Reviews again!
Electronic Arts are, as most people who take an interest in the medium of computer games are more or less aware, generally considered to be bad for the industry/art form/whatever it is, in the sense that their marketing division have apparently been beaten about the head regularly with a large blunt object, and their approach to making profits appears to be "buy up smaller development houses and ruin them". For this reason there are some people who decline to give EA any money; I'm not much for absolutes, though. In particular, EA's subscription service is a very rare sign of them doing something fairly new and getting it right - for a £20 annual fee it works out as access to a lot of EA's back catalogue, and various other games, including a lot of indies and the odd AA publisher (there's a lot of Paradox games there, for example) they've licensed for it. It works great, particularly since I wasn't really interested in, say, Bioware's archive to want to buy the games individually, but £20 for access to Andromeda, all the Dragon Age games and Jade Empire is clearly worth it (whether or not I renew this next year is another matter entirely). So now I have 150 or so games I'm trying out from time to time, and I find writing reviews fun, so here we go again...
This is by way of introduction to a series of "things what I played on Origin Access" review posts.
Mass Effect: Andromeda (Bioware/EA, 2016)
Let's start with the initial motivating force for buying a subscription, which is that it was significantly cheaper than buying Mass Effect: Andromeda which is still full price. Andromeda is...interesting. The basic idea - struggle with limited resources to achieve a foothold in a hostile new galaxy - is excellent. The execution is...lacking. The basic core Mass Effect gameplay is still intact - they've fiddled around with abilities a bit and the skill tree looks more MMO-ish than it used to, but fundamentally the cover shooter isn't much different to how it used to be (I never play these games with biotic adepts so I don't know if that was particularly different; I did faff with the engineer powers a bit but those seemed to fit fairly seamlessly into my normal playstyle). The characterisation is pretty good, though I felt like a lot of it was a bit samey - you've got a human female first officer who starts off somewhat skeptical of you but comes around during the game, a bitter, cynical Krogan mercenary, an Asari archaeologist (sure, she doesn't act much like Liara, but still...) and a Salarian who is technically your pilot but who you talk to almost exclusively about technology so he might as well be a scientist. It feels like the more innovative characters - the Asari medic with a bad case of impostor syndrome, your science officer with a strong personal faith and a somewhat implausible accent/name combination (she's called Suvi Anwar, and speaks with a broad Scots accent) didn't get as much attention, which is a pity, because they seemed more interesting and I didn't get as much of a chance to talk to them as would have been nice (not least because they're not squad members - there is one interesting squad member, Vetra Nyx, a Turian engineer/smuggler/general ne'er-do-well with a solid grasp on how people work. Sadly she filled the same skill niche as my Scott Ryder most of the time so I didn't use her that much). The game was much criticised for its poor animation on release, and yes, it is somewhat bad, but rarely so bad as to break immersion other than sometimes when running down slopes (the animation for which is very weird indeed). What is more of a problem is the game's insistence that all conversations must be carried out within touching distance, which makes almost everything feel inappropriate and anything even mildly flirtatious come across as deeply charged with sexual tension. I doubt this was the atmosphere which Bioware were aiming for. But neither of these factors felt like particularly major problems to me.
So the characters are reasonable enough even if they do kind of give you the feeling of having been here before (as does the design of the Tempest, the game's ship, which is very much the Normandy with the serial numbers filed off). The run-and-gun gameplay is basically fine (even if it does kind of give you etc etc etc). What's wrong, then? Well, the two big problems are the overall story and all the non-run-and-gun parts of the gameplay. I'll start with the latter, because it's easier to explain what the problem is with it. The problem is that somebody thought "wouldn't it be great to have all our planets as big open world arenas where you can find everything to do just by going there and seeing that there's a problem?", having apparently forgotten that the driving sequences in ME1 were almost universally loathed and removed from the sequels for a good reason. I actually kind of liked driving the Mako in ME1, and I got very, very bored of driving around in Andromeda (and unlike the Mako, your transport doesn't even have a big gun on it, meaning you have to annoyingly dismount if you want to shoot anything). Then there's the story, which...well, commenting on his attempts to novelise ME3,
requiem_17_23 said:
"Rereading this recently, I'm struck especially by the way *everything is still stupid*. Half a dozen story elements would need to be outright excised to the point that it didn't even follow the game plot any more before it would stop being stupid."
ME3, however, is sufficiently fast-paced, dramatic and intense that you can at least overlook most of the stupid while you're still playing it. Andromeda is not so fortunate, primarily because the stupid slaps you in the face with much greater regularity (and indeed force). This starts with the initial crisis - in which you're pitched into a life-or-death mission because your colony ship collided with an unknown and unexpected spacetime anomaly thing on entry to your target system...which naturally raises the question of "so wait, what, we just engaged our FTL drives on leaving our own galaxy and expected that our navigation would be so good that we could complete a six hundred year journey precisely to within an individual star system?" since that is, apparently, what happened. The idea of, perhaps, pulling up a couple of dozen light years short does not appear to have been discussed at any point. (Spoilers: your colony ship was the least dumb of all five ark ships the Andromeda Initiative sent out).
But it doesn't matter, because the game's antagonists are worse. It's hard to feel threatened by the Kett; partially because the game is quite easy on default difficulty settings and they only really manage to prove difficult in truly ludicrous numbers, but mainly because of the fundamental disconnect between the game's taking great pains to point out their overwhelming advantages in resources and firepower and the fact that they've manifestly failed to wipe out either your fledgling presence or your allies either before the game started. Their subsequent failures during the plot make them look enormously like a paper tiger, an impression which is not removed by the one time wherein they do manage to pull off a fairly competent ambush, only for your hotshot pilot to outmanoeuvre their task force with consummate ease, taking only relatively minor damage compared to some reasonable-sized losses on their part. As the game wears on the question of why they've not attacked your Citadel-like headquarters station becomes increasingly imponderable to the point where I could only conclude they couldn't find it. Without giving away too much plot suffisit to say the endgame disabuses you of this notion in a way that does nothing to make the rest of the story seem any more plausible. Then there's the final mission that Mass Effect games always have, which, um, MAKES PERFECT SENSE and IN NO WAY marks a hard right turn into JRPG land wherein the main character can do anything if he just tries hard enough (and if it's the end of the story).
So there you have it - perfectly playable, some of the subplots and missions are even quite compelling, but your enjoyment of the game will be spoiled by a) the fact that you've got to spend a distressingly long amount of time driving a vehicle around a not-particularly-featureful landscape and b) the inability to prevent yourself from realising how dumb it all is while playing it.
This entry was originally posted at https://ilanin.dreamwidth.org/8200.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
This is by way of introduction to a series of "things what I played on Origin Access" review posts.
Mass Effect: Andromeda (Bioware/EA, 2016)
Let's start with the initial motivating force for buying a subscription, which is that it was significantly cheaper than buying Mass Effect: Andromeda which is still full price. Andromeda is...interesting. The basic idea - struggle with limited resources to achieve a foothold in a hostile new galaxy - is excellent. The execution is...lacking. The basic core Mass Effect gameplay is still intact - they've fiddled around with abilities a bit and the skill tree looks more MMO-ish than it used to, but fundamentally the cover shooter isn't much different to how it used to be (I never play these games with biotic adepts so I don't know if that was particularly different; I did faff with the engineer powers a bit but those seemed to fit fairly seamlessly into my normal playstyle). The characterisation is pretty good, though I felt like a lot of it was a bit samey - you've got a human female first officer who starts off somewhat skeptical of you but comes around during the game, a bitter, cynical Krogan mercenary, an Asari archaeologist (sure, she doesn't act much like Liara, but still...) and a Salarian who is technically your pilot but who you talk to almost exclusively about technology so he might as well be a scientist. It feels like the more innovative characters - the Asari medic with a bad case of impostor syndrome, your science officer with a strong personal faith and a somewhat implausible accent/name combination (she's called Suvi Anwar, and speaks with a broad Scots accent) didn't get as much attention, which is a pity, because they seemed more interesting and I didn't get as much of a chance to talk to them as would have been nice (not least because they're not squad members - there is one interesting squad member, Vetra Nyx, a Turian engineer/smuggler/general ne'er-do-well with a solid grasp on how people work. Sadly she filled the same skill niche as my Scott Ryder most of the time so I didn't use her that much). The game was much criticised for its poor animation on release, and yes, it is somewhat bad, but rarely so bad as to break immersion other than sometimes when running down slopes (the animation for which is very weird indeed). What is more of a problem is the game's insistence that all conversations must be carried out within touching distance, which makes almost everything feel inappropriate and anything even mildly flirtatious come across as deeply charged with sexual tension. I doubt this was the atmosphere which Bioware were aiming for. But neither of these factors felt like particularly major problems to me.
So the characters are reasonable enough even if they do kind of give you the feeling of having been here before (as does the design of the Tempest, the game's ship, which is very much the Normandy with the serial numbers filed off). The run-and-gun gameplay is basically fine (even if it does kind of give you etc etc etc). What's wrong, then? Well, the two big problems are the overall story and all the non-run-and-gun parts of the gameplay. I'll start with the latter, because it's easier to explain what the problem is with it. The problem is that somebody thought "wouldn't it be great to have all our planets as big open world arenas where you can find everything to do just by going there and seeing that there's a problem?", having apparently forgotten that the driving sequences in ME1 were almost universally loathed and removed from the sequels for a good reason. I actually kind of liked driving the Mako in ME1, and I got very, very bored of driving around in Andromeda (and unlike the Mako, your transport doesn't even have a big gun on it, meaning you have to annoyingly dismount if you want to shoot anything). Then there's the story, which...well, commenting on his attempts to novelise ME3,
requiem_17_23 said:
"Rereading this recently, I'm struck especially by the way *everything is still stupid*. Half a dozen story elements would need to be outright excised to the point that it didn't even follow the game plot any more before it would stop being stupid."
ME3, however, is sufficiently fast-paced, dramatic and intense that you can at least overlook most of the stupid while you're still playing it. Andromeda is not so fortunate, primarily because the stupid slaps you in the face with much greater regularity (and indeed force). This starts with the initial crisis - in which you're pitched into a life-or-death mission because your colony ship collided with an unknown and unexpected spacetime anomaly thing on entry to your target system...which naturally raises the question of "so wait, what, we just engaged our FTL drives on leaving our own galaxy and expected that our navigation would be so good that we could complete a six hundred year journey precisely to within an individual star system?" since that is, apparently, what happened. The idea of, perhaps, pulling up a couple of dozen light years short does not appear to have been discussed at any point. (Spoilers: your colony ship was the least dumb of all five ark ships the Andromeda Initiative sent out).
But it doesn't matter, because the game's antagonists are worse. It's hard to feel threatened by the Kett; partially because the game is quite easy on default difficulty settings and they only really manage to prove difficult in truly ludicrous numbers, but mainly because of the fundamental disconnect between the game's taking great pains to point out their overwhelming advantages in resources and firepower and the fact that they've manifestly failed to wipe out either your fledgling presence or your allies either before the game started. Their subsequent failures during the plot make them look enormously like a paper tiger, an impression which is not removed by the one time wherein they do manage to pull off a fairly competent ambush, only for your hotshot pilot to outmanoeuvre their task force with consummate ease, taking only relatively minor damage compared to some reasonable-sized losses on their part. As the game wears on the question of why they've not attacked your Citadel-like headquarters station becomes increasingly imponderable to the point where I could only conclude they couldn't find it. Without giving away too much plot suffisit to say the endgame disabuses you of this notion in a way that does nothing to make the rest of the story seem any more plausible. Then there's the final mission that Mass Effect games always have, which, um, MAKES PERFECT SENSE and IN NO WAY marks a hard right turn into JRPG land wherein the main character can do anything if he just tries hard enough (and if it's the end of the story).
So there you have it - perfectly playable, some of the subplots and missions are even quite compelling, but your enjoyment of the game will be spoiled by a) the fact that you've got to spend a distressingly long amount of time driving a vehicle around a not-particularly-featureful landscape and b) the inability to prevent yourself from realising how dumb it all is while playing it.
This entry was originally posted at https://ilanin.dreamwidth.org/8200.html. Please comment there using OpenID.