In a vacuum, Andromeda is a perfectly fine game. The gameplay is solid, the story is functional, the visuals and soundtrack are beautiful, but when you have 3 of the best games ever made sharing the same name, expectations are high, and unfortunately, Andromeda falls short in that comparison. I think you can play this game and find fun, but there is so much missed potential here, and so many seedlings of ideas that either never manifest or come out spoiled and tasteless. The memes of the facial animations on launch truly doomed this game from the start, and even with that having since been fixed, what's left is a game with an identity crisis, that fails to stand out not only within its own franchise, but really at all.
The first offender is the gameplay. Now, in truth, Andromeda probably has the best core combat mechanics of the entire series, with no restriction on classes and tons of really cool returning and new powers that still combine together amazingly, just like the amazing combat of Mass Effect 3. The improvements to movement are also stellar, allowing for verticality that the previous games avoided entirely. But while Mass Effect 3 is an endlessly replayable game for the combat alone, Andromeda is a boring slog to play through for too long, and that is entirely due to the enemy design being just absolutely bland and boring. Even if you had the best gameplay ever, you'd still not want to be doing it over and over against enemies with no personality or interesting design. Top it off with some rather poor balancing of all the powers, allowing you to craft a pretty reliable combo of abilities that handles every single threat and disincentivizing the swapping of abilities like the game wants, and a horribly grindy crafting system that makes using different weapons horribly unfun to farm for, you end up with gameplay that fails to provide any excitement, challenge, or fun.
For an RPG series like Mass Effect, story and characters are the bedrock on which it stands. Andromeda does manage to have some fun characters, with some of the squadmates being great to spend time with on side missions or in downtime between missions, but they never achieve the heights that the series had before, so even pretty good is not good enough, another unfortunate lense through which this game is viewed. What's worse is the absolute waste of a premise. Travelling to an entirely new galaxy, having to build a society from scratch, all of that is thrown out the window by having already established, and familiar-looking aliens help you do anything, and for the rest, you have magic space robots that can fix all problems. All narrative tension evaporates from this game pretty quickly, and the most interesting parts like the backstory of the other Milky Way Arks, while engaging, are mostly relegated to side content, or backstory. The coup de grace is a main antagonist that is so painfully generic that it manages to be less alien than the galaxy we left behind. The bones of a great story about survival, political intrigue, the divide between alien species, and colonialism, is buried within this game, and it only manages to grab one shovelful of dirt before calling it quits.
Andromeda on its own is passable. You can shoot things and have fun, you can interact with interesting characters on some enjoyable side quests, you can experience gorgeous environments and explore them at your leisure, but it all feels so hollow. This game put Mass Effect on ice, a tragedy unto itself, and despite having played through it twice to complete every achievement, hoping to enjoy it more the second time through, in the end, the more I think about this game, the less favourably I look back on it. Truly a disappointment from such a legendary series.
The first offender is the gameplay. Now, in truth, Andromeda probably has the best core combat mechanics of the entire series, with no restriction on classes and tons of really cool returning and new powers that still combine together amazingly, just like the amazing combat of Mass Effect 3. The improvements to movement are also stellar, allowing for verticality that the previous games avoided entirely. But while Mass Effect 3 is an endlessly replayable game for the combat alone, Andromeda is a boring slog to play through for too long, and that is entirely due to the enemy design being just absolutely bland and boring. Even if you had the best gameplay ever, you'd still not want to be doing it over and over against enemies with no personality or interesting design. Top it off with some rather poor balancing of all the powers, allowing you to craft a pretty reliable combo of abilities that handles every single threat and disincentivizing the swapping of abilities like the game wants, and a horribly grindy crafting system that makes using different weapons horribly unfun to farm for, you end up with gameplay that fails to provide any excitement, challenge, or fun.
For an RPG series like Mass Effect, story and characters are the bedrock on which it stands. Andromeda does manage to have some fun characters, with some of the squadmates being great to spend time with on side missions or in downtime between missions, but they never achieve the heights that the series had before, so even pretty good is not good enough, another unfortunate lense through which this game is viewed. What's worse is the absolute waste of a premise. Travelling to an entirely new galaxy, having to build a society from scratch, all of that is thrown out the window by having already established, and familiar-looking aliens help you do anything, and for the rest, you have magic space robots that can fix all problems. All narrative tension evaporates from this game pretty quickly, and the most interesting parts like the backstory of the other Milky Way Arks, while engaging, are mostly relegated to side content, or backstory. The coup de grace is a main antagonist that is so painfully generic that it manages to be less alien than the galaxy we left behind. The bones of a great story about survival, political intrigue, the divide between alien species, and colonialism, is buried within this game, and it only manages to grab one shovelful of dirt before calling it quits.
Andromeda on its own is passable. You can shoot things and have fun, you can interact with interesting characters on some enjoyable side quests, you can experience gorgeous environments and explore them at your leisure, but it all feels so hollow. This game put Mass Effect on ice, a tragedy unto itself, and despite having played through it twice to complete every achievement, hoping to enjoy it more the second time through, in the end, the more I think about this game, the less favourably I look back on it. Truly a disappointment from such a legendary series.