full image - Repost: [Spoilers Andromeda] Revisited Andromeda 5 Years Later (Sorry Long Post) (from Reddit.com, [Spoilers Andromeda] Revisited Andromeda 5 Years Later (Sorry Long Post))
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The last few weeks I have been playing ME: Andromeda due to some comments I’ve seen on the sub that have said it’s gotten a lot better since release. I have always been very critical talking about it among friends and others when the topics came up. I figured I should give it another shot and give the game a fair shake 5. If I’m going to keep shitting on the game I should at least reaffirm why I don’t like it or maybe it’ll surprise me.Andromeda did surprise me in a few ways. I didn’t realize how many of the bugs the Devs managed to fix at this point. While I did still encounter a couple crashes, a few clipping errors, and some weird animations it is nowhere near what it was like at launch. It was playable and that already is a massive boost to my enjoyment of the game.I remember liking the combat in the game, but it really was the top tier aspect. It was fast paced, smooth, and satisfying. Absolutely the best combat of any ME: Game. It was a rewarding shooter and didn’t feel like it was still trying to be Gears of War. I guess this is the positive side of moving to Frostbite.The character models are still an amazing let down. I had forgot how busted everything looked. All the Asari, Turians, Salarians, and most of the Krogan look exactly the same with a different color scheme. An absolute disappointment. The aliens were already pretty “Samey” in the OT but here it’s abhorrent. Not to mention how busted the Krogan females look, how they go from making me feel amazed in ME3 at how greate Eve looks, to the absolute disappointment I felt looking at Kesh I don’t understand.Looking at both Inquisition and Andromeda together we can see BioWare doesn’t understand the open-world and how to make it feel fun. They want to boast huge maps you can explore and give us nothing to warrant exploring. Andromeda is filled with MMO quests, which I hate even in MMOs.Go here and scan, now go back and talk, now go somewhere else and kill the guy related to the scan you just did. Go to these 5 places all around the map and scan. Sure some of them have data pads you can read, but nothing substantial. Even as a completionist gamer I found myself just ignoring some side quests because the amount of effort they took compared to the payoff was abysmal. As an adult with a job, a relationship, a house to maintain, friendships to keep, and chores to do I can’t be spending my time fetching random shit for one line of thanks from an NPC.As I was really wanting to explore more of the game, I used more companions than I usually do when playing. I didn’t just stick to two or three, I constantly shuffled who I brought with me to see their personalities. This was actually a positive. I like a lot of the companions, and even with the time crunch I felt like they worked at giving more companions more dialogue than the OT did. This is one of the driving positive factors of ME: the squad. Getting to hear their input and feel like a unit is great and I do applaud them for working on this.Some companions still kind of suck. Cora is pretty boring in general but has a strong romance, and Liam is probably the most boring character of the game. He feels pretty one dimensional. Everyone else I felt was really well defined and had interesting takes on my missions.Side characters are hit-and-miss. Some are boring as hell, some felt real. I liked Sloan as a character even if I don’t like her. Almost all of the nexus crew is pretty boring but I really liked the autistic bartender, he was fun to talk to in the short interactions we have with him. The main Angaran’s are pretty solid, the Moshai and Evfra are solid and I felt they were well realized. Most of the Angara in general I felt are solid.Ryder him/herself is something that I just hated. I’ve seen a lot of people on the sub say they like Ryder more than Shepard and I just can’t understand how. Ryder’s dialogue is just terrible. I played as a guy and he is the most timid and unsure MC I’ve seen in an action/exploration game where you’re essentially the chosen one to save the world. This game would have been so much better if you could play as the father, Alec, who in the short time we see him looks to be exactly who I want to play as.Ryder being awful is even accentuated by the fact that he’s just a fucking meatstick for SAM to do everything. “SAM what’s going on? SAM where are we? SAM I’m stuck and I get up. SAM do this for me. SAM do that for me.” What a way to go through the game giving your player absolutely no feeling of agency. Your character is a little timid baby boy in dialogue, and then SAM does everything else that needs doing. All the way through the end of the game. To follow up the absolute badass space Jesus that Shepard was with this milquetoast excuse for a character was a real shame.The main story is pretty disappointing in itself. It’s essentially “Go turn on this alien terraforming network 6 times, establish an outpost, now go to this weird alien artificial planet and kill the alien boy with a burnt fruit loop attached to his head.” I do think the Kett had a lot of potential. An enemy that turns your own people against you, similar to the reapers, has a lot of potential to explore especially on the dialogue/emotional side with character interactions. While we do get some good stuff out of Jaal it could have been explored more and turned into something really compelling. Unfortunately all we got was a cream puff without the cream.The outposts are fairly boring themselves. They had real potential with having your actions affect the world. Seeing more people come out of cryo, different decisions with the outposts affecting the people how they look, and game effects: seeing big changes on the nexus, seeing people do things on the worlds you colonize. There was a lot they could have done, but again creamless cream puff.One thing I will give the game major props for is the last mission. While I didn’t like the story, the execution of that last mission was fantastic and what I love to see out of companion/relationship building games. Seeing everyone come together, helping on the mission. Companions you didn’t bring with you dropping in to help with the fight. NPCs you saved show up in the mission to help, the different alliances coming together. Fantastic last stand type of battle and it feels good. Brings up all the good chemicals. Give the players that payoff.All in all I think the game is still mediocre. It’s got some stuff I think is really well done but it’s dragged too far down by everything else for me to recommend the game to anyone. Glad I played it again because it was a worthy experience to see the game when actually playable. A long post but if you stayed with me this far thanks for reading.
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