Mass Effect Andromeda is a bad game. I try to be open-minded... but if you think otherwise you can fuck off. How many single-player, campaign-based games have had their DLC cancelled? Andromeda is a highly sophisticated shit sandwich, with many layers to it. I could talk extensively about how they dumbed down the combat, or the boring open world, or the unnatural dialogue – my face is sure is tired right about now – or, indeed, about the facial animations and the fact that Sara Ryder looks like the result of a saucy night starring Rafi Fine and an Oblivion NPC. I could talk about all of these things, and I kind of just did.  However, I’m going to talk about the plot, and Mass Effect Andromeda’s constant and consistent failure to do anything new or exciting, despite the constant opportunities presented – a failure I’ve never seen in any space opera before. Ever. The best example of this is found in the Angara, the friendly sapient race of Andromeda.

So, here’s the deal. This is an alien race in an alien galaxy. The possibilities are endless, yet BioWare managed to make them as boring as possible. They’ve human-ish faces, backwards shins, and three-fingered hands. And they were genetically engineered. By pure coincidence, they look exactly like a Milky Way race. But perhaps they have some weird alien quirks and values? Nope. They’re open with their emotions, and they value family. Or that’s what we’re told. Of course, we very rarely see them getting all emotional. You’d think they’d be fired up all the time; freaking out, always in laughter or tears, an open book. They’re not, though. They’re just normal dudes. Making it even worse is that it’s them that tell you they’re open with their emotions. How are they actually aware of this? What comparison do they have? The only other race is a bunch of evil rock bastards. If you never had any contact with anybody outside of your culture, just how aware of your own cultural biases would you be? Furthermore, their morals are just…normal. By pure coincidence, their concepts of right and wrong happen to be the same as Milky Way values. They're an alien race from another fucking galaxy, but there's only minimal friction between your lot and theirs. You're never forced to try and see the world through their own bizarre morals. There's never any cultural clashes, which did actually exist in the original trilogy. They point guns at you for a few minutes and then become your buddies.

There are so many directions this could have gone, allow me to illustrate:
You go to a planet and OH SHIT! There's people here! But they're primitive, like alien cavemen, or perhaps even tribals. You've accidentally interfered with their natural development, what the fuck are you going to do now? Leave them and the planet's resources, hoping they don't wind up making you into a deity or some shit? Try and find some uninhabited spot on the planet where you can try and pinch a few resources without destroying their prospects? Or say "Fuck it, kill 'em all" and take the planet for yourselves out of desperation, and fear that the damage to those people has already been done?

This reflects the underpinning problem with the entire game. It’s another galaxy. They could’ve done anything, but they did nothing. The Andromeda galaxy just happens to run on the exact same ruleset as the Milky Way galaxy. Every planet has a single biome, the technology is the same shape as it is in the Milky Way, and all the cool anomalies are man-made, so to speak. How much cooler would it have been if that fucked up storm on Habitat 7 was just the way things work here?
Every single venue to do something new and exciting is squandered. Both the male and female protagonists exist simultaneously? We can do some cool shit with that! Nope. Coma. (Caption: Funny, another game squandered the same concept – Picture of Fallout 4).
Okay, how about the antagonist? He looks like he’s got some crazy tech, and he’s clearly fascinated by the Remnant tech. We can do some cool shit with that! Perhaps His people are just as desperate as ours, but have chosen to shoot people instead of building bridges? Nope. Assimilation plot. Okay, fine. What about the fucking remnants? Can we have some cool shit with them at least? No, no you fucking can’t. They’re a generic precursor race that played with genetics and set up tech for the future generations to find. (Insert pictures of prothean shit from original trilogy, halo shit, 2001 shit, Prometheus shit)

Somehow, BioWare managed to make a story about going to another galaxy boring. And that’s the key word. Boring. It’s a boring fucking game. The characters are dull, flat, and annoying. The voice acting is drier than a nun’s muff. The exploration that they advertised so heavily just amounted to driving a boring car on boring hills, going back and forth across a boring galaxy delivering things.

Currently, it looks like Anthem is BioWare’s last stand. They’re on thin fucking ice, and we shall see whether it breaks or not. Of course, perhaps if they hadn’t pissed away so much time with Molyneux-grade ideas such as hundreds of procedurally-generated planets, or trying to use an engine like Frostbite, or bickering amongst themselves, they might have been able to make a game worthy of their own legacy.