through the RNG and only play it for an hour or two at a time, this would have been dragging out far longer than it already has (and it’s already lasting longer than I thought.)
Mass Effect Andromeda has a bad wrap. It was horribly and hilariously buggy when it released, and for a while it was Youtube comedy gold. But to the Bioware B-team’s credit, they straightened it out and for my entire playthrough, which ran a good 50+ hours, I only ran into two game crashes, which were freezes during cutscenes. I never ran into anything game-breaking or otherwise detrimental to my experience. So that’s a plus.
Graphically, the game has its moments. It can be really creative and gorgeous at times, especially when in tighter, more deliberately designed areas. Some of the planets can be visually impressive here or there, but for the most part they’re pretty barren, riddled with the same Initiative or Remnant structures over and over. Likewise the variety of the planets you’ll visit aren’t as diverse as one would hope. You’ll get tired of seeing sand and canyons pretty quick.
As for the game itself, well, it’s… good. It’s a good game. It’s not bad by any means. But it’s not terribly exciting either. There’s one major reason for this: the pacing of the game is completely fucked. It’s really hard to feel as though there’s a race against a powerful enemy when you can wander aimlessly for hours doing menial tasks and talking to random people for seemingly small stakes. You play as Ryder, a Pathfinder, which is essentially a problem-solver. Apparently, no problem is too small. I mean sure, the fate of humanity and and galaxy is at stake, but hey, you can spend some extra time finding some dude’s sister so he can take her home with him, just for her to be like “nah I’m good” when you finally find her, thus solving nothing. The combat was great, but there was way too much downtime between.
Speaking of downtime, holy shit I got tired of watching loading animations. Why can’t I board the Tempest and do what I need to do on the ship without leaving the planet? Does the ship’s computers only work in space? Anything that needs to be done on the ship requires you to leave whatever planet you’re on, which is pretty dumb. Later missions require you to fly to multiple planets, only to do one single thing, then leave to go to another planet or solar system. Everything requires watching an animation (which to be fair, is skippable most of the time) and waiting for shit to load. Flying between any two points requires multiple animations. You can’t fly to a specific planet in a different solar system, first you have to fly to the solar system, then fly to the planet. It would have been really fuckin’ nice to just select a solar system, then select a planet, and let the animation play one time while you load the exact location you want to go to.
This was exasperated when going to Kadaara, where 90% of everything you do there is out in the wilderness, not the port. But you have to land at the port, so you watch the load screen, hop into the port, then immediately turn around and access the lift to go to the wilderness, which is another load screen. In all fairness, after you establish the colony, I think you can land there instead, but honestly, by the time I established the colony I was so fucking tired of Kadaara that I tried not to go back.
I wasn’t sure how to feel about MEA. I was getting increasingly impatient with every passing mission. The story missions and a lot of the side missions tend to intertwine, and some side missions are put on hold until you complete certain story missions. So it was a back and forth trade off between working on this mission or that, and I was getting tired of not just being able to blaze through the story and get it done with. At the same time, I didn’t know if I was impatient because the game was becoming a chore, or because I just wanted it done. In the end I think it was a little bit of both, with most of the blame falling on the aforementioned pacing.
The reason I say this is because the final mission was actually pretty damn good. It was every bit as epic and exciting as it should have been, but it also put a pretty big spotlight on just how dull the rest of the game was. My first thought when experiencing this was “finally!” My second thought was why the game waited until the very end to get good. In my opinion, a story-focused video game should be like a roller-coaster, full of highs and lows, intense moments followed by small lulls to allow the gamer to catch their breath. If you don’t give the player enough of one or the other, it’s either a boring slog or an exhausting barrage. I’ve played some games that didn’t know when to give you a break. MEA is more like a train ride at the kiddie park, where at the end they launch you off a cliff. The climax was good. I was adequately excited and entertained, which I guess is better than being underwhelmed by it all. But is one mission worth 50 hours of build-up?
Oh, and if you’re wondering, I had my Ryder bag Peebee. She was just the easiest choice. One of the weird things I’ve always noticed about Mass Effect is how nobody’s interested in relationships with anyone else. They’re all hot for Ryder for some reason. Now, I could understand Sheperd. He/She was a badass. Fem Ryder’s kinda derpy though, so I’m not sure what anyone would see in her. In any case, my Fem Ryder apparently had the pick of the litter, except for Cora. I had my Ryder trying to hit on her for a good 25 hours into the game, only to realize she was straight. Go figure.
Now that MAE is finally out of the way, I’m going to try my best to get back to using the RNG, although I’m really starting to regret putting Yakuza 0 on the board. Man, that game is a chore.
