I admit. I cursed Mass Effect: Andromeda for its existence two years ago. Like many did, I was quick to grow angry, disappointed, and sad for where one of my favorite new franchises was going to: the garbage. That was what I thought during my fifteen or so hours playing the game until I decided to simply drop it. After going through reviews and reading general opinion across the internet I felt as if I did the right choice. The game was done for. No updates, no DLCs, just a marginal support to fix some of the most prominent bugs and weirdness.

This year, however, the benchmark for shitty high-budget game was widely renewed by Bioware when they released Anthem, which was not only unfinished, but a complete lie and spit on the face of fans after so many forged trailers and ridiculously misleading marketing. So yeah, nothing more coming from Bioware, one of my favorite developers as an old-school RPG player and dungeon-master.

That trail of thought led me to Andromeda once again. Perhaps to see if it was really that bad, or perhaps to compare it to Anthem, or maybe just to feel that Mass Effect aura of old. Why I found it so bad two years ago? Well, let me recap in order of annoyance.

1. It was ugly and bug infested. Yeah, Ryder had some fucking weird facial expressions, everyone you talked to had this cold-eye gaze like damn psychos ready to kill you, and everyone except for aliens were plain ugly. That was hard on a game where the major objective is talking to people, which means staring at them for many minutes. The game also had some damn bizarre running animations and minor bugs at every corner. It was annoying, really annoying. The remainder of the visual experience was not so bad though, although the rooms and starting planets seemed kinda lifeless.
2. It was not Mass Effect 4. I mean, the Mass Effect trilogy established an amazing setting filled with a multitude of charming alien races, an intricate social structure, ancient conflicts, and a lot more to explore. However, Andromeda was scared of using it. Instead of exploring all that amazing setting, it simply decided to throw everything away by moving the plot to another galaxy, only using the races and some light relationship to the established lore. It was a coward move by itself, and those expecting more Mass Effect could certainly feel as disappointed as I did.
3. Its first worlds were boring. Although the very start of Mass Effect: Andromeda is exciting, the game quickly moved its plot to a boring desert planet called Eos, much like what Dragon Age: Inquisition did with the Hinterlands. Despite having some interesting quests, the sand world was anything but exciting and barely felt weird and alien as it should. The second planet happened to be yet another boring mountainous region with snow and ice, and the third, although more interesting with its jungles, was small and empty.
4. It felt similar. I enjoyed my time with Dragon Age: Inquisition back in 2014, but I had more bad things to say about it than good things. I felt the game as a lifeless move to a more open-world experience filled with fetch quests, making the game a simple rush from quest marker to quest marker without anything truly catching your attention except for its cast. Andromeda was vastly similar in this regard, and having this same experience once again was not what I was expecting.

It is important to say the first and major annoyance was vastly fixed in the game’s post-release patches, which happened only after I decided to quit the game. The rest remained there until today as they were basically tied to the core experience of the game. But hey, not being Mass Effect 4 is not THAT bad, right? Boring open-worlds is like a pleonasm. And being similar to another game is also not exactly a reason to butcher its reputation.

So what, am I saying we were all hypocritical fuckers?

Yes, kinda. Not because Mass Effect: Andromeda is a superb game, because it isn’t, but because we praised the shit out of Dragon Age: Inquisition when that game had less to show off than Andromeda. Yup. After finally playing the fourth Mass Effect game fully I can easily say it kicks the ass of Inquisition in most aspects. Perhaps those bugs and ugly characters really fucked the whole experience, and fixing that alone was enough to allow me to see the rest of the game, which ranges from barely decent to amazing.

The Pathfinder

Sara Ryder (or Scott if you play as a man) ends up inheriting the mantle of Pathfinder from her father, a badass AI-programmer elite soldier who was at the front of the Initiative, an organization set on gathering enough people to put into cryostasis and send them in a 600 years trip towards the Andromeda galaxy. She is not exactly ready for the job and the initial events work around showing us that everything is screwed up. A bizarre phenomenon destroyed habitable worlds during those 600 years, a crazy alien race is dominating the region, the arks carrying the people of the journey strayed from their paths, and the first group of travelers had to wait an entire year to see some kind of hope, which is basically Sara’s arrival. She is no Commander Shepard though, she is not a mastermind tactician with godly charisma. She is simply a good soldier forced to play a bigger role.

As a Pathfinder there are infinite ways this game could move on. Sara needs to find new habitable planets, she must make first contact with Andromeda’s races, she needs to establish outposts, she must act as a pacifier in the exploration effort, and a lot more. The game, however, nicely divides these things: the main quest is dealing with the Kett, an aggressive race dominating the Heleus Cluster; the side-quests are focused on settling outposts, dealing with political problems, and exploring for resources and diplomacy; the loyalty quests are not simply based on your group of friends, but also about much of the problems faced by the initial effort of the Initiative.

Comparing how those quests perform against Dragon Age: Inquisition is ridiculous. Andromeda not only puts a lot more effort into scripts, into conversations with strangers, and into meaningful actions, but everything you do also fits the role of Sara as a Pathfinder. You help people because of the Initiative, you explore new lands to find new outposts, you kill scavengers to pacify a region you will explore. In Inquisition, not only the main quest was shallow and quick (they even resorted to gating content behind a point system and steep level recommendations to inflate play-time), the side-quests were basically you as a Inquisitor helping random people just for the sake of being a good guy, randomly recruiting a useless “agent” at some points. Andromeda’s plot, although void of all the amazing setting it could’ve used from the previous trilogy, is consistent, is meaningful, and is brimming with side-quests that make sense and offer a sense of accomplishment as a Pathfinder. I wasn’t able to get the hang of this at first, but this certainly became Andromeda’s major asset for me in this complete playthrough. Almost every side-quest felt as if part of the main quest, and that’s fucking amazing.

Bioware’s Pedigree

Needless to say, Bioware’s real power have always been creating captivating characters and giving them depth, lots of casual conversation topics, and ultimately making them feel as if they were really part of your group, be it as friends, rivals, lovers, or just random people walking around the world. Andromeda is no stranger here, it is everything you would expect from Bioware in this department, offering not only a lot of great allies, but also giving flesh to many other important NPCs taking part in the Initiative.

Simply put, Andromeda owes nothing in this department to any other Bioware game, and those who enjoy this aspect of the experience the most will certainly feel right at home. Some of these characters can really grow during the course of the game, which can stretch around 70 hours with the enjoyable side-quests and loyalty quests. If you liked how Mass Effect 2 played out with its cast, well, be ready to an experience on par with that. Drack is the best krogan around (sorry Wrex). Jaal is a great exemplar of the new alien race. The non-combatant crew has a lot to more to offer this around. It’s an all around great cast, that’s for sure.

And it gets alien at some point

I mentioned the first three worlds were boring traditional open-world settings with desert, snowy mountains, and jungle. Well, that hasn’t changed, but I was surprised to see how the most interesting places to visit can only be found in the second half of the game. Yeah. I mean, how awesome is traveling across a destroyed planet with massive rocks floating around? What about a real desert with colossal stones and a gigantic crashed alien ship to explore? Maybe an alien city feels good to you? Heck, this is what this game was supposed to be about: bizarre places of a new galaxy. Yet, it held back nearly half of its content in boring places everyone is tired of visiting. Not only that, but the initial exploration of these first worlds are vastly limited by environmental hazards, forcing you to only wander in a small portion of those. Once again, only later these hazards are lifted and you can really see the most interesting parts of these boring planets.

It is sad to see this kind of choice. It really hurts the game and it goes completely against what the initial experience should be. If Andromeda had more focus on these really weird experiences and gave real freedom to explore these maps, the game could really make a much better first impression, especially because the quests in the later maps are also a lot more engaging than in the first ones.

It gets combat right too

I think there is one point that people had a consensus since the game released, and that is how amazing the combat plays out. It is a natural progression from the Mass Effect trilogy, filled with more customization elements, more skills to use, branching skill paths, and an enjoyable dodge and jet-pack mechanic to move around the battlefield. Those who like third-person shooters will have little to complain here, but the experience is not exactly perfect though.

The cover system is a bit squish, making it hard to put yourself into cover and getting out from it. You have little control over your friends except point out enemies to attack or points to protect. The melee also suffers, especially with the camera, which is annoying because the game offers a lot of options for melee-focused builds and it is a practical and interesting experience in this kind of game.

It is a Mass Effect

Despite all problems and all the critics it suffered during its release, Andromeda is still a member of this great franchise and not as bad today as it was before. The fixed issues really did good for the game, but its core has always been great. It lacked polish, it had controversial choices of how to introduce you to the experience, and it was not the Mass Effect 4 most fans were expecting, but it still holds true to the great characters of Bioware’s pedigree, to an exciting combat system, to a RPG-like customization of things, and to an amazing set of side-quests contributing to make the main story feels better, deeper, and more meaningful.

By the end, the Pathfinder’s journey ends up being an amazing one, full of great people to talk to, pieces of equipment to find and craft, a lot of new lore, and even a few kicks into the trilogy to make some fanservice. Well, I must say, I hated this game for two years and, gods, how stupid I was. Mass Effect: Andromeda is still Bioware doing what it does best.