Mass Effect Andromeda has Some Serious Problems

Mass Effect Andromeda has some serious problems after a shaky launch for what should have easily been one of the best games of 2017. This is ultimately disappointing to fans like myself that hold this cinematic focused series to the highest of standards. This was a fresh chance for one of the best gaming franchises to start again, but in an entirely new star system and it just didn't deliver.

It wasn't necessarily a terrible game, but coming from the Shepard trilogy the expectations were higher. I had initially expected a true current generation take on the series and was instead given a smaller, disappointing experience. It might be the change of engines causing the issues, but at the cost of creating larger worlds to travel across, the content within them has shrunken. This led to a shorter core tale that relies on players doing side missions instead of having a well weaved story supported by small optinal stories. Some will enjoy the freedom of heading out there, but those side ventures just weren't that intriguing.



I'm not going to really complain about the animations because we already know that they weren't great and bordering on just slightly below average quite honestly. There were so many other issues present aside from that and I think those should be looked at too. Every time I drove a vehicle the terrain beside me would appear as I'd drive by taking away immersion. On foot it was better, but I could still see things showing up occasionally while moving through the world.

There were times during the campaign and multiplayer where the screen would pause for seconds at a time which is annoying. The multiplayer itself felt exactly the same as it was in Mass Effect 3 with some best as I can describe them, meh maps with a generic survival system that grows boring very quickly. The story itself felt too similar to Mass Effect 3 in regards to how enemies were produced and many of the discovery elements were generic. It even felt like many aspects of the Remnant were just taken from Halo. There were sentinels, mysterious bridges/panels you activate by hand palm using your AI and the Kett were essentially just Elites. They even visit a shield world at some point which was where Halo 4 took place. These are some of the larger problems I had with Mass Effect Andromeda, mostly that it was just more of what we've already seen mixed with performance problems.

The first trilogy pushed that excitement of exploration, meeting aliens and a sense of strong purpose. Shepard had things that needed to get done with a crew that were exciting to be around and that just didn't come together here. This should have been an easy series to continue considering it's a glorious space opera with choose your own adventure elements coming off of an amazing trilogy. I hope the franchise hasn't been damaged too much by this entry as the past games were so enjoyable and groundbreaking. There's always potential for improvement with sequels and hopefully they learned from the issues at the launch of Andromeda.

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