Mass Effect: Andromeda: Patched into a more natural smile, but still with a lemon aftertaste

I still remember the laughter that accompanied Mass Effect:Andromeda’s release as it was yesterday. The long-awaited game was finally available – after a delay which was related to many issues in the development phase – at the end of March 2017. The developers of Bioware and equally well-known publishing company EA admitted very soon by approving numerous game updates and patches (until the end of July of the same year) that the quality of the release version of this game was just not acceptable at the time of release (yes, I am also talking about you, horrid facial animations).

As a lot of things have been fixed in the game since then and as Andromeda recently also went on discount on the Origin platform (okay I confess, only the latter was the real incentive), I took my chance to discover whether the echo of the original laughter still has a justified reverb in 2020. Translated into: I really wanted to know if ME: Andromeda does earn a well deserved second chance.

Now let’s just get into it straightaway, the first 20 minutes of the opening scene of ME: Andromeda is plain vanilla. Boring as hell, explore the space ship environment, learn the controls, get affiliated with the personalities (or not), get used to the atmosphere.

The graphics are just amazing. on a GTX 1060 with 6GB of VRAM I could play it on 4K HDR resolution without having any performance drop during the completion of the main quest (lasting for 28 hours).

But then – without spoiling too much – you finally can start your first mission and things go horribly wrong – as it should be and also, as it shouldn’t. I have to admit that the exploration of the vault on Eos became interesting enough to experience the same tension again like I had with the first 3 installments of the series. At the same time, I cannot deny that the rest of the game is not at the same quality level of its predecessors.

The game did remind me a lot to Fallout 4. It’s just another installment of a RPG series, offering great graphics and tight controls, with in background a fantastic history and lots of fans. Everything for this sequel shined so bright to be brilliant, but unfortunately at the end, the core of the game fails to deliver onto the expectations, because of falling into the already famous, superficial pit filled with exploring, killing, looting, grinding, mining and endlessly completing fetch quests, leading to extreme boredom and totally annihilating replay-ability…