As I said in my review, Mass Effect: Andromeda has an enjoyable main plot and characters. The sights of the new galaxy are vivid, and combat's fun. Yet there are so many irritations in playing this game, so many small bad decisions and design choices. Just a few of them and this would still be a great game, but with so many of them, Andromeda is dragged down to average at best.
I touched on many of these in my review, but I felt like ranting on for a bit about all of these missteps.
No quicksave? Seriously? It's not even just that it's disabled during combat. It doesn't exist. The autosave is pretty good, but not as good as being able to save with the touch of a button. Why would you remove that?
There are way too many keys to do things (headlights for the Nomad?) and the original key bindings suck. Then the game has the gall to complain (that is, alert you repeatedly) if you change them. Which of course I did; they made no sense!
The menus are a confusing mess. Let's start with quests--how am I supposed to tell if this quest is a personal crew matter, or planet-based (personal crew stuff can take place on planets!), or whether it qualifies as minor? Why does it take several clicks to get out of these menus?
Ugh, the inventory has awful organization as well. I just want to see all I have, including what I'm wearing. I don't want to have to look under each section of armor to see what's there (which doesn't include what I'm wearing!)
I already complained about the maps, but I'll do it again. I hate how it starts out so zoomed out you can't see the terrain or find anything. And the awful quest-marking! I can't even do a secondary marker because if I select that quest it becomes the main one! I need the ability to mark more than one quest at once!
And crafting. I hate having all these levels (each involving yet more crafting) to get the same exact armor, because there's only like five different types in the game. And those don't even look that different! (It took me until the second playthough to learn I could at least adjust the color. Thanks again, lack of manual!)
It might be nice if different materials made a difference in the finished product. If using bug exoskeleton made my armor green or Remnant tech added certain bonuses, that might have added some interest to the affair. But nope.
The cryo point reward system is such a sad lost opportunity. Here was the chance to really have Ryder influence Heleus, at least cosmetically, and maybe even tell some neat little side stories ala the War Table in Dragon Age: Inquisition. Instead we get...materials and mod bonuses I don't really need.
There some interesting differences in location with the rune scanning, but it still began to feel repetitive. I didn't feel like I learned anything about the mystery of the Remnant when I was exploring their ruins. Maybe if you learned something different based on the location? Somehow this game managed to make the lovely, epic Remnant structures boring, and that's a shame.
Again, it's really annoying to have to jump out of the Nomad to engage in combat. It feels silly, too. I also dislike how enemies keep showing up in the exact same place. There need to be more roaming animals and not so many raiders and outcasts (I feel like I killed half of the Initiative.)
I dislike how climbing in the Nomad becomes easier once you buy certain mods. It feels like level-locking parts of the game.
Some people seem to like the combat of the game, but for me it's worse than any of the trilogy. I miss pausing and ordering my squadmates to use their abilities, and I really miss classes. I miss being able to pause without a great big wheel blocking my sight.
Enemies are hard to see. If battles were more engaging I wouldn't mind. Maybe it's just the kett's theme of boring brown and puke green. I really like the idea of the kett, but I didn't end up liking their design. If their architecture felt cool I think it would have helped the game a lot.
I get having environmental hazards, and they can be fun, but radiation blocking your first planet kind of puts a hurdle in exploration. And I don't feel like there's enough acknowledgement when a planet is fixed via Remnant monoliths.
It might have been more dramatic to engage the uprising as it happened, but coming in and learning about it afterwards could have been interesting. Yet far too much is left unsaid or filled in at odd places (why does it take so long to visit Kadara or Elaadan when two of my crew members know very well where they are? Why can't I actually friggin' explore?)
It's a general problem with the story that too much of interest is hidden away in the codex or stated bluntly after already learned more subtly. There are a bunch of flow interruptions where something new doesn't seem acknowledge.
For example, why introduce the angara as a first contact scenario, then have them had already met the exiles and been kicked out of Kadara? And no one talks about this! Ryder doesn't really get to discover anything.
Seriously, the Initiative dragged along the materials to create there own not-so-mini Citadel? That really breaks my immersion. I suppose can understand having a central space station hub, but does it have to be so ridiculously ginormous?
Speaking of which, the decision to have the Initiative be a bunch of people just up and deciding to go to a new galaxy mostly breaks down because there are plenty of undiscovered places still in the Milky Way. There needed to be a better reason and a better pitch for this difficult journey.
I understand wanting people to have different reasons for going, but the Reapers would have made so much more sense. And I guess they sort of did, given the mysterious Benefactor bit, but that's a side plot of another plot, and it ISN'T FOLLOWED UP UPON. You can't just leave that dangling! It shouldn't be a random side thread, it's crucial to the logic and setup of this game and universe! It could have been part of the main plot!
Speaking of Pa Ryder's memories, why in Andromeda do I have to go out and find random locations to move this plot forward? If they wanted the plot to last throughout the game, why not just have the memory fragments happen naturally after main plot events and/or as Ryder becomes more experienced?
Generally, having to trek all over Heleus is overused in this game. Having to go to five different planets doesn't actually enhance a quest. Quite the opposite. And if I could just naturally explore and find stuff, I wouldn't need quests shoving me all over the galaxy.
I wish Ryder talked about their own background more. I know that's a bit odd coming from me, given my preference for defining my own characters, but it's weird having my character's background being an unmentioned cypher. I'd like at least something to work with! Then I can headcanon how Ryder feels about things and why they might make different decisions.
But there aren't a lot of decisions to make, unfortunately. There are some, but there should have been more. And those decisions have little or no effect on this game. I wonder if they got so caught up thinking about the neatness of future game consequences they forgot to have any meaningful influences in this game.
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