"We're explorers, and what we do is fun!"
That's basically the personality of your protagonist, who was forced into the position of the crew's leader under pretty dire circumstances. Unlike Commander Shepard, who brilliantly showed the confidence and capability that he/she can lead an entire army, Ryder does not exhibit that. It would be okay if they could lead through a different skill and with better writers, but no. The game expects you to believe that someone oozing the wet behind the ears nervousness and the experience of someone sheltered all of their life just seeing the world for the first time is someone capable of deciding the fate of colonies that are in dire straits.
The game has a real cognitive dissonance problem, as the forced "We can do this!" moods do not reflect the overarching dread of being hunted down by an unknown alien race, being millions of lightyears away from their home galaxy with very limited resources, and trying to settle in a new galaxy that has an actively hostile environment. It's almost like the writers have not actually talked with the game designers and forgot that they were making a Mass Effect game and not a No Man's Sky clone.
Few of the characters seemed to care about the situations they were in, and pretty much every character was either bland, a rehash of a trilogy character, or unfathomably hated. Liam, Cora, and especially Peebee fit the latter bill as though I cannot fault the voice actors for doing their jobs, the scripts they were given... Jesus Christ. I honestly believe the characters were all Dungeons and Dragons players not taking the scenario seriously and finding every opportunity to crack a "well, that just happened" snark in every situation. I've avoided having them as my squadmates because of this.
Ryder's lines are affected too, as he/she constantly quips about certain situations repeatedly like when being overwhelmed by the opposition, they make the same joke of "these guys don't know when to quit!" or "How many of these guys are there?!" When things de-escalate and they talk with whoever was on the other side of the fight, it feels like they never actually got into a life or death situation just minutes before. Again adding to the game's cognitive dissonance problem, Ryder is written to be an explorer excited to see what is out there, but they fight to the death with an alien race hellbent on all other races' demise. Not to mention Ryder use the same lines every time when exploring and solving puzzles in the Remnant Vaults. Like not even variations of the same lines, but the exact. Same. Lines. Again. And. Again.
Vetra and Drack are the only characters I like, and it kind of owes to the fact that Vetra's a Garrus rewrite and Drack's basically Wrex. Both he and Vetra are my go to squadmates because they play off each other very well during their banters, and they at least have some things to say that are worthwhile to listen to, but there are still a few lines that had me roll my eyes. Drack also stands out compared to other Andromeda characters because he's sort of written to be a bit of a open minded grandpa that knows the old ways of living doesn't work anymore and though he enjoys fighting, he doesn't pridefully obsess over it like most krogan do. (Wait a minute, that's basically Wrex again... Huh ...)
Because of EA's obsession with turning as much of a profit as possible, the game uses EA's inhouse engine that Bioware was not familiar with. The engine was not designed to be used for a third person RPG, so much of the code had to be rewritten from scratch. Developer infighting took a huge chunk of the game's development time along with several other political issues between Bioware's multiple studios and those were reflected in the game's haphazard nature, animation bugs, quest marker bugs, and the such. In my 50 hour playthrough with mods, none of the bugs softlocked the game, but there were more than a handful of instances where I was forced to quit out of the game and reset from the last save point.
Even for all of its technical issues and this game being held together by duct tape, judging from a combat standpoint, the game plays fine. The combat is a super fluid ME3 with rolling replaced with jump jets, and the game actively wants you to not overdo the cover mechanics. Gunplay feels great and the sound design is expertly crafted to give the weapons a huge impact, especially when pulling off headshots with the sniper. Graphically, the game has its moments of being beautiful even if there's always a moment of Bioware having some kind of animation jank. Plenty of photo mode opportunities despite that the game doesn't have one (you can mod the HUD to disappear though.)
However, being that the shareholders wanted to populate the gaming market with more AAA open world games, Andromeda took the Ubisoft approach and opted to have very large worlds that are sparsely populated with bloated content. Oxymoronic enough? Basically, the game has few things in large empty areas that require a large chunk of your time to investigate and collect. Much of the containers you find have junk that you trade in for credits - a huge time wasting measure - and instead of using ME2's planet scanner to find minerals to mine, you use a large rover to find places to mine for minerals but the mining spots are all randomized around the placements in the map - another huge time wasting measure.
On PC, there are a couple of mods that can fix some of the annoyances like that, but no fan patch will be substantial enough to fix what is fundamentally broken about the game. It did not need the tedious open world slop along with the crappy story that will never have a conclusion, as well as the constant Joss Whedon-like cringe-inducing writing that plagues the dialogue throughout the game.
The rushed, tumultuous and haphazard development along with the politics that got in the way of the game's development meant that it was destined to suck anyway. For that, I absolutely despise ME:A for almost all of its worth. The game as it stands alone is absolutely below mid, but as a Mass Effect entry, it's a goddamned disaster and as of 2024, it is the death kneel of any new entries to the series.
You can probably have some solace that because Andromeda takes place 600 years after the original trilogy, it's pretty easy to dismiss the game and not include it as part of the Mass Effect canon. You can feel pretty safe to skip out on this entry entirely.
That's basically the personality of your protagonist, who was forced into the position of the crew's leader under pretty dire circumstances. Unlike Commander Shepard, who brilliantly showed the confidence and capability that he/she can lead an entire army, Ryder does not exhibit that. It would be okay if they could lead through a different skill and with better writers, but no. The game expects you to believe that someone oozing the wet behind the ears nervousness and the experience of someone sheltered all of their life just seeing the world for the first time is someone capable of deciding the fate of colonies that are in dire straits.
The game has a real cognitive dissonance problem, as the forced "We can do this!" moods do not reflect the overarching dread of being hunted down by an unknown alien race, being millions of lightyears away from their home galaxy with very limited resources, and trying to settle in a new galaxy that has an actively hostile environment. It's almost like the writers have not actually talked with the game designers and forgot that they were making a Mass Effect game and not a No Man's Sky clone.
Few of the characters seemed to care about the situations they were in, and pretty much every character was either bland, a rehash of a trilogy character, or unfathomably hated. Liam, Cora, and especially Peebee fit the latter bill as though I cannot fault the voice actors for doing their jobs, the scripts they were given... Jesus Christ. I honestly believe the characters were all Dungeons and Dragons players not taking the scenario seriously and finding every opportunity to crack a "well, that just happened" snark in every situation. I've avoided having them as my squadmates because of this.
Ryder's lines are affected too, as he/she constantly quips about certain situations repeatedly like when being overwhelmed by the opposition, they make the same joke of "these guys don't know when to quit!" or "How many of these guys are there?!" When things de-escalate and they talk with whoever was on the other side of the fight, it feels like they never actually got into a life or death situation just minutes before. Again adding to the game's cognitive dissonance problem, Ryder is written to be an explorer excited to see what is out there, but they fight to the death with an alien race hellbent on all other races' demise. Not to mention Ryder use the same lines every time when exploring and solving puzzles in the Remnant Vaults. Like not even variations of the same lines, but the exact. Same. Lines. Again. And. Again.
Vetra and Drack are the only characters I like, and it kind of owes to the fact that Vetra's a Garrus rewrite and Drack's basically Wrex. Both he and Vetra are my go to squadmates because they play off each other very well during their banters, and they at least have some things to say that are worthwhile to listen to, but there are still a few lines that had me roll my eyes. Drack also stands out compared to other Andromeda characters because he's sort of written to be a bit of a open minded grandpa that knows the old ways of living doesn't work anymore and though he enjoys fighting, he doesn't pridefully obsess over it like most krogan do. (Wait a minute, that's basically Wrex again... Huh ...)
Because of EA's obsession with turning as much of a profit as possible, the game uses EA's inhouse engine that Bioware was not familiar with. The engine was not designed to be used for a third person RPG, so much of the code had to be rewritten from scratch. Developer infighting took a huge chunk of the game's development time along with several other political issues between Bioware's multiple studios and those were reflected in the game's haphazard nature, animation bugs, quest marker bugs, and the such. In my 50 hour playthrough with mods, none of the bugs softlocked the game, but there were more than a handful of instances where I was forced to quit out of the game and reset from the last save point.
Even for all of its technical issues and this game being held together by duct tape, judging from a combat standpoint, the game plays fine. The combat is a super fluid ME3 with rolling replaced with jump jets, and the game actively wants you to not overdo the cover mechanics. Gunplay feels great and the sound design is expertly crafted to give the weapons a huge impact, especially when pulling off headshots with the sniper. Graphically, the game has its moments of being beautiful even if there's always a moment of Bioware having some kind of animation jank. Plenty of photo mode opportunities despite that the game doesn't have one (you can mod the HUD to disappear though.)
However, being that the shareholders wanted to populate the gaming market with more AAA open world games, Andromeda took the Ubisoft approach and opted to have very large worlds that are sparsely populated with bloated content. Oxymoronic enough? Basically, the game has few things in large empty areas that require a large chunk of your time to investigate and collect. Much of the containers you find have junk that you trade in for credits - a huge time wasting measure - and instead of using ME2's planet scanner to find minerals to mine, you use a large rover to find places to mine for minerals but the mining spots are all randomized around the placements in the map - another huge time wasting measure.
On PC, there are a couple of mods that can fix some of the annoyances like that, but no fan patch will be substantial enough to fix what is fundamentally broken about the game. It did not need the tedious open world slop along with the crappy story that will never have a conclusion, as well as the constant Joss Whedon-like cringe-inducing writing that plagues the dialogue throughout the game.
The rushed, tumultuous and haphazard development along with the politics that got in the way of the game's development meant that it was destined to suck anyway. For that, I absolutely despise ME:A for almost all of its worth. The game as it stands alone is absolutely below mid, but as a Mass Effect entry, it's a goddamned disaster and as of 2024, it is the death kneel of any new entries to the series.
You can probably have some solace that because Andromeda takes place 600 years after the original trilogy, it's pretty easy to dismiss the game and not include it as part of the Mass Effect canon. You can feel pretty safe to skip out on this entry entirely.