Nostalgia is one hell of a drug.
I can still remember the early weeks of January 2010 when the Bombcast would not stop talking about how amazing this new game called Mass Effect 2 is. It all sort of came out of nowhere. The crew had never talked about Mass Effect in the past and all of a sudden they're over the moon about this sequel. My only knowledge of ME came from a demo disc for the original xbox that had a video demo of Mass Effect showing the Citadel and the groundbreaking dialogue wheel.
I went out to best buy after a couple of consecutive Bombcasts because I just had to know. I remember looking at the back of the box and expecting some kind of top down RPG mixed in with some cutscenes where I could use the "amazing" dialogue wheel. Suffice to say I was quite pleased by what I actually got (for the record I wasn't a huge fan of RPGs or even sci-fi at the time). I went on to s-rank (remember those?) Mass Effect 2 and did the same for ME and ME3. All 3 games were very good, but ME2 is still my favorite. ME had the best story but played like ass. ME3 had good combat but otherwise felt very rushed and inconclusive. ME2 was the awesome dark middle chapter where every aspect of the game was at its best.
So it's only natural I would compare my early impressions of ME: Andromeda to ME2.
The main draw of these games for me is the story. This is where Andromeda seems to be doing well so far. The sense of adventure feels great, discovering what these new "vaults" are is fun and intriguing, albeit a bit derivative. The way they divorced this story from a universe which honestly had no canonical continuity is very clever. I'm exhausting every dialogue option because I'm genuinely curious and want to know more. I read every codex page. I go out of my way to talk to everyone. Even some of the side-quest like "first Andromeda murder" are great and had me thinking about the consequences of my choices. However I do feel that, five hours into the game, only meeting two new alien species is disappointing.
Most of the disappointment comes from playing it too safe. You only get 6 squad mates, and two of them are human (male and female romances). Only one....that's right...ONE of your squad is an Andromeda native. ME2 had like 60 guys you could recruit if you included all the DLC. The crew of the Tempest is still fun and interesting to talk to (except Liam) but I just wish there were more. I'm also disappointed that a game from 2010 still manages to look better than Andromeda. The faces look bad, the pop-in is distracting, the Tempest is so dark I can barely see anything, the list of complaints about the visuals is very long and that's a real shame. The worlds look good but that's only a portion of the presentation. The disparity between how good the environments look and how bad the characters do has me wishing EA would just abandon this frostbite initiative all together and let studios do their own thing again.
People seem to forget that in previous games, you would get a loading screen when you used a Mass Relay, so it's only natural you would get some loading on the galaxy map in Andromeda. However, there was never any loading between 2 neighboring planets! This "feature" is by far the worst thing in this game. I don't know what happened here. It's 2017, I should be able to look at a giant map, highlight whatever planet I want and scan it or land on it much easier than it is in Andromeda. I'm not flying the ship myself between planets, I'm just looking at a cut scene I should be able to skip. I still can't get over how this passed QA. Or am I missing something?
Another aspect that has me shaking my head is the movement and combat. ME2 was a pretty straightforward 3rd person shooter but it worked well. I'll admit that having recharging health made the game too easy on anything other than Insanity difficulty, but being able to give commands to your squad made the whole thing feel fresh even upon repeated playthroughs. Andromeda has none of this. You can tell your squad where to stand and who to shoot, but that's it. This is taking multiple steps back and also tripping over your shoe laces while doing it. It makes the combat feel boring and uninspired. Why would I ever want to replay these portions of the game? Using your own abilities against enemies is fun but you lose a lot of variety when you can't use your squad mate's powers as well. It also doesn't help that your FOV is so small with you weapon out that you can't get a good feel as to what's going on. 90% of the time in combat I can't tell who's shooting at me or where the enemies are coming from. And when you holster your weapon, you get the wonderful added bonus of awful animation priority. I'm talking about how long it takes to start and stop the walking animations and how annoying it is that every jump is met with a vocal grunt and stumble when landing. I don't know how testers felt good about this big aspect of the game. Maybe they got used to it over time, I hope I do too.
But I'm still playing the game, and as I write this I'm thinking about loading up my save and doing more quests. Promise is what's keeping me going right now. For every time I'm looking at Cora teleport into the sky, I'm also thinking about how fun it would be to drive the Nomad up that hill, getting some platinum and crafting a cool piece of gear.
Andromeda has problems, but I'm happy to say it's not a burning disaster just yet. It hasn't matched up to the greatness of previous games, but it's still a fun space opera with lots more to discover and do. I'll do a follow up post when I'm done with the game to see how it ultimately stacks up in this storied franchise.
But 2010 wasn't just about Mass Effect 2. It also had Red Dead Redemption, one of the rare games I love more than ME2. I hope Rockstar can do better than Bioware with this new title, although I feel pretty confident in their abilities. 2010 was a really good year for games; NFS Hot Pursuit, AC Brotherhood, Bad Company 2, Starcraft 2, Black Ops, New Vegas....the list goes on. Too bad only a few of those franchises have any future I care about.
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