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Mass Effect: Andromeda
8 years ago
Was pretty decent.
The story was right up my alley in that it is largely a heroic tale.
I have not and do not intend to play any of the previous mass effect games, my view of them having already been tainted by all the sht I've seen on youtube already. I don't want to invest a hundred hours in a game series only to have the outcome be one of three flavors of explosion, as it were.
THIS mass effect game, judged absent baggage from the series, is all right. I spent the climactic scene all but yelling 'Hell Yeah!"
There are a few things I feel I should go ahead and get off my chest, not because anyone reading this cares but because this is pretty much the only place I have or am inclined to blog about anything, so here goes.
I played as Scott.
I shipped Vetra, and even after consideration I've no desire to ship anyone else in the game. She was far and away the most interesting and lovable of the options available. In fact I knew pretty much from the very first scene I saw her that she was, if eligible, going to be the love interest.
Cora was a self-absorbed, self-pitying half-pile of white hair for all I was concerned, and I kicked her out of the party as soon as humanly possible. None of the other options were interesting enough for me to even define what I did and didn't like about them.
Most of the moral decisions were on the light side, which is to say there were pretty clear right choices to all of them, and I say with fair certainty I got them all right given how my climax went. (read too much into that at your peril.)
I played on hardcore, which is to say the hardest mode that didn't say nightmare somewhere in it, and it was suitably challenging for the first twenty levels or so, but by the time I got to the end of the game I had sixty some odd unspent skillpoints because I didn't need them and couldn't think of anything to spend them on to make things any better. The only reason I'd have spent them is if I wanted to change play styles... speaking of which:
I went recon sniper with a secondary emphasis on close-combat cloak shotgun/melee. Popping heads in video games never gets old, and as soon as I could do it with the Black Widow, that became my preferred method for the rest of the game.
The difficulty fell off rather steeply towards the mid-game and never picked up again: I went through the final, climactic encounter on the first try with no deaths. Not bragging, rather disappointed in fact, considering as my wife will tell you, I spent about four hours assaulting the Kett base on Eos and swearing a blue streak at how ridiculously unfair it was.
(As it turns out, I was 'doing it wrong' as they say. I was trying to blitz the base, not realizing the waves I was blowing through would continue to spawn BEHIND ME and commence the raep no matter how quickly I disarmed the alarms.)
The solution was simple, and once I learned that lesson the challenge, pretty much for the rest of the game, ceased. The solution was this: when a wave spawns, stop, take a deep breath, and kill every, fcking, thing. You cannot blitz the set-pieces, which is annoying in a way.
As for the thing everyone is complaining about, the googly-eyed unfinished look and wooden faces in the cut scenes and elsewhere... well, to be honest, I gave few fcks. I can see what people are talking about, but if you choose to invest in the story they could almost be stills and it wouldn't matter. Given how little polish went into some of the scenes, stills would have been better.
The voice acting was good across the board, but standouts included the krogan (who's name I forget), Jaal, and Vetra (I may be biased on that last but I don't think so.)
The multi-player was engaging for all of about an hour, after which it became boring. REALLY boring. The rewards are meaningless and it has no impact on game play. Why it was included I genuinely have no idea as it's clearly not something they put any thought into or focused any time on.
Space travel was utterly meaningless, as is planet exploration beyond those planets you can land on. Unless you get a hard on when someone tells you the mineral composition and temperature of ye random planet, don't bother.
I'm sure some of my concerns and potentially even the unfinished look of the game will get 'fixed' as time goes on but there was little here I'd consider worth replaying the game for.
I got the deluxe edition so I could have the soundtracks.
.... that's pretty much it I think. Back to writing.
The story was right up my alley in that it is largely a heroic tale.
I have not and do not intend to play any of the previous mass effect games, my view of them having already been tainted by all the sht I've seen on youtube already. I don't want to invest a hundred hours in a game series only to have the outcome be one of three flavors of explosion, as it were.
THIS mass effect game, judged absent baggage from the series, is all right. I spent the climactic scene all but yelling 'Hell Yeah!"
There are a few things I feel I should go ahead and get off my chest, not because anyone reading this cares but because this is pretty much the only place I have or am inclined to blog about anything, so here goes.
I played as Scott.
I shipped Vetra, and even after consideration I've no desire to ship anyone else in the game. She was far and away the most interesting and lovable of the options available. In fact I knew pretty much from the very first scene I saw her that she was, if eligible, going to be the love interest.
Cora was a self-absorbed, self-pitying half-pile of white hair for all I was concerned, and I kicked her out of the party as soon as humanly possible. None of the other options were interesting enough for me to even define what I did and didn't like about them.
Most of the moral decisions were on the light side, which is to say there were pretty clear right choices to all of them, and I say with fair certainty I got them all right given how my climax went. (read too much into that at your peril.)
I played on hardcore, which is to say the hardest mode that didn't say nightmare somewhere in it, and it was suitably challenging for the first twenty levels or so, but by the time I got to the end of the game I had sixty some odd unspent skillpoints because I didn't need them and couldn't think of anything to spend them on to make things any better. The only reason I'd have spent them is if I wanted to change play styles... speaking of which:
I went recon sniper with a secondary emphasis on close-combat cloak shotgun/melee. Popping heads in video games never gets old, and as soon as I could do it with the Black Widow, that became my preferred method for the rest of the game.
The difficulty fell off rather steeply towards the mid-game and never picked up again: I went through the final, climactic encounter on the first try with no deaths. Not bragging, rather disappointed in fact, considering as my wife will tell you, I spent about four hours assaulting the Kett base on Eos and swearing a blue streak at how ridiculously unfair it was.
(As it turns out, I was 'doing it wrong' as they say. I was trying to blitz the base, not realizing the waves I was blowing through would continue to spawn BEHIND ME and commence the raep no matter how quickly I disarmed the alarms.)
The solution was simple, and once I learned that lesson the challenge, pretty much for the rest of the game, ceased. The solution was this: when a wave spawns, stop, take a deep breath, and kill every, fcking, thing. You cannot blitz the set-pieces, which is annoying in a way.
As for the thing everyone is complaining about, the googly-eyed unfinished look and wooden faces in the cut scenes and elsewhere... well, to be honest, I gave few fcks. I can see what people are talking about, but if you choose to invest in the story they could almost be stills and it wouldn't matter. Given how little polish went into some of the scenes, stills would have been better.
The voice acting was good across the board, but standouts included the krogan (who's name I forget), Jaal, and Vetra (I may be biased on that last but I don't think so.)
The multi-player was engaging for all of about an hour, after which it became boring. REALLY boring. The rewards are meaningless and it has no impact on game play. Why it was included I genuinely have no idea as it's clearly not something they put any thought into or focused any time on.
Space travel was utterly meaningless, as is planet exploration beyond those planets you can land on. Unless you get a hard on when someone tells you the mineral composition and temperature of ye random planet, don't bother.
I'm sure some of my concerns and potentially even the unfinished look of the game will get 'fixed' as time goes on but there was little here I'd consider worth replaying the game for.
I got the deluxe edition so I could have the soundtracks.
.... that's pretty much it I think. Back to writing.
Good enough, I can wait for it to drop.