Mass Effect Andromeda - Let me play my game

What the fuck is wrong with games these days that they feel the need to make everything open world. Its good if its done well but for Andromeda it becomes a huge chore to do anything in this game. Its even worse than Dragon Age Inquisition's open world and completely sours the game. Mass Effect Andromeda is a side story to the original Mass Effect trilogy and was worked on by a completely different team. It carries the Mass Effect name so everyone went into it with high expectations and came out disappointed.

This may be the most boring game I've played since Dragon Age Inquisition. Its not as bad as that game but its up there. There are fun parts to the game, the combat still feels like Mass Effect, but a little weaker. Exploring the remnant ruins for the first time was amazing, but after doing the same garbage on every single planet makes it annoyingly repetitive. Seeing the different planets is nice, but it feels like the same as the previous planets just with a different coating of paint. Instead of heat, you're worried about cold. Instead of radiation you're worried about toxicity. Every single planet is a empty wasteland with nothing to explore and just a lot of fucking driving. The biggest thing is there is no Shepard. Shepard isn't an amazing protagonist or anything but he was competent, he got shit done and he has some emotions at least. Look at Andromeda's Sara Ryder, she stands there cross eyed with a big dumb smile on her face reading emotionless lines fucking up everything everywhere she goes. Really? This is the protagonist you come up with? This is worse than Hawke, this is worse than Inquisition's protagonist, this is the worst protagonist Bioware has ever shit out. Ryder is completely incompetent with a schizophrenic personality that changes on the fly. I never had any "woah Ryder is kicking ass" moments like I've had with Shepard but I've had numerous face plants into "WHAT THE FUCK RYDER WHAT ARE YOU DOING THIS TIME."

This game has no reason to be open world other than to pad the game out. Why make a fun game that lasts 30 hours when you can make a shitty game with 5 hours of actual game play and 200 hours of mindless fetch quests. This is coming from someone who found driving around on the Mako bearable in Mass Effect 1. I wouldn't call it fun but it wasn't a huge chore to get anywhere because the driving distance wasn't that far and you are able to shoot stuff. In Andromeda you have to ride the Nomad, basically Mako 2.0. It doesn't have any guns and it doesn't do any damage when you run over people. There is a 4 wheel drive and a 6 wheel drive mode. The 4 wheel drive is faster but it cannot go over slopes, or bumps or any kind of uneven ground unless you're going downhill. The 6 wheel drive is slow as shit but you can drive at a steep angle. So what is the point of the two modes? You wish you can drive around in 4 wheel drive all the time but you can't even drive down a road without getting stuck and rolling down backwards. A ROAD. What kind of garbage car cannot drive on the fucking roads. Why not keep the speed of a 4 wheel drive and give us the traction of a 6 wheel drive like the Mako? The Nomad is so slow and the world is so big it takes you 20 minutes of holding down the W key to get from the hub to wherever the quest wants you to go. Of course you have a boost key but it lasts half a second and the cooldown is so long its almost worthless to press it. Just hold down W, read a book with your other hand, play with your cat, or go fiddle with your phone. Theres nothing out there so you won't be missing anything.

Open world means exploring many planets and that means animations. What animations you're asking? Every single time you do something in this game, an unskippable animation will play. You try to click on a planet in the space screen? You see your ship zoom out from whatever planet/asteroid/spacestation you're at and fly through the galaxy, then zoom in onto the planet you clicked, then zooms out. Now you can scan the planet or land or whatever. Nothing here? Lets click the next OH FUCK NOT ANOTHER ANIMATION. This is the least I've ever explored in a Mass Effect game because of how long it took to get anywhere. If you stuck to the main planets, there is still a landing animation of your ship touching down on the ground and one when you leave the planet of you flying away. Going to another part of the Nexus? Tram animation. Seriously who thought this was a good idea? At least there was a patch that helped. Also shut SAM up a bit. The worst part of all this is how much backtracking this game forces you to go through. You are wandering around on a planet and it wants you to go back to the tempest. You can't just fast travel and click go back. No you need to drive all the way to the border and go through custom then take an elevator up to the town hub, which is a loading screen. Then you go back to the ship which is an animation of your ship taking off the port then you enter the ship, talk to your party member who tells you to go back down to the surface. So you take another animation of you landing in the port. Get off the ship take the elevator load screen. Walk through customs again walk to the open world then call your car down get in the fucking car and start driving. What the fuck? Can you let me play the fucking game? As if the driving wasn't bad enough you have to add this shit.

So we can finally get around to the game play right? NOPE. Not yet. The UI is a giant mess of garbage. Instead of just buying guns in the original or unlocking new guns in Mass Effect 2 and 3. You have to craft everything this time. This means you have to run around mining and scanning everything in the galaxy. This means your inventory will get clogged with a whole bunch of garbage. I want to shoot people not play inventory manager. There are a whole bunch of guns to craft but you can count the viable guns on one hand. Which ones are good? Which ones are bad? Can we test them out? Who the fuck knows. What does this gun do? Who the fuck knows. They show a huge list of guns where you can't scroll down quickly. You have to roll your middle mouse button over and over and over until you reach the bottom. I don't need to know every single item at the exact same time in my inventory and what I can craft. Why isn't there a list where you can pick from the sniper rifles or assault rifles instead of jamming every single gun in the game in one giant list in a randomized order. The rest of the options isn't any good either. Adding in skills you often need to click multiple times because how much of a mess it is and having to reset it. Shopping is a huge list where you have to scroll down with your mouse button again. Show more stuff at a time? Have tabs? Do we need to see every single item possible? Can't we split the shop NPCs up? Then you have the AVP where its a huge garbage can of vomit. You can unlock different people from cryro which will let you unlock bonuses. You check back every hour to collect points and materials from them for crafting.

The gameplay is different this time. It feels like there are way more enemies and they are much weaker than before. You only get 3 skills and you don't really feel yourself get stronger. From level 1 to level 30 you are killing at around the same speed, using the same guns. You just shoot shoot shoot and move on. You get an annoying rocket jump this time which makes climbing a pain. They added a bunch of jump puzzles and other annoying garbage you have to leap from. Don't make platforming puzzles if  the jump is awkward and the movement is shit. Everything is wide open and half the time you can't tell where the shots are coming from. Enemies can shoot through walls and shoot while completely behind cover. A lot of times its safer to just rush them and kill them than wait and get shot. Bosses are all copy paste. I've only seen one boss repeated multiple times so far. A kett with a barrier and a orb that spins around him. Shoot the orb to break the shield to kill the boss. They also use the orb to charge giant energy balls that knock you out of cover so shoot it while they channel the ball and get out. Thats it.

The story they tried their hardest to be as safe as possible and fucked it up horribly. Not only is the main villains nonthreatening you rarely come in contact with them. Like the Kett invaded the galaxy but your team of 3 can mow through millions of them. Your outposts are being attacked? Well the 3 of you can come can wipe them out and save them all. Which brings me to another point. Where the fuck are the soldiers protecting outposts? Why is the pathfinder in charge of defense? Isn't the goal of the pathfinder to find new worlds? Also they have a distress call but I can leave it there forever and they never get attacked until I land there. Why is the 3 of us able to clear every enemy. I'm no super soldier. I'm not Shepard. This time you're Sara Ryder part of your dad's pathfinder team. Your dad is a mary sue and was a top scientist who invented the SAM AI and joined the N7 and then became a pathfinder and is the most looked up to person in the new galaxy and everyone loves him and all the other pathfinders want to be like him. Then he dies because your helmet broke and he sacrificed himself to save you by giving you his helmet. Then you find hidden memory fragments throughout the Andromeda galaxy that gives you an idea what kind of man your father was. Then you inherit the position and fuck everything up because your a piece of trash, garbage cyborg. No one likes you, they all want your dad. Then you meet the Angara who somehow across galaxies, have the same biological makeup, the same reliance on electricity, the same spaceships, guns, ammos, omnitools, mass effect engines for their ships, they also speak space english and have the same words like ambassadors and embassies as you even though there are no other species.

It seems like they tried their hardest to not offend anyone. You catch a criminal sabotaging the Nexus? Shepard would've shot him or at least threw him at an officer. Here Ryder tells him you're going to report him to the ones in charge and the guy just walks off going "yeah right." OK. So this fuckface endangered the life of millions of people, potentially wiping off the last vestiges of civilization in a new galaxy and you let him walk off saying you're going to report his ass, which you never fucking do? Every other person you meet is some kind of minority. Talk to this guy oh he's Russian, this guy oh he's Indian, talk to her oh shes Japanese. Talk to this Krogan, shes female, this Salarian, shes female too. OK BACK UP. In Mass Effect lore, female Salarians don't leave their home planet and female Krogans also don't leave their home planet because they're too valuable. Here they're running around with guns blazing shooting everything. Like what? Aren't they the leaders of their community while the men run around dying? What about Quarians why aren't they here. The story says there was a problem with the Quarian ship which was also carrying the Hanar and Drell and other races and were unable to reach Andromeda. So they don't exist at all. Whatever, the point is they pushed it way too far in another direction that it feels really fake. Your companions aren't much different either they stuck to the safest possible group of squadmates. You have the tough as steel balls Krogan, the scientist Asari, the Turian bad cop who does his shit, the token Alien that joins you, and a whole bunch of boring humans. This is the standard formula for every Mass Effect Squadmate and they haven't moved from it.

The game is pretty bad but the worst part of it all is how boring it is. A bad game can still be finished. Look at what I've written. I've played plenty of bad games but when a game is so boring that I can't even be bothered to finish it then I don't know if I should consider that game worse than a game I found bad but still interesting enough to finish.