Part Two: Say Something Nice
It would be an exaggeration, and/or an indulgence in Internet-style hyperbole, to say the game is completely worthless. A whole lot of talented people put a whole lot of work into Andromeda, and it shows.
To begin with, the environments are intricate and absolutely beautiful, sometimes heart-stoppingly so. Yes, the modern generation of high-definition games has been repeatedly topping itself with the gorgeously meticulous rendering of its naturalistic settings; I can’t be the only player who spent the Titanfall 2 campaign occasionally abandoning an objective in order to jump and wall-run to the highest available vantage point, just to have a look around. Even by these standards, Andromeda’s worlds are huge and impressive, lush and compelling, exceeding BioWare’s previous high-water mark of Dragon Age: Inquisition. We get to explore jungles, an ice planet, alien temples, the asteroid-like surface of a shattered world, three different populated settlements, and more, all teeming with life and convincing detail. It is a little strange that we get two separate desert planets, only marginally distinguishable, but that’s a small knock against the game’s environmental abundance.
The combat gameplay, too, is smooth, responsive, and enjoyable. The action may not be as perfectly polished as in a dedicated Battlefield-style shooter; also, it’s true that old-school Mass Effect purists were unhappy with Andromeda’s removal of the classic “pause to strategize with the power wheel” mechanic, and even more with the limitation of the player’s available powers during skill-building and loadout. But if you can get on board with the game’s intentions and faster-paced vibe, it turns out to be great, frantic fun to jet-jump and biotically evade around a battle space while throwing bullets and power blasts at a richly varied selection of enemy targets from newly verticalized vantage points. The combat designers behind Andromeda are to be commended for literally elevating BioWare’s game.
The cast of supporting characters in Andromeda is not as compelling as in previous games, for a number of reasons, but it’s to BioWare’s credit that they recognize the appeal of the franchise is as much in exploring the backstories of your companions as it is in the overall story, and the game goes to great lengths to give you opportunities to get to know your people. Even Liam, generally considered to be the least interesting and most disposable companion, gets a fun and funny loyalty mission that highlights his impulsiveness, his temper, and his unbreakable habit of screwing things up with his shortsightedness. And one of the very best small details in the game is how the writers have created a relationship between every pairing of the companions, resulting in unique and entertaining dialogue between whichever two characters are accompanying you in the Nomad during your long drives; the tension and teasing between Peebee and Cora is very different from the tentative but growing companionship between Jaal and Drack.
Andromeda also boasts a terrifically interesting antagonist species/civilization in the kett. Science fiction is replete with examples of villainous beings who absorb, assimilate, and transform their enemies, from Star Trek’s Borg to Doctor Who’s Cybermen. The kett’s focus on genetic research gives them a body-horror feel similar to John Carpenter’s The Thing or HALO’s Flood, or, if you know Stephen R. Donaldson’s Gap series, the mutagenically motivated Amnion. But the kett are driven not just to expand and reproduce as-is, but to improve themselves by carefully, methodically studying their enemies’ DNA and working to isolate and incorporate their most promising traits, which is not common in SF’s “assimilation” trope. And most unusually, this is presented as a religious imperative, with an entire alien culture revolving around the “sacred” desire to uplift their inferiors and give them the gift of “exaltation.” The kett may have echoes of their genre predecessors, but we’ve never seen anything precisely like them before, and the more you learn about them, the more interesting they become.
And, finally, I want to say a few words in support of the game’s choice to relocate itself to a new galaxy and start over with a whole new story, bringing forward only the historical background and interspecies conflicts from established canon. Many fans groused about this; they were heavily invested in the adventures of Their Shepard in the preceding trilogy, and they wanted more of the same, or, barring that, to explore the consequences of their choices in a continuing narrative. But that trilogy was always built to be Shepard’s story, centered on one person determining the fate of a galaxy. Further, given the big choices made at the end of the third game, it would have been technically and financially prohibitive to continue the narrative from there, taking into consideration all the possible variations of story state. In my mind, therefore, BioWare deserves significant credit for sticking to its plan and ending the trilogy definitively. You may not like the conclusion, and lots of people didn’t, but it does conclude, which is rare in this era of open-ended IP exploitation.
So, if they were going to continue developing the Mass Effect universe, they had to make a big choice to do something else, to separate themselves completely from the numerous threads of possible continuity. Before anything about Andromeda was revealed, there was speculation among fans that the new game would cover the distant past, perhaps the Krogan Rebellions (which would mean no human characters) or the First Contact War with the turians, both of which would suffer from the prequel disease of driving toward known established outcomes and thus lowered stakes and suspense, not to mention directly contradicting the feeling in BioWare games that the player’s actions are what writes the history. Or possibly the game would flash forward to the distant future, millennia after the impacts of Shepard’s choices have faded, and some new order has arisen. But if you do that, if you separate yourself from the known story far enough to eliminate any relationship with it, then what’s the point of staying in the Mass Effect universe?
The choice, then, to center the story on a generation ark that leaves the Milky Way galaxy entirely, midway through the continuity of the preceding games, was fairly unexpected, and really quite clever given the constraints the game’s writers were working under. It’s arguable whether the franchise should have been expanded this way, again considering the original trilogy is absolutely Shepard’s story and has a concrete ending; but if you’re going to do it, this is probably the best case scenario for preserving only as many recognizable details as are needed to maintain player familiarity and goodwill, while also giving yourself a fairly blank slate for writing a new story, unencumbered by the player’s choices in the preceding trilogy.
In summary: Andromeda’s creative team made a smart and bold choice in relocating to a new setting, its developers managed to wrestle the difficult Frostbite engine into a solid game platform that would support fun and energetic gameplay, the environmental designers built out a large and varied cluster of worlds to explore, and the writers came up with an interesting cast of characters and a fascinating enemy with enormous potential to challenge, thrill, and surprise.
So… why doesn’t Andromeda work?
