Learned the wrong lessons from the original trilogy. :/

Can be argued it was a tragic victim of an online smear campaign but ultimately it deserved its fate of not getting a sequel. That being said a sequel would still have been preferable to what we got instead.

Ultimately they will just have to move on and try again to continue the story of the Mass Effect universe in another title.

Mass Effect is one of my favourite videogame series. This doesn't feel like Mass Effect at all, and fails to be entertaining as its own thing.

The gameplay:
- Combat is mandatory and very generic, makes it feels like a space call of duty rather than a mass effect.
- Outside of combat, you just have to follow quest markers once after another.
- Most dialogue options are useless since you can tell the result is the same as if you picked any other option.

The story: so a bunch of Milky Way colonists arrive at Andromeda and the first thing they do when encountering aliens is... creating an open conflict with them? I can excuse the first encounter since they did shot first but, after that, all characters just go on a full xenophobic murderous spree with these alien species with no single attempt to do things right. And ignoring that, the gameplay doesn't support the story at all, since it's just centered on shooting aliens.

Chief.. I-.. I got some bad news. We've somehow made a worse Mass Effect game than Mass Effect 3. You may want to plug your nose because this one is FOUL.

First and foremost, this game is so.. so... outrageously BORRRRRRRRRIIINGG. It's like they took the most tedious parts of the original trilogy and made a whole game out of them. You travel from nothing planet to nothing planet to do- Guess what?: NOTHING. There's no life, there's no soul, there's not even a light behind the main character's eyes. They're dead on the inside and so am I.

There is no fun to be had and it's a massive slog to wade in. You could take a 2 hour nap while traveling to different planets and you still wouldn't be there yet when you wake up. Which is ATROCIOUS because you're often times being told to leapfrog back and forth from planets you just left.

Your crewmates might as well be made of cardboard who are too scared to speak to you so they email you with important personal information about themselves immediately upon leaving their room. So glad I could customize my own twin to the abomination I wanted him to be, but he doesn't do anything. The shallow ass dialogue options lead Ryder down a path of being the dumbest person alive tasked with the most crucial mission in the galaxy, and yet of course they somehow figure it out through failing upwards at every turn.

There's no real reward for the cleaning up planets other than more enemy shlock thrown at you and I hope to God you like Sudoku because it's a major feature in this game that you have to do multiple times. The power system is stripped to the bare minimum in favor of this garbage crafting system that I couldn't even stand to look at.

It's so bad and no, just because it's 2023 does not make it some underrated masterpiece people were just too mean to back then. This game is still broken as Hell, soft-locks, crashes, and looks atrocious. Characters clip in/out of cutscenes and duplicate themselves all over the place. Enemies and companions T-pose mid combat, doors stay closed when they shouldn't, etc.

The story and characters are so forgettably mediocre that I don't even remember what happened to most of them. Worst of all, it's wildly unfun.

I have changed on a molecular level having played this piece of shit game.

This game makes me so mad to think about. It was an ambitious project that was sadly ruined by a horrific launch that could've been prevented had EA and Bioware not had their heads up their asses and let it stay in the oven longer. All the post-release work was spent on fixing (some) bugs and anything to do with story DLC or a sequel was either scrapped or put in a book that probably no one read.

I feel like this could've been like a "new ME1" for what could be considered an Andromeda galaxy trilogy but due to corporate greed and EA wanting to push a shitty Destiny clone (Anthem) out asap and Bioware's incompetence this game would never realize its potential.

The story and character writing was... whatever, and the exploration was just dogshit, but the gunplay and combat were some of the coolest in the series.

I feel like as individual games (separate from the rest of the trilogy) this one isn't that far off from ME1 level and could've been the start of something special like ME1 was, but due to shitty decisions, it would never be.

MEA ist nicht so schlecht, wie es oft gemacht wird. Ja, die Animationen sind nicht immer perfekt (Treppen hoch und runter gehen, Gesichter), aber es gibt sehr viele wunderschöne Backdrops.

Die Kämpfe sind sehr dynamisch und bieten im Gegensatz zur orginalen ME-Trilogie keine Möglichkeit zum Pausieren.

Die Möglichkeit, den eigenen Charakter mit allen möglichen Kräften auszustatten und ohne Klassenlimits zu mischen, gefällt mir sehr gut.

Die Companions haben mir insgesamt auch recht gut gefallen. Nur Liam kann ich auch nach mehreren Playthroughs immer noch nicht leiden.

Leider bleiben am Ende viele Fragen offen, da BioWare/EA aufgrund des schlechten User-Feedbacks keine DLCs erstellt hat.

Vielleicht bekommen wir im nächsten Mass Effect ein paar Antworten, aber das könnte schwierig sein, denn das soll ja an die OG-Trilogie anknüpfen ...

Graphics - 3/5
Main Quests - 3/5
Side Quests - 3/5
Characters - 1/5
Combat - 5/5
Mechanics - 4/5

The best thing I can say about Mass Effect Andromeda is that it's playable.

To press deeper, this game represents the absolute worst of the modern video game industry. In BioWare's infinite wisdom, they decided to strip away everything they built in the original trilogy, sacrificing its tight, streamlined gameplay experience for open-world AAA garbage. Andromeda is like a bad future timeline that split off from the first Mass Effect, where instead of what we got in 2 they chose to double down on the boring, monotonous planetary exploration of 1. This is open-world design in its most tedious and least interesting form, and on top of that, hey let's pile on other features that everyone loves, like endless resource collecting, crafting mods and consumable powerups, equipment rarity, pointless 2% percentage upgrades to your powers, and a ton of side content that never amounts to anything more than bottom of the barrel fetch quests. Thus, a memorable action-RPG transforms into a goddamn loot shooter.

Anything you loved about the core experience of the Mass Effect trilogy is practically gone, and the vestiges that remain only serve to remind you how inferior the product is in comparison. Mass Effect was all about hanging out with your cool squadmates in space, getting to know them and becoming invested in their stories, and being presented with difficult decisions that challenge your morals and understanding of the story. Here, your crew are all merely different flavors of bland. I did not care to learn about any of them. I cannot think of a single choice presented that I felt I needed to consider for more than a second. And while I had my issues with the morality system of the original games, replacing it with four personality types that do absolutely nothing to color your character or their experience was a piss-poor alternative.

There seems to be a push to redefine this game as being "overhated" or somehow not as bad as originally characterized, but let me tell you, the massive technical disaster Mass Effect Andromeda was at launch only served to hide that this thing was absolutely rotten to the core. Even with the (slightly) cleaned-up presentation, there's almost nothing redeeming about it. Like many open-world games, it throws a lot at you, keeping you on that grind, where there's always something to do and you never have to stop and ponder about how little thought was put into any of this. It's like fast food, where you can keep shoving it into your mouth, never getting full but never feeling fulfilled.

Congrats to BioWare on developing the Arby's of video games.

Mass Effect: Andromeda begins in the year 2185, when you set out on a journey in large ships with the goal of settling the Andromeda galaxy. A coalition of Milky Way races - human, asari, turian, salarian and krogan - join the 600-year journey and are placed in deep sleep machines to ensure they don't age during the journey. Prior to the voyage, worlds in Andromeda's Heleus Cluster had been identified as highly suitable for settlement. Each ship consists of a crew led by a pathfinder tasked with exploring these worlds and other potential locations and making sure they are safe before settlement begins.

Depending on your initial choice, the game can start with one of the Ryder twins, Scott or Sara Ryder, and then you follow their father, pathfinder Alec Ryder, as he tries to assist in his endeavors. Alec and his children are traveling aboard the Hyperion, one of the ships with mostly human passengers. Unlike the familiar Shepard from previous games, the Ryder brothers do not have a respected status in the past, instead the protagonist's character and reputation grows as the story progresses. Since the events in Andromeda take place in the future, characters from the original trilogy are not present, and decisions made in past installments have no impact during the events in this game. This has been done to ensure that the game is understandable for new players. However, references to some of the characters from the original trilogy games can also be found for older players during exploration and interaction with various people.

The morality system of Paragon and Renegade choices from previous games has been changed. Tone of speech choices are used instead. Tone choices no longer fully affect gameplay as they did in the previous games, so Ryder is free to speak as harshly as he wants without affecting gameplay. As in the original trilogy, there's a Galaxy Map for navigating space, but it's different from its predecessors. The map is located at the helm and uses an overlay over the actual view of space. There is still the scanning of valuable minerals on planets that was in the previous games. This time the resource scanning is done on planetary surfaces using the ND1 Nomad. The main starship Tempest does not require refueling when traveling through space, unlike the Normandy SR-2.

The game features side quests similar to those in the Witcher series. Producer Mike Gamble has emphasized that Andromeda is not an open world game, but rather an exploration-based game. Either way, it is not linear. Ryder can learn any skill and is not locked into a single progression tree. In a given game, Ryder can have combat, tech and biotic abilities, while Shepard, the protagonist of the previous games, was limited to a maximum of two skill categories. However, Ryder's teammates do not have such flexibility and follow more typical classes. Ryder's abilities can be optionally reset on a regular basis as the situation dictates.

Ryder can unlock profiles by investing skill points in certain ways. For example, players who focus on combat and biotic powers can unlock the Vanguard profile. Each profile comes with bonuses tailored to the player's style. Six of the profiles correspond to existing Mass Effect classes. The seventh profile is called the Explorer and is obtained by investing skill points in combat, biotic and technology powers. Combat is faster than in previous games. Power wheel pausing and aiming have been removed. The game can still be paused, but it is no longer part of strategies. Characters automatically take cover when heading towards an object and leave it just as quickly.

Two types of vitality are gained by the player during the game. The first type is the AVP icon. These points are earned just by playing the game. Completing missions, interacting with the team, exploring and pretty much everything Ryder does can potentially earn points. These points increase his Nexus rank and allow him to awaken more of his expedition members who are still in Cryo sleep. The second type of points is known as vitality and is earned directly on specific planets, which unlocks more activity on that planet. Mass Effect: Andromeda also introduces a crafting system where Ryder can acquire blueprints for armor and weapons throughout the campaign. Weapons can be given custom names, and there is also a slot reserved for a new class of weapon now known as melee weapons. Six teammates are available to choose from during gameplay. Mass Effect Andromeda offers over 60 hours of gameplay.

2 full playthroughs and 108 hours later and this game is still dog ass.
combat can be very engaging, but one has to qualify that with "as long as you're on a difficulty where the enemies don't become bullet sponges" and "as long as you don't think about the 'profile' system that completely kills the appeal of replayability from a mechanical perspective".
the story and general narrative atmosphere is a mess, the gameplay outside of combat is stale, and the game as a whole is defined by the number of clashing priorities that drag down the entire experience.
andromeda was destined to fail from almost the beginning of its development cycle, and the resulting product is just that; a failure.