A depressing journey through a beloved Universe *Spoilers... if you care?*
So... the internet has already told you how bad this game is. I'm sure they've told you how disappointing and depressing it is too.
This review is more about me I think... its the eulogy I needed to write on my way to recovering from my crushing disappointment.
I love the Mass Effect Trilogy. I've played through those games almost every year since the day they were released a decade ago. Thats a long time, and a lot of Mass Effect.
The Mass Effect Trilogy is kind of a unique experience, one I feel is definitely greater then the sum of its parts. Individually each game is its own organism, with its own sets of strengths and flaws. What it does do however is lovingly craft an experience curated by a family of fictional characters you grow to love or hate as they lead you through this wonderful playground of classic science fiction tropes and little vignette adventures.
Mass Effect Andromeda tries to do all of that at once without any kind of clear plan or vision all the while steam rolling over all of the world building and lore that so often ran behind the scenes in the original trilogy.
The average Mass Effect player probably didn't know that bullets are just little shavings of metal that the gun makes projected to impossible speeds via mass effect fields. I'm sure the average player didn't know that the average space engagement could only last for a few minutes until whichever side's ships became too overloaded with heat and would have to FTL away to vent it. All of this information is ancillary to the game of Mass Effect, but its not just there in the background for people that care, its also informing the fabric of these stories so that they are coherent and fit into a cohesive vision.
Ultimately the overall fidelity of the final product comes down to the individual writers responsible for each piece of content or the designers who are the architects of our quest structures.
This game fails at everything it could have failed at other then art design.
There is a moment in this game where you are on an Asari ship... filled with Asari... and a warship that severely outclasses you fires its entire payload of weapons... and two biotics propel a biotic field around the ENTIRE ASARI ship and harmlessly deflects them. It just thoughtlessly becomes a cartoon and doesnt even address it ever again.
There is a moment in this game where an entire clan of Krogan are shipped through space for hundreds of years like they were any other species - ignorant of the painstakingly established details of the first three games that hammer into your head that large groups of Krogan are very poor choices to package together within close proximity of each other without all hell breaking lose.
There is a moment in this game where you are staring at three identical Krogan guards and realize each alien race has one or two faces with only color swaps between them. When you realize that they forgot how Salarians are supposed to blink, that Turians and Quarians eat different food then the other races...
There is a moment in this game where you realize story content is gated behind MMO style fetch quests with backtracking that can take sometimes one or more hours of walking to even complete.
There are too many moments in this game that feel cheap, unearned and empty.
You are told things you should be feeling, you are shown things that shouldn't unfold the way the did and you are asked to swallow an incredibly broken and incomplete experience filled with bugs for $90.00.
Its not the bugs though that kill ME:A... its the lack of soul.
