On top of that, we have to drive around planets again, this time in a vehicle that handles like a Volvo estate and has even fewer guns. In particular, its crafting system is a convoluted mess which requires two separate screens and more currencies than a Bureau de Change. Accusations of dumbing-down or becoming too much of an action game bounced right off it, and to this day it's by far the collective favourite.Īndromeda introduced a lot of guff of its own. Mass Effect 2 was shorter, sleeker, and tonnes more fun. Mass Effect was a Ridley Scott film, and Mass Effect 2 was its jarhead James Cameron reinvention. Its stages were more tightly orchestrated, and the narrative device of an urgent suicide mission kept the pace up with an unprecedented sense of momentum. They had camera moves and walking and all sorts. The game's cutscenes and conversational sequences were noticeably more cinematic, at a time when that was yet to become a dirty word. That infamous space-car, the Mako, had been consigned to the dustbin of history along with the sparse planetary surfaces it had trundled across. Its RPG systems were simplified, as were its environments. Mass Effect 2 arrived in 2010, having expelled much of the guff.
Sound familiar? Aside from its combat, which retains the slickness of the sequels, Andromeda has resurrected many of the original game's issues. The gunplay was a bag of arse, the conversation system was as stilted as conversation systems ever were, and driving that daft space-car around? Good lord, how did we ever cope. That's probably why it took a few months for the cracks to show. The future had arrived, in glorious 720p. Except now it was running in real-time on a home console. To the contemporary observer, Mass Effect looked a bit like Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, a film which - while rubbish - is considered something of a watershed moment in reaching, if not quite escaping, the uncanny valley. The generational leap from the CRT era into a new age of enormous, pin-sharp, flat-screen televisions - and the requisite GPU power to drive them - represented the kind of foundational shift in gaming that hadn't been seen since the advent of textured polygons. The Xbox 360, the greatest console of all time until it wasn't, was in its honeymoon period. What's the background? The first Mass Effect was a revelation upon release. While it hasn't won everyone back, Andromeda might well have nudged Mass Effect to a place where it could, by learning the right lessons from its past and embracing the distance it has travelled. So Mass Effect is still down, but it's not out.
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The long-awaited Mass Effect Andromeda needed to be near-perfect if it was to have any hope of restoring the series to the acclaim it once enjoyed, and while it's nowhere near as bad as some quarters insist, even its most ardent supporters can't escape the conclusion that Andromeda left a lot to be desired. The damage it did to BioWare's reputation is still, rightly or wrongly, part of the ongoing conversation about the developer. The details of Mass Effect 3's ending controversy need not be recounted, as it remains one of gaming's most pervasive disappointments.
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