MASS EFFECT ANDROMEDA
Intergalactic lover leads the space invaders
FACIAL ANIMATION GLITCHES are undeniably funny. Also funny is the moment your character suddenly levitates in a tram car while talking to his crewmates, or when an enemy freezes, inviting an assault rifle to the face. Mass Effect Andromeda proves to be more than the sum of its bugs, however.
If you’ve played the other ME games, you know what to expect: an RPG you play like a shooter, or maybe the other way round, in space, with mutually pleasurable interspecies mating-port-stimulation a distinct possibility. There’s a character creator in which you can make any number of grotesques, and a car in which you can roar around on planetary surfaces, causing trouble. This familiarity isn’t necessarily a criticism, though, as it enables you to settle more quickly into a new situation. When that new situation is the same as those that have gone before, well, that would be a criticism.
So, some time during the events of Mass Effect2, humans and the other basically human species of the Milky Way shot five “arks” into space to try to colonize a star cluster in the Andromeda galaxy. Several centuries later, cryo-stasis, strange energy cloud, something goes wrong, you end up in charge. It’s not original, but it’s compelling enough. You soon meet some basically human aliens (having digitigrade legs doesn’t differ from the humanoid plan enough for our tastes) and, in a move that would see Jean-Luc Picard’s palm twitch toward his brow ridge, shoot them dead.
With your new ship, the Tempest, plus a crew made up of TV talent show contestants and Priss from Blade Runner, you journey around the worlds earmarked for colonization, solving ancient sudoku puzzles, and achieving objectives to increase crew loyalty or raise the viability of your colonies. You roar across their surfaces in your space buggy, and shoot lots of bad guys. There’s also all the planet-scanning and resource-mining we loved from the previous games. On top of that, you can uncover the true purpose of your journey between galaxies, and discover the history of the planets you’re exploring.
There’s a lot going on, and the game does well to keep the pace going, controlling the drip of information well. Your ability to choose the order of the planets you visit in this new, slightly more open, galaxy means the similarities to Mass Effect 1 and Dragon Age Inquisition (in both structure and the way you carve a space-empire from the smoking corpses of aliens) is less obvious.
The best bits of Andromeda remind us how good Mass Effect can be. The rest provides a solid base for the inevitable trilogy to build on. It’s well crafted, despite bugs that will surely be patched out, and shows that a franchise reboot doesn’t have to be a complete overhaul.
Mass Effect Andromeda
NGC 224 Sprawling plot; great visuals; top-quality voice acting.
NGC 4548 A few bugs; long initial load times; quality is variable.
RECOMMENDED SPECS Intel Core i7-4790 or AMD FX-8350; 16GB; GTX 1060 3GB or RX 480 4GB.
$70, http://masseffect.com, ESRB: M