Best Of

I finished the game last night. Two thumbs up from this guy.

As I thought back more on the Andromeda story, I decided it was unfair to compare it to ME2 and ME3 because two completely different teams did the games. What I mean by that is, ME2 built on the foundation of ME1, and ME3 was the conclusion of the build up from ME1 and ME2. With the trilogy you had Shepard's story. The games could have easily been called ME: Shepard's Story 1, 2 and 3. By the time the team started doing ME3, they knew wtf they were doing.

Andromeda is not ME4. With the controversial ending in ME3, Bioware decided to leave the Milky Way behind and start new 600+ years in the future.

So what we have is a fresh team making Andromeda 1. Therefor I feel we have to compare MEA with ME1. The foundation of the next series.

For those of you who have played ME1, you'll remember the story took a very long time to get exciting. I remember many forum posts about "you just gotta get off the citadel. If you can do that you will love the game". Getting off the citadel in ME1 took quite a few hours, more if you were a lore junkie.

Andromeda is the same way. In fact the power curve of the story from "meh" to "holy shit" is basically the exact same between ME1 and MEA. Both games start off by throwing you right into the "holy shit" for an hour or two, and then both games have many hours of "let food sit on low heat"

I can see both ME1 and MEA losing the interest of players during this "low heat" timeline.

I know a lot of people don't want to hear, "get off the citadel (nexus in MEA) and the game gets good" but it is so worth it. MEA like ME1, is a slow burn story that takes many many hours to reach it's potential. I probably only did 85% of the content, and I clocked 103 hours.

So, does Andromeda live up to the awe of Mass Effect 1?

Almost.

But I feel Andromeda lays down a much better foundation for future Andromeda games than ME1 did.

And that part has me excited.

BTW, have you guys checked out all the goodies in patch 2.5? pretty stoked about some of the changes. One thing that wasn't highlighted was that Kunai's cube now has a function to populate the cube with the needed crafting mats since they aren't inventory items anymore, sweet little QoL improvement IMO.