8/10
Jul 22, 2017·✓ Recommended
Beat·Xbox One
The question of how to follow on from Mass Effect must've been an incredibly demanding one. Andromeda's answer is to take us to a brand-new galaxy, far away from the Reapers and start afresh.
We are Ryder, one of the chosen pioneers travelling aboard a colony ship called an Ark, aiming to settle the Andromeda galaxy. When we arrive however things are not good - the predictions of galactic survivability made centuries ago when the Ark set sail turn out to be wildly wrong, and a dangerous enemy known as the Kett hunt down our extragalactic travellers. Elevated to the rank of Pathfinder, Ryder has to somehow stop the Kett and find a way of making the settled planets viable for life. Despite the high stakes, Andromeda is much lighter in tone than the Mass Effect trilogy, which I was really grateful for - it's much more about the joy of exploration, in contrast to the grim hopelessness of the trilogy's story of galactic annihilation.
The various worlds of Andromeda are absolutely massive, with lots of time spent careening about in your planetary rover and finding quests to do. There's a degree to which one could label it a typical contemporary open world game, but I think the framing and writing help elevate it personally. Of course, Andromeda was a controversial game on release - partly that came down to its writing, which was always going to struggle being compared to the trilogy, but also because of its abysmal performance on release. This has been patched thankfully since then, so anyone going in nowadays needn't worry about that point at least.
Check out my full review! The Almighty Backlog, review #11:
https://thealmightybacklog.wordpress.com/2018/03/12/mass-effect-andromeda/
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