So, full disclaimers up front: I am a huge Mass Effect fan, with multiple 'three game' play-throughs to my credit... in fact on my current Xbox the hard drive is almost entirely taken up in downloaded Mass Effect games (no discs), meaning that I simply didn't care if I left room for other games on there.   However, and importantly here: I do not have, and have not played any of Andromeda, so my impression/reaction is entirely based on watching play-streams on youtube. This will not be a proper review. Bioware has lost me as a customer, possibly forever.

We've all seen the images, the 'whats wrong with your face' shots, the glitchy animations... oh... oh god... the animations!  Slumping bar patron had me in stitches!

Well, I'm not going to talk about those, so how refreshing is that?  
 
I'm going to stick to the writing, and by extension the directing, which is in my opinion one of the more important parts of 'the writing' in a project like this, be it game or film.

In the original Mass Effect trilogy there was always just One Shepard, the gender and personality of 'The Shepard' was emergent, depending on choices made by the player, but there was One Shepard.

This led to a rather bizarre series of choices by Bioware that have never panned out right for them, particularly in relationships.

In Mass Effect One you had three romance options: the Hot Alien Bi-Chick, the Straight Dude or the Straight Chick... and here is were our problems all begin. Since there is only One Shepard, why bother coding a gender preference into your romance options at all?  Why not have Ashley's sexuality depend on wether or not its a FemShep trying to mack her up? It seems to me that that would be actually easier to code and dialog for, since you don't need to have the AI respond to the character's gender at all, except for pronouns, but no, they made sure you couldn't do that and caught flack for being anti-gay.

In Mass Effect Two they opened up the Mackage with a bunch of options, and once again most of the aliens were cool with switch hitting, but except for our pansexual sidepiece girl-friday, the human characters again were hard coded to be almost entirely straight. See comments about One above.

In Three, finally feeling the Sting, Bioware introduced two new Sexual Assault Victim crewmembers, again not as regular characters, but as mook crew side peices. One Gay Man, with what I've heard is the lamest ever lost lover backstory (seems credible from my seat), and one Gay Woman who manages to be slightly better written but just barely. Seriously: who owns a five thousand dollar toothbrush?  Dentists don't own five thousand dollar toothbrushes, and thats a business expense for them!  This didn't really put an end to criticism, mind you, and once again it brings up the age old question: why not let the player's choices define the sexuality of the characters they're supposed to be sexually assaulting?  


But this brings us to the Ryder Twins. Now we have Two Shepards, as not only is the female counterpart an option to play, but can actually be interacted with in game when playing the male counterpart. At last it would make sense for Bioware to hard code sexual preferences into their characters, as now this creates a meaningful distinction in a world with Two Shepards.  And, so far as I can tell, they did just that, which ironically has created controversy because the 'Coded Butch Lesbian' is actually straight. Sigh.  Mind you, thats a sigh because of the controversy exists, not because I agree. In fact, its also a sigh because of 'coded butch lesbian', but that's just the same sigh, really.

So, at least here, Bioware is true to form, warts and all, and despite the change in Shepards to Ryders.

And normally I'd be all into seducing Coded Butch Lesbian Cora or Down Syndrome Asari or any of the other characters, because damned if I don't like my imaginary pimp life, yo.

But that brings us to the story, where our problems should be beginning.  Only, they don't. They actually begin with Coded Lesbian Cora and the character design. I'm not talking 'bout the animation so much as I'm talking about the Hot Topic Hipster character designs. Dutifully mentioned, so lets move on.

So the story goes that Hard-ass Papa Ryder brings his two bouncing children 600 years into the future on a sleeper ship to Andromeda to serve as his 'team' on Pathfinding Missions. Papa Ryder is clearly a Hard-ass, based on his Solid Snake design philosophy, may have ties to Cerberus and, if the design team hasn't entirely shit the bed on lore, is N7 trained, which is a bit like saying... well its almost exactly saying... that he's a full on Shepard Commander, motherfucker.  

Shady ties to Cerberus? Well, he's got that implanted AI thing going for him, and Cerberus is one of the few groups willing to flaunt galactic laws regarding AIs, and apparently the Illusive Man's last name, at least during the First Contact War is the same as the Captain of the voyage...

Which is were we get a bit of a headscratch which might be resolvable with some game playing time, but based on what I'm hearing, probably isn't.  Papa Ryder is a Hard Ass Pathfinder Shepard Commander motherfucker. Captain... um.... Hanson?... is a dopey youngish(?) woman who may, or may not, be taking orders from her Pathfinder, who is the guy with the AI in his head, after all. So, who is in charge here?  The Solid Snake motherfucker with teh AI, or the woman who can't talk right now because her face is too tired?  Its an interesting question.

Naturally Papa Hard-ass dies in the first mission, so one of his bouncing baby boy/girls can take over as Pathfinder. I'd say this is our first real sign of bad writing, of hacky cliches and all that jazz, because that's all true. I mean: I TRUST certain writers to handle it well, heck I'm pretty confident I could handle it well, but its hacky, cliched and obvious from seconds of starting the game.

But its not really our first sign of bad writing, not by a country mile.

Where to begin? Well, one guy online pointed out what a huge missed opportunity the whole 'waking from cryosleep' scene is handled, and I agree with him, but missed opportunities are not necessarily bad writing in and of themselves, but lets start in the same general vicinity.

So: waking from cryosleep to start. Eh. Its a bit trite. Necessary to the plot for there to have been cryosleep, but if you aren't going to do anything decent with it why not have it happen before the story actually kicks off?  

But no: you apparently get one hour of wakefulness, a cup of coffee, and some snarky bro-dude dialog before you're sent planetside on your first mission. Where your dad will die, in case you were asleep and not seeing the Vegas Lights all spelling it out for you from the box art or something.

But before that can happen this ship, where everyone BUT the Pathfinder(s) has been awake for an unknown but presumably longer than one hour length of time, manages to crash into a space cloud bigger than the moon, so that the Other Shepard won't be awake yet.  Sigh.

Really?

Look, I get it: You can't let either Ryder Option have primacy over the other, which makes matters of inheriting the Pathfinder Role from Papa Ryder sort of tricky. So lets chalk up a mark in favor of keeping the One Shepard idea alive right off the bat.  Beyond that lets say that if you need to go through this many contortions to set up your passing of the torch plot, with this many WTF decisions just to reach this point (and we haven't got to teh actual passing of the torch yet!), you done fucked up, son!

Look again: Plots ain't Hard, yo.  Mass Effect was about giant killer robots from beyond the galaxy wiping out all life.  See?  Andromeda is about Pathfinder Ryder exploring Andromeda, making new friends and shooting them in the face.

See the problem there? You're making the plot about the character. Plots can be about the character, but usually its better served if they aren't. Let the character handle being the character... some people make credible comments in favor of Shepard being a Brick, because we can immerse better, while others make credible comments that Shepard, as a character, is deep and well handled because Indoctrination Theory. But notice: Mass Effect isn't about how Shepard is having a Very Bad Day because Reapers. Shepard's just the guy who we're hoping Stops the Reapers.

Andromeda? All about the Ryder, yo. Which Ryder? Well... agency and all that, so whichever, man.

That, and being drunk and stupid, is no way to go through writing, son.

But if you have to be about the character, then at least make the character credible.

I mean: leaving aside the apparently wooden voice acting and utter lack of direction for all voice acting, Papa Ryder is a character we could get behind and actually follow as a Character.  His Son/Daughter is just some young punk who only gets the job because of family connections. Its actually pretty damn hard to imagine anyone on this mission getting behind Junior, not one person has suggested Junior has any qualifications behind being, well, Junior.

Mind you: I'm of the mind that the passing of the Normandy from Anderson to Shepard in ME1 was a bit unnecessary and ham-handed, though relevant to the SPECTRE subplot. I guess Commander Shepard sounds better than Captain Shepard, and someone had a hard-on for proper naval terminology?  Heck, I appreciate someone taking the effort to actually Naval It Up in here, though I gather the Andromeda mission is more civilian in nature, which is fine for its own reasons.

Now, I've gotten mixed impressions from others about Side-kick Liam, who I'm guessing is romancible by One Of the Ryders, but I couldn't swear to it. One reviewer said he was the only character whose voice acting and writing seemed remotely on point, while another thought his snarky-brah banter was worth shooting him in the face over.  Like Lesbian Coded Cora, he's a Hot Topic Hipster design, which is a mark against him in my book.  I don't know much about the character himself, but I have heard his dialog and seen at least two crucial early scenes that put Liam into the 'shit character' catagory for me.  There's that whole "Looks like I made him mad... because I shot him in the face!" dialog (actual quote), which is cringeworthy... and I'm going to say a bad Whedon impression at that, but that only irritates because apparently he never shuts up.

No, I'm talking about the scenes where, as a Pathfinder exploring a whole new galaxy he apparently wants to shoot everyone in the face and ask questions when he's back in cryosleep or when he's just pointlessly shooting into a corpse so you can make a paragon/renegade choice... to let him keep shooting the corpse.

Dear.

Lord.






Sigh.  

I got a lot of shit to do, and as I said, I haven't played the game... and now may never play the game, so I'm going to skip forward to Papa Ryder's death and then my final conclusion, m'kay? Save us all a lot of pain.

So: THere are a few elements into Papa Ryder's death, not even discussing the utter lack of emotional reaction from the character(s) that absolutely needs to be discussed by someone.  Now, while killing off this character was a foregone conclusion a five year old doped up on Ritalin could have seen coming from ME3's ending five fucking years ago (I may be exaggerating for effect here, but only a little), that doesn't automatically make it bad.  

Lets start with the setup: After successfuly completing our bullshit introductory mission of 'piss off the locals by shooting them in the face and turnign off their lightning machine that we have no idea why it even exists but is inconvienent for us' but before you can get off the planet, sudden wind/earthquake/structural collapse without precedent take only you and Papa Ryder on what is only your second 'Fall to your Death' moment of the game thus far. This time managing to avoid bringing everyone else along for the ride, so yay for showing restraint and boo for sudden plot contrivance getting even more plot contrivancy?

Only this time your magic space armor fails, leaving you sucking not-healthy-for-human-life air. You needed Pathfinders to land on this world to determine if it was fit for a colony why again? Unbreathable air, people. Gonna say no to that human colony world thing. Leave it to teh locals, they seem to breath it just fine, and they really don't like us visiting, m'kay?

So you are dying because three or four sudden plot contrivances say you are dying, so Papa Ryder gives you his helmet, and... I'm ballparking here... his magic AI implant, since that seems super important to Pathfinding, if only because all the humans are morons of the first order.

Quick Dissection Moment: Papa Ryder Sacrificing Himself (and putting the 'fate of humanity' mission in the hands of his until-now untested child) is not, in and of itself, bad.  No, scratch that, its actually good.  Taken in a white room scenario, this is a long standing cliche bit of character development that we keep around because it resonates with us. It is, by itself, a deep and powerful testament to humanity, to character, to family and all that jazz.

ALL BY ITSELF.

The writing can only add to that inherent power.

Unfortunately: This pretty much is a White Room version of that iconic scene.  Noting, not one fucking iota, one fucking jot, of power is added. If it were possible to make this weaker, they would have found a way, but frankly this is about as pure an example of a stereotypical scene being used as I think you will ever find.  It has almost exactly as much power as if you were discussing the idea of such a scene in a writers workshop... which is to say: wow, that might have possibilities. Coffee?

Wooden Voice Acting doesn't do any favors here, nor does the samples of Low Energy Ryder Junior I've heard, but really that's irrelevant.  This is someone making a list of boxes to check off along the way of telling the story of ME:Andromeda.  Shepard's Mom has more emotional impact than Papa Ryder.  Anderson's feelings for the destruction of his hometown of London (with his very american accent, and lack of any iconic London set design elements) is better developed that this.

Seriously: One in Three Shepard's will have a deeper connection to a streetgang from his youth selling drugs on teh citadel is more meaningful character development than 100% of all Ryder Juniors having their father give his life so they will live on their very first every Pathfinding in Andromeda... fate of humanity and all... has.

People have gone from 200 dollar pre-order packages to not-buying the game after playing through this.


But Spike, you say: You haven't even tried the five dollar pre-order stream, how can you utterly savage the writing sight unseen from hearsay?  Maybe it gets better?

But here's the thing. I can savage it, not because of the Hearsay itself, but because it speaks to a readily identifiable problem with the creative design of the game... a problem that means that there is no 'there' there, nothing to be saved later, nothing to be improved upon.

This is a game written and directed, created in almost every single aspect, by Tyros who have no fucking idea what they are doing. Not only do they not have any idea what they are doing, they don't even know they have no idea what they are doing, and they don't care to find out.  This is like the old Ubisoft complaint that they didn't make female characters  (assassin's creed unity) because writing female characters, and animating female characters was hard. Yes, sure it is. Its also your fucking job, mate!  The one you get paid to do? Absurd amounts of money I might point out? Not impossible, mind you, because every single other game in existance at that point had plenty of female characters, often quite good ones.

Everything about this game screams about how young and hip the creators are, or think they are.  Our Protagonist CAN"T BE Papa Ryder, because he's OLD and Un-Hip. Untested, virtually untrained youths have to run this mission because WE ARE YOUNG AND HIP! Youth In Revolt!!!

Cora being 'Coded Lesbian' by accident because of her hip, hot-topic haircut and, yes, deliberately unattractive mannish face (on, I might add, a Model's Body) and Liam's Hip Urban Youth and Snarky Brah dialog are part and parcel to the fundamentally un-seriousness of this design team.

Why can't they create an Emotional Connection to Papa Ryder's Death? Because I strongly doubt any of them have suffered a major emotional trauma in their lives, and if anyone has, he or she was probably marginalized from bringing that to the writing because it created 'bad feelz' or negative energy.   Every bit of the writing is about telling the story in the most convenient way possible, damn how idiotic it comes across, full lazy ahead!

There are good voice actors involved, somehow providing the worst performances of their careers. Because they aren't the people in charge, and the people in charge are... and damn them for making me pull out my old people's card a good few decades early... fucking children.  They are grown fucking children who have no idea why or how things work because they've never done a damn thing in their lives except be fucking children...and they don't even have the good god damn grace to ask an adult about the things they don't know.

My God: The entire premise of the Mass Effect universe is based on goofy-ass nonsense science (Element Zero? Do you even Chemistry, bro?), and yet listen to (I really should link this) the relativistic physics that would give Einstein a boner IN THE FUCKING BACKGROUND when an alliance Gunney is dressing down his crew for 'winging' shots in naval battles.  Read some of the codex entries, for example on the heat sinks of the Normandy and see just how much real science made it into a damn game about killer robots from between galaxies wiping out all life because Element Zero suddenly renders two of newton's three laws more or less irrelevant!

But no, we don't pilot our starships around space clouds when we wake up our Pathfinders to tell us unbreathable air is bad for humans, and Papa Ryder dies because someone needed a sexy gay twink model hero, god damn it!

The sheer staggering depths of the fall is breathtaking.

The problems with the animation are, at the end of the day, utterly predictable just from the writing. It's god damn 'young and hip' turtles all the way down this fucker.  Its 'Neil Armstrong didn't design the Apollo rockets, so we're getting slighted' New Fantastic Four all up in this bitch.  Shepard/Anderson ship slash-fic would be better written than this. Fuck, hire the dude from the Evangelion/40k crossover to write for you. That motherfucker did the exact opposite, he actually redeemed both the most worthless protagonist in all of history AND made little plastic models deep and insightful characters in their own rights! These assholes?  Hmm.. just had a parent sacrifice himself so I could live? Yeah, that's like... say, is this organically sourced coffee? I only drink Fair Trade Organic, you know?  Oh, my dad? Yeah? I guess that's a bummer, but you know... he was like, killing the earth or something with his carbon footprint? I mean, its like a tragedy or something, but I got his sweet AI, so... kinda evens out, amirite?

Rage on.

aheh.

One of my players has it and I think just finished it. Aside from the bugs and the animations, seemed to like it overall.

I like porn overall, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

What is really funny, Omega, is that as I was driving back from an absurdly unnecessary medical appointment caused by my own glaring incompetence at reading simple dates... I was remarking to myself that for all the vitriol and rage I... and I gotta stress this word... APPEAR... to spew online, I am about the least rageaholic person I've ever met.... which I suppose does mean I should quit hanging out with bear-shirts, but really I'm mellow enough to get random drug tests because there is apparently no human way I could be that calm all the damn time.

But I used to jump out of planes for a living, so my perspective on important shit is perhaps a bit skewed.

I bailed after ME3. As in, I had no plans to buy any future Mass Effect titles.
They had been heading in a poor direction with the loss of the early writers and developers anyway.

Spike, do the earlier Mass Effects have gaming value beyond the virtual soap opera?

And you are 100% right that nobody is gonna be happy until every NPC get turned on by the PC. If they had 100 NPCs and 99 would hook up with the PC, we'd have online shitstorms over that 1 NPC.

Just about 40 hours in and I am enjoying the game. As for the father's death and lack of emotional "umph", two things I think work against it. One, you have barely any game-time with the character (dad) when he dies. As a player you simply don't have any real connection to him. Second, it seems dad didn't much raise his kids and/or was super distant. I've lost count how many times Ryder has said how "not close" they were in other conversations.

Quote from: Ras Algethi;955841Just about 40 hours in and I am enjoying the game. As for the father's death and lack of emotional "umph", two things I think work against it. One, you have barely any game-time with the character (dad) when he dies. As a player you simply don't have any real connection to him. Second, it seems dad didn't much raise his kids and/or was super distant. I've lost count how many times Ryder has said how "not close" they were in other conversations.

In other words: Its a white room version of the traditional trope, with no effort from the writers to give it any emphasis or impact? Hrmph... if only I'd thought to say something like that earlier? Good Catch!

Quote from: Spinachcat;955834Spike, do the earlier Mass Effects have gaming value beyond the virtual soap opera?
.

That is a loaded question. I haven't seen any soap operas since I was a wee bairn, but even they can tell interesting and moving dramas, and there are things (shows) I've seen dismissed as thinly veiled soap operas that I've liked, though I haven't got a clue what they would be now, since I tend to flush anything not currently relevant to make more room for internet drama.

There is always a big selling point in the Mass Effect games (prior to this iteration....) that their characters, and the player's interactions with them, are exceedingly well done.  If THAT is your definition of Soap Opera, then we can argue the big draw is, well, soap opera. But Mass Effect isn't really all that stereotypically Soap Opera like. The Big Plot is the killer robots from beyond space, not which space skank Shep, or Femshep, is banging this go around.  Despite the series pretty much forcing you to break up with (and potentially re-ignite) your Mass Effect relationship in the second game of the series, no one ever really gets all 'bitch, Femshep is Mah HO!'...and the relationship and denouement is secondary to the Big Plot. Its been joked by a few fans about how predictible the relationships tend to be.. Shep/Femshep gets laid just before the final battle, with almost no variation at all. (Banging the space hooker asari in One, or being a bastard to broken, tattooed bad-girl Jack in Two being the only exceptions off the top of my head).

But the games DO revolve around their characters, and the characters have typically excellent backstories. Mass Effect Two especially goes from a thirty hour game to a five hour game if you opt to ignore your supporting characters and race to the end... and as a consequence they all die... maybe even you die.  

I'm not avoiding your question, but I do have to point out that Characters are THE BIG DRAW for Bioware games, especially in writing, which is why I focused on that in the OP.

That said there is an awful lot of 'other stuff' to draw people to Mass Effect.  The world building is generally excellent, despite being almost entirely hackneed cliches taken from a dozen other franchises orginally.  The Element Zero Science is bollocks, but the rest of the space science is spot on, and we need at least one bollocks macguffin to make any Sci-Fi story really go big, otherwise its all sleeper ships and dead planets, and the tedium of crossing hundreds of light years just to go anywhere interesting.   Its got plenty of humor and detail, and is surprisingly one of those series that made consistent improvements in most aspects as it went along.  It Gets Bigger in every game without losing sight of where it started, the overarching story is solid as a rock, and firmly grounded in traditional storytelling techniques, such as solid, consistent themes (Hope, choice matters, Resistance is not futile) that carry all the way up to the very end... which is so infamously mis-aimed that it almost burned the internet down... and yet was so good along the way that even the worst burned fans forgave the game and bought the DLCs for six more months. Because while the ending was shit, and remained shit after they 'fixed it', every single thing leading to that shit was just so damn good.

So what does Mass Effect have to offer other than Soap Opera?

Excellent World Building
Unparalleled Character Agency over 90 fucking hours of game play (Minus 15 minutes of Wachozski level philosophical crap sandwich)
Solid Science for the Science Fiction, with caveats
Storytelling that manages to be action and adventure while not losing the deeper questions that all good science fiction poses (in this case a big one is humanities responsibility to it created children (AI))
A fun combat and RPG combination that improves over the series, though tastes may vary here (I personally found Two distasteful).
Let me repeat: Unparalleled character agency over 90 fucking hours. In a minor side quest I let a would be mafia dona go provided she gave up her criminal dreams. I could have killed her, but that's not what I'm talking about. In ME2 that character showed up again, and told me what she'd been doing.  There are major plot points in ME2 and ME3 that require certain choices in the previous games. BIG FUCKING CHOICES, fate of entire species stuff.  Choices have consequences that meaningfully impact not just game play, but the setting itself to a degree I don't think any other game series has even attempted.
The writing itself, to include the direction and the acting, is very good. I wanted to say consistently good, but that would be a damn lie, but it is still very, very good. By the end of ME3 you can FEEL the weight of fighting an extinction level threat weighing on Shepard, and the choice to bear it all stoically, instead of confiding in friends, actually carries through to the end by making that burden seem as heavy as god damn Frodo and his stupid little ring. This isn't even the usual Bioware nice guy/asshole choice system, its entirely separate from that, that the main character's animation and voice acting (for two different actors) actually changes as a consequence of what seems to be a minor flavor choice.
The sound track is consistently excellent in the classic sense of setting mood and tone.


I could go on, but I think you get the picture.  The answer, in short, is yes.

Thank you Spike!

It does sound worth a second look.

Once EA bought Bioware, the slow decline to complete and total shit was expected and inevitable.  Mass Effect 2/Dragon Age 2 already showed significant decline with the switch from RPG to Action RPG.  The saving grace was the characterization, writing and voice acting.  Once people started jumping ship or getting fired, it was the beginning of the end.  Now that Gaider's gone, it's not even Bioware anymore, just a tag EA puts on games.

They've destroyed Bioware just like they destroyed Mythic.

I'll admit that ME2 was not my favorite entry... changes to the character and combat system paired with the much smaller sandbox (as in: you could only go to a world with a party member quest on it) were three significant changes for the worse I can think of.

That said, in terms of telling its story and making choices mean stuff, ME2 actually is one of the stronger games, and I've found plenty of fans who basically think its the strongest overall... and I can see why.

But yeah: peeling away all the best people from Bioware, while expecting the new guys to keep the old standards flying, was just a dumbshit move... and not giving them enough time hurt ME3 badly... though I'd say that the END of ME3 wasn't so much rushing as... well... just an utter paucity of ideas on how to end it all, resulting in the one ending that Bioware had promised over and over again wouldn't be done.

But this new team, and the game they produced? Yeah... there ain't much legacy left there, just some externalities, artifacts designed by better people in an earlier, better time.


Damnit, now I gotta go outside and start yelling at the kids stomping on me lovely green grass...

Couldn't get into ME, the combat seemed like shit and it was so similar to KOTOR I got bored rather quickly. Should give it another shot but I'd rather finish Valiant.

I won't say that ME's combat is the most engaging part of the game. It is serviceable.

However, it is also true that it gets better as you play the game. Its strength was the options, the interplay of biotic and tech powers with basic shoot and cover mechanics and the synergies that come up... things that simply don't come across in the early, low levels of the game where you and your party are very limited in abilities, and enemies tend to be fragile.

Notably, however, the Combat System evolved the most between games. ME2, which gets massive praise, is a brutal and direct cover shooter, and with global cooldowns for powers reduces the interplay of ability synergies, while ME3 actually had, to me, the smoothest and most engaging combat of the three, reducing but not eliminating the cover based combat.

I've finished the game and I agree wth all of your points. The same themes are present all the way through, with your character having the authority to make decisions that would normally be made by world leaders and a variety of unearned deus ex machina gifts, with your AI buddy as the participation trophy.

The whole thing is clearly written from the perspective of someone who has very little life experience, and likely is claimed as a dependant on someone else tax form. The two older squadmates are largely defined as a cranky old dad and a big sister/mom. The two younger ones are cardboard cutout high schoolers. That leaves us with Cora that you have already covered well and the new alien companion Jall/The Beast, who appears to be designed to appeal to young girls.

I generally make a character that looks like me for my first run through the game, but that wasn't possible this time. Your male character is going to be an undersized, soft spoken millennial no matter which head you put on the body. I ended up being an asian female, and I don't think I'll go back and try the male.

Having said all that, the gameplay and rpg character progression are great. There are many fun powers and items to build up and combine, and you get a lot more powerful as you level up. Unfortunately after a few hours you've seen everything the combat has to offer and it does get a little stale. There is one enemy base on the first planet that is very hard and to me was the high point of the game. There is exactly one boss fight that gets repeated several times. The melee companions are more of a liability than a help, at least as a gun character, as they habitually run right in front of your gun and don't do much damage.

The research points are a nice idea but unless you know what you want beforehand you are likely to waste them, which is unfortunate. The right gun makes a huge difference and the right items to research are not intuitive. You can respec your character abilities but not the research, so you can still easily gimp your character.

Going in, I was expecting something in the ballpark of Dragon Age: Inquisition, and I thought that was a fair expectation. MEA has better, if less diverse gameplay and is a giant step back in terms of  the plot and dialogue. The game is marketed as an adult game, but outside of a few boobies is anything but.

I'd love to see the marketing data they based their decisions on here. This seems to be designed to appeal to younger gamers at the expense of other demographics. Did they believe that they would pick up more Millennials/Gen Y than they would lose Gen X, or was the failure unintentional? The skeleton of a good game is in there. I'll wait and see before buying the next one.