Mass Effect: Andromeda - Review After 100%

Talking about Mass Effect Andromeda after a thorough run of everything the game had to offer.Not as bad as everyone says but not exactly great either.

Timestamps
00:00 Intro
00:52 Overview
02:44 Character Creation
03:36 Story/Plot/Thoughts (Spoilers)
11:22 Gameplay/Worldbuilding
20:31 Character Progression
21:55 Combat
26:27 Companions
32:01 Positives/Negatives
34:35 Conclusion
36:48 Wrap Up

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Support The Channel By Becoming A Member!
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

------------------------------------------------------------------
Follow Me On Various Social Media
------------------------------------------------------------------

#masseffect #gaming #gamereviews #masseffectandromeda

[Lordoziom]

I feel bad for the people that did the combat in this game, they did a good job

[sslender]

I really liked this game but one thing I hated with a passion was how the tempest left the planet every time I boarded it.

[ace]

I think another great thing in Andromeda is the Tempest. Don't get me wrong, I love Normandy, especially SR-1, but having a smaller ship felt great. Finally, as the captain you get to know all of your crew, none of them are silent extras. Plus, I loved the evolution of dynamic character positioning they first tried in ME3.

[alexsamurai]

Few random thoughts:

- The game is set only in a small cluster within Andromeda (The Heleus Cluster), hence its not so unreasonable to have only one kind of intelligent life.

- The quest structure is not only bad in itself, it also encourages a terrible play style that I try to get away from myself in most games - Because its so tedious to get on and off planets, rather than take up one quest and follow through the story to conclusion, you land on a planet with a dozen quest markers and just mindlessly tick them off.

- There are two desert planets I think because the graphical optimization was hitting a wall and it encouraged environments with less dense assets. I remember having 60fps consistently in the four barren worlds (ice and badlands included) but dropping to 40 or thereabouts in the one small jungle planet and the richly detailed prologue world.

- One thing about the crafting that infuriated me was how you never knew what you were building. The system heavily incentivized beelining, you needed to research for example Spectre SMG 1, then 2, and so on up to 8 or 9. But there was no way to switch or even test out what you researched, so if you found you didn't like it, or wanted to try something else, tough luck, you already poured your entire games-worth of research points into working up the chain.

[ZakEmber]

Tough, but fair. I have a soft spot for this game. I'll never say it was great, but I felt like it had a lot of unrealized potential. The exploration and combat were fantastic, it just needed some of the old talent from the previous games on story and characters. I actually always have it installed on Origin because there are times I like booting it up and running around some of those worlds; I think the designs for the gear you can wear look fantastic, the animations for running, jumping, and fighting are really smooth, and I love the theme song from the game, "A Better Beginning." But every criticism you aimed at the game is right on the money.

[Jenkychan]

When I first picked up this game I fell absolutely in love with the sound design and the combat. But man the more you play the more you're reminded how good the original story was.

[Throrface]

Among all the shortcomings of Andromeda, I always thought its combat just felt great. I loved it. But I hated the limitation to 3 abilities. There was no reason for the limitation other than that they couldn't figure out how to map the abilities to a controller. And of course I played on keyboard and mouse, so you can imagine how much I love to be kneecapped because of controllers.

[ninethreefivesix]

This game was obviously meant to be the beginning of a trilogy and so a lot of things just feel unexplored and it's kind of sad. Also pretty sure one of the sidequests alludes to other alien species existing in the galaxy just not in that specific cluster. The side-plot with The Benefactor was actually really good and it sucks that we'll never know the end of it.

[keyamazed]

The combat is addicting in this game. The game was at its best, ironically, when you were fighting in corridors or invading a base, and doing character-focused missions. The open world part though is just so dreadful to go through.

[locke]

The thing I've always said about Mass Effect Andromeda is that it would have been much more well received if it wasn't attached to Bioware and the Mass Effect Franchise. It's not a great game, some stuff is good, some stuff is terrible, but I've played worse. It's greatest shortcoming though was that it failed spectacularly to live up to the, well-earned IMO, reputation and expectations of the original Mass Effect Trilogy.

[freakyzed]

I was fine with the 'become us or die' plot idea. It's very in keeping with the theme that species survival amongst the stars is a primal directive and letting any technologically advanced competition survive can spell the doom of your own species.

[NapoleonSoares]

Drack is actually my favorite krogan in the entire series, he just feels like he's actually lived in the universe and feels so grounded in his choices and quotes. I know people love wrex and grunt but Drack is extremely memorable imo.

[JosieJOK]

Pretty much in agreement with most of what you pointed out! I know you mentioned the bad writing, but I’d specifically call out the overall weird tone of much of the dialog. I think the writers were going for “irreverent and funny, ” but that more often came off as “cringey and inappropriately flip.” On the other hand, I’d mention the jump jets as bringing a welcome sense of speed, flow and verticality to the combat. Oh, another negative: you can’t control your companions’ powers, you can only tell them where to go and which enemy to target, which is a step backwards from the OT.

On Insanity, with an appropriate build, even the bullet-spongy bosses become a joke, but that requires a certain level of dedication to researching the best powers and weapons that a newbie to the game might not want to invest in. If a person came away from their first playthrough with a sufficiently negative impression, they might not want to invest further time into replaying and theorycrafting builds. Another way the game shoots itself in the foot.

[Trace]

As you said, the game had a good foundation. But as a 4th game in a series this well known, it should not just be a foundation. It was a very soulless game to a great franchise.

[cyrusXVII]

I’ve said it before . The open world added nothing to the game other than the 2 seconds of “oh that looks cool”
This game would’ve been great if the missions were more linear like the previous games

[monkeybtm]

i always felt the kett were a last minute addition cause someone high up felt the story needed an antagonist, maybe the story initially was just about the growing pains and drama of settling in and figuring out the mystery of the scourge

a lot of the story issues seem to go away if you just, delete the kett.

[robertthebard]

Props for not resorting to "Mass Effect is Shepard's story", which one particular reviewer did, 45 minutes into an hour and a half long video, 45 minutes of my life that I'll never get back. I played at launch and didn't think it was as bad as the press it was getting. I had the facial animation thing, which was very definitely cringe worthy, but some of the more notorious bugs, like the duck walking and the head spinning around like the Exorcist, only vertically instead of horizontally I could never get, even when I was trying to get them.

I think my biggest disappointment was that we're left with a lot of threads that may never get sewn up, like the Quarian Ark. It got the "Dragon Age II treatment", as I like to call it, where the player base was so vocal about it that it got canned. I didn't run into the resource problem, but I scanned everything, and used the Apex mission terminal, sending teams out, to get more resources. I finished the game, and have several in progress save files. It wasn't as good as it could have been, but it was ok. It's a fun little romp, especially in small bites. I did, however, find that it was much easier to do all the quests I could while I was in a single location, instead of doing one, then leaving, and coming back later for other stuff that could be done while I was there the first time.

[ZCSilver]

The story and the characters are the points I really cared about, so them being bad did make the game bad for me. I didn't care about the combat.

[AndusDominae]

I had no problem doing a dozen separate quest points in an area and moving on to do half a dozen of the next points and half a dozen new quest points in another area. It's a bit weird to me doing just one quest across a few planets at a time when you're surrounded by things to interact with on each planet. I remember very few times being forced to move on rather than just go to the next blip on the map on my way.
Maybe my memory is clouded by the fact I was defiantly enjoying the game. 🤣

[tenshin]

The game is also available on Game Pass so if you have that - give it a try. I did and it was a pleasant surprise. Was expecting a complete trash but it turned out to be decent 30-40h of sci fi infused gaming.