Video Game Review - Mass Effect: Andromeda

Well it's here. After 5 years waiting, BioWare give us the long awaited 4th game in the Mass Effect series. To be honest, I personally wasn't as hyped as most fans would be, mainly because I felt that the original trilogy ended the series well enough to give it closure as soon as the Extended Cut came out for Mass Effect 3. But I'm actually glad that this game decided to instead build upon the Mass Effect universe within the original trilogy rather than be a full on sequel to Mass Effect 3 like how the anthology films for Star Wars are doing. Now don't get me wrong, I love the Mass Effect games despite their flaws. I love the characters, the music, the sci-fi elements, the romance and of course the decision making that can then be carried over to future games. So being the first of the franchise for the 8th generation of gaming, let's have a look at this game:



Taking place between the second and third games of the original trilogy (or in other words, during Commander Shepard's time on Earth and prior to the arrival of the Reapers), the Ryder twins (voiced by Tom Taylorson and Fryda Wolff) wake up in the Andromeda galaxy following a 634 year journey on the Ark Hyperion and continue a mission set out for them and the crew to populate the worlds of the Andromeda galaxy with the species represented on the Citadel Council (Turians, Asari and Salarians) as well as the Quarians (Tali's race), unaware of the reason why they haven't been populated beforehand. So the game goes above and beyond on building upon things that fans have enjoyed from previous games such as bringing back loyalty missions from Mass Effect 2, starting romantic relationships with your crew (which while time consuming, is now more simplified and easy to figure out than before), allowing more freedom in character creation and more. The game is also more open world than in previous games where it was quite restricted (especially in Mass Effect 3) and while it has removed the whole paragon/renegade run throughs, you are still allowed to explore all the options made available. Rather than be restricted to playing just one character and one gender, you can play as two characters with opposite genders. And loads more things to do here too.

There are lots of good things about the game and as I said, it brings back things fans liked about previous games and building upon them to make them bigger and better than ever before. But as many of us know, even though the games are great, there are not without their problems. Character animations are very robotic and doesn't really do much to give the characters some personality, if any. It also has glitches (though fortunately none that make the game unplayable) and the story could've been better than what we got. So as the most anticipated game of the franchise thus far, its nowhere near perfect (which is very rare for anything), but it did what fans asked and more so can't complain there. 8/10