Mass Effect: Andromeda is a wasted opportunity by BioWare (Review)

Big shoes to fill

Furthermore, the series’ struggle with gunplay still continues, creating an unsatisfying combat experience, at least if you’re using guns.

Guns still feel relatively lightweight, without the impact or ‘oomph’ you’d expect. Compared to other third person shooters with similar mechanics (like Gears of War 4), combat is relatively mundane and nowhere near as stimulating (both in looks, sounds and feel) as it could be. Biotics and Tech skills liven things up somewhat and give you more options in combat but unless you opt to invest skills in them, you’ll be stuck with the basic boring gunplay.

It’s still fun to muck around with the extraneous combat mods you can find in the game. Some of them (like the scopes) change the gunplay style, though there aren’t any mods that give too radical a change, so if you’re expecting a mode that allows the pistol to fire grenades, for example, you’re out of luck.

However, if you thought that the number of different guns in past Mass Effect games was somewhat lacking, you’re in the luck. You can still buy gear from shops and find them as drops or in containers but now you can also craft them yourself. Find a blueprint, get the required materials and you can craft (and name) your very own weapon.

As with past games, on-foot exploration is just part of the whole package. The other part is exploration. Space exploration is standard fare, with you selecting your destination from the system map that’s shown on the Tempest (your ship). Once selected, the camera will then move along the preprogrammed route to wherever you wanted to head. At your destination, you can scan it for basic info and if there are anomalies, launch probes to uncover what they are.

It sounds much better in theory than in practice. In reality, the whole act of travelling, scanning and launching probes is incredibly boring. There’s not much to do other than pressing a button whether it’s scanning, probing or travelling. You don’t even get to control the ship. As before, you can’t land on every destination you can go to on the systems map; only a selected few are land-able.

Those few that you can land on however, are massive improvements over the barren worlds you could explore in the previous games. Not only are the maps much larger now, they’re also filled with hidden quests and locations. You have to explore to really get to the hidden stuff, which is great considering how shallow the space based exploration’s handled.

Planetary exploration isn’t just lip service, it ties in to the plot. Completing missions and other objectives on worlds raises its viability points, which you can then use on the Nexus to give you an edge. These bonus range from the passive (like giving you extra XP per battle) to giving you actual items you can use. Needless to say, it’s in your best interest to raise the AVP as high as you can if you want the bonuses.

With the huge maps, you get a new vehicle to navigate them with. It’s called the Nomad and longtime fans will undoubtedly find it similar to the original trilogy’s Mako. Unlike the ungainly Mako, the Nomad is much more maneuverable, with two different driving modes. There’s normal mode, which makes the vehicle speedier but with little traction and there’s the 6WD (6 wheeled drive mode) which is slow, but allows you to climb certain slopes and obstacles.

On top of the two moves, the Nomad can also jump and boosts for limited periods. One wonders though, the relevancy of two different modes when one that integrates both aspects of the two modes could’ve easily sufficed. While it’s true the Nomad is better than the Mako, it still suffers from mobility issues, especially in cramped or rocky areas. The boost is underpowered and drains too fast to be practical, making climbing slow-going.

Andromeda is a mixed bag of good and bad gameplay and it’s the same with the visuals. It’s definitely not a looker though it does get the job done. However, the animation and draw distance (on the planets you can explore) can be incredibly bad. Facial animation especially is wooden at the best of times. At its worse, the facial movements look robotic. Movement for the NPCs too can be stilted at times, resulting in the most mundane of actions (like walking, or dashing) looking artificial and awkward.

Also, there are frame rate drops that occur constantly, especially in cutscenes or during heavy combat. These are reduced on the PS4 Pro but still present on the nonetheless.

On top of that, texture pop-in is also prevalent. Quick camera cuts in the cutscenes are usually the culprit. To BioWare’s credit, the pop-in doesn’t last more than a second before it’s resolved but it’s incredibly annoying, especially considering the visuals aren’t that great to begin with.

Lastly, the engine also uses half-rate animation. What this does is that characters or objects that are animated, will animate at half the frame rate when they’re at a certain distance from your character. This translates to objects moving jerkily or looking like stop-motion animation when you see them from a distance. Needless to say, this isn’t a good thing at all.

As the start of a new story (and potential trilogy), Mass Effect Andromeda is off to an incredibly rocky start. Of course, the same could be said of the original Mass Effect and that game’s spawned three sequels.

Still, for a fourth entry in the series, that are certain expectations that gamers tend to expect. While Andromeda exceeds those expectations in terms of plot, characters and certain gameplay aspects, it also disappoints in many technical parts. The unstable frame rate, texture pop-ins and half-rate animation (not to mention the other bugs) is definitely not what one expects from a fourth title in a series, which should, by all reasonable assumptions, be at least technically competent. Hopefully, BioWare would be able to fix some of the teething issues mentioned with a day one patch and beyond.

Mass Effect Andromeda succeeds in extending the lore and canon of the series but falls short in a handful of technical aspects. Does that make it a bad game? Not at all, considering its core aspects are fun and fulfilling, but it does make it the most flawed entry in the series, and not what we had expect from the herald for a whole new generation of games.