Here is my "Clean" review of this game, to educate and inform people who, like me, was on the fence and "didn't mind the sjw-ness since that's been a staple of Bioware games for forever". I thought, if it bothers you just ignore the romance options, nbd right?
Bioware is dead. Nobody who was involved in making any of their previous games is still around, they've all jumped ship or got "problematic" harassment lawsuited out of the business. This game was designed by a diversity committee with no experience at making video games. That is the only way to explain this.
Here is how the game was designed:
This new team looked at statistics for the original 3 games, having never played those games before, they had to go by statistics.
What did players spend the most time doing in Mass Effect 1? Well, it says here that a significant chunk of the game play was driving around in very sparsely populated open world maps in this clunky little tank thing, looking for resources and upgrades. Oh great, so lets make sure to include that, players obviously loved that aspect since they spent a lot of time doing it.
What else did they do? Well they spent a lot of time looting things and managing their inventories via a clunky interface, so let's make sure to include that too.
Ok great, got everything we need from the Original, what about Mass Effect 2?
Well, players spent a disproportionate amount of time scanning planets for resources through a clunky interface. Really? Man the players really love to scan for resources. Ok great, let's not just copy the original, let's improve upon this by having you scan from your omnitool at all times! They will love this!
What about 3? Well it looks like players all loved multiplayer! it seems like everyone did that no matter what! let's make sure to design this game around multiplayer too! We can save a lot of development time by just designing multiplayer and piggybacking that in to the single player experience, since that's what players spent a lot of time doing in 3. They also spent a lot of time flying back and forth to different planets to turn in quests in 3, should we include that too? Why not, stats say thats what players spent their time doing, it must be what they like about it, right? Oh, theres been a lot of forum chatter about uncontrollable actions during cut scenes? i didn't actually read the threads, just a lot of players are talking about it! Ok cool let's make sure to include that as well.
At some point someone actually sat down and tried to play one of the Mass Effect games, but having no experience playing video games, died a lot. I don't like it, they said, i have to press space bar to hide behind things? Why am I hiding? Let's make space bar jump really high in to the air with a jump pack! we can add platforming and jump puzzles in to the game too!
Yeah, that's great and all. but you know what this game really needs? I mean we have the players collecting all these various resources from basically every aspect of play, we need to add MMO-inspired Tradeskill/crafting to this game! that would really separate us from the pack!
And that's how Andromeda was made. By people who've never played video games.
The game has nothing to do with Mass Effect. The hate (all of which is legitimate, btw) about the clunky UI or the hideous characters or laughable story line or disastrous animations, that's all window dressing. The CORE GAME PLAY is just wrong.
At it's heart, Mass Effect is a Level Based Cover shooter, with additional elements that prolong and extend gameplay. Over the course of the original trilogy systems are tweaked and changed, to reduce the tedium of these additional elements, to streamline the gameplay to support the core system which is a level based cover shooter.
Andromeda is none of these things. The core gameplay is not a shooter, it's "Exploration" ie all the tedium from the original games dialed up to 11. Occasionally you have to fight things, but that is just window dressing to support scanning. Even the minigames are back! Remember in 1, you had a couple of minigames, a frogger style one, and a simon says one? They "improved" upon that in 2, a memory style game and a match this symbol one? It took until 3 for them to realize how lame that was and just removed them. But they are back in Andromeda, hope you like Sudoku.
The Core game play is driving around in a car from Mass Effect 1, using the Mass Effect 2 scan system to find minerals, combined with getting out of your car so you can scan things with your omnitool, all while being directed what to do at every step of the way with a Super EDI that's implanted directly in to your brain which will not shut up, ever.
THAT is this game's core gameplay. It is NOT a level based cover shooter. It's not even a Shooter. It's a walking/driving/resource gathering simulator. Combat is just window dressing that occasionally occurs that gets in the way of the walking simulator.
I've said it before but I'll repeat myself so that it's not lost: This game is everything you hated or found annoying about the original games, and that's it. And while in the original trilogy they added new systems to improve upon the old ones, this one doesn't. It just adds all of them back in, and worse than the original.
Just because the trailers show you combat don't make the mistake I did in assuming that "well I can handle the crap and the tedium as long as I get some good combat", because you don't. Combat is less than 10% of this game, it's sparse, it's short lived, and it's irrelevant. Also the combat sucks compared to the previous games.
