Mass Effect: Andromeda (PS4): What's New is Old.

July review of a game I played in March. Good pacing, Chris.

As we all know, I generally have a pretty hate/hate relationship with the majority of science fiction. There are a handful of shining examples through various media that will grab and in some cases even hold my attention, but they tend to be pretty few and far between. With games that is just as relevant. If it has star or space in its title I'd say 70% of the time I don't even bother giving it a second glance. I don't care what color Spock's beamsaber is in Battlestar.

Which is what made it so surprising that this series managed to actually engross me to the point of being a fan of it. Because to be totally honest I don't think I actually even really liked the first one, I didn't think it was a great game. I had just bought a XB360 at the time and was told this was a game worth getting. But once I actually got into it I'll be damned if I didn't fall for this universe. I still feel the second one was the best in this series and it sure felt like the book was closed on the third one, but here we are with a new game in this franchise. After the lukewarm ending of the third, I'm ready to see how Bioware writes themselves out of this one.

MASS EFFECT: ANDROMEDA(PS4)

In between the events of Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3, in a joint initiative between the Quarians and 4 races of the Milky Way galaxy have collaborated on an expansion initiative to the Andromeda galaxy. Over 20,000 of the collected races partook in a 600 year journey across space in search of "golden worlds" on massive ships called Arcs. Each race's Arc is lead by a Soldier with an embedded AI unit called a SAM, and they are tasked to find suitable planets for colonization. In this case, the human pathfinder, Alec Ryder.

You control either one of Alec's children, Scott or Sara Ryder (Sara in my case), and unfortunately after being awakened from cryo-sleep to find out that their targeted golden world isn't quite golden.... or even habitable, as it surrounded by this harmful dark energy being called the scourge. The scourge knocks out the ships power, and renders one Ryder sibling comatose. A scout team goes down planet-side to confirm if they planet is habitable or not, and they are met with resistance from a hostile alien race called the Kett.

While investigating the remains of a previous alien race, Ryder and Alec find an alien monolith and activate it. The explosion from it sends them reeling, smashing Ryder's helmet. Alec sacrifices himself to save his child, and makes them the new pathfinder by transferring the SAM AI to them. With the pathfinder lost, all that's left is to return to the centralized space station for the Andromeda Operation called the Nexus and continue the mission. But the Nexus is in shambles, none of the other arcs made it, and it's barely functional. So it's up to Ryder's team to figure out what happened, and get the Andromeda initiative underway.

So as you can tell from the plot synopsis here, we are getting no resolution on the events of the previous Mass Effect Trilogy. It's essentially so far down the timeline that the majority of the characters from original series would have died from conflict or age. They essentially wipe the slate clean sans from a handful of messages from Liara T'soni warning about the impending purge of the Reapers.

Anyways, Andromeda. I'm going to be a little hard pressed to review this one because I'm months behind writing this, they've already patched a bunch, and honestly I can't really think of a lot that has changed in this one in comparisons to the rest of the series.

First off, let's talk character models. Bioware, I'm willing to give you a pass because the majority of the cast are aliens, but some how a significant portion of them seem to look more humans than the actual humans. It was a pretty significant issue with how poor an number of the characters looked that they had to patch in design upgrades to make the humans (specifically women) look less tired and more detailed. Every character with a humanoid form still looks like their eyes are trying to pop from their heads.

The character creator is still a plate of hot garbage. I spent hours try make Velfir Ryder appealing for me to look at only to have it look like she has neon face paint the moment she left the creator, because shit looks differently in different lighting engine. Despite the incredible amount of customization to this game, you really only get one crack to make your characters so you better be confident in them when you finish up. Or, you can do what a significant number of people did and just try to make the shittiest looking characters they can come up with.

Kotaku had people send in their bad character screens, and some of them are horrifying.

Thankfully, when it comes to abilities you don't really get locked into what kind of character you have this time around. Andromeda lets you play around with all the aspects of your characters pretty fast and loose, and it makes incredibly cheap to reboot and make adjustments. So if you are playing the game as silent stealthy sniper and decide mid-way through the game you'd like to be a heavy wielding thicky with biotic powers? A quick trip to you ship and a couple of credits and you can respec however you like. I ended up liking what I was rolling with and didn't end up doing this.

Andromeda has kept the somewhat cover-based 3rd person shooter engine it laid down in Mass Effect 2 pretty much intact. If you've ever played a Mass Effect game before or even any modern 3rd person shooter, the controls should feel natural at this point its been around for well over a decade. The combat really on changes up depending on what traits you've taken and will dictate what kind of attack you will use.

Andromeda gives you lots of freedom with your specs, so play around.

In my case, I was a technician with effective sniping ability, so I would basically rain down headshot fire target after target from hundreds of yards away, and if they were foolish enough to get closer they would be burned with a incinerate fireball, then exploded with an electric overcharge. If they were dumb enough to push closer, they were ripped down with a laser assault rifle. I could clear out entire bases without ever needed to step foot in them till it was totally safe. I've seen some pretty interesting high damage builds, but I never really needed to explore them.

The only real thing different about the combat that I can think of is now there is an addition of a rocket jump and a dodge. The dodge I found useful for whipping around a cover for tense firefights. The jump is really only about as useful as the games platforming segments require them. Sure you can jump and then dodge to dash, and it helps with exploration a little bit but otherwise the game could have not had it and it probably wouldn't have affected things much.

Paw Rifle: unlimited ammo, perfect accuracy, shreds shields.  Yes please.

The cast? Ehh, cast is alright I guess. As is with most Mass Effect games there are characters I really liked like Peebee and Drack (the Asari and Krogan, go figure), and ones that I didn't like Cora. But because of your ability to overhaul your skills team composition never really felt like it was a real determining factor. From my build, it seemed like I wouldn't have needed a character like Ja'al because of the same skill set, but I rarely noticed any impact if he was on my team or not.

It feels like Andromeda tried to mix various elements of the previous games that worked in the hope of a vastly improved experience. It's better for it but I don't know how much. Maps for example are big and explorable again. It feels like they have taken a page out of the build of Dragon Age: Inquisition and set up the maps for individual questing areas. As much as I hate to say it, Skyrim really set a precedent for open world questing that's probably going to continue to be a staple for years to come. Thankfully, In addition to the return of being able to drive around the maps, it also implements a fast travel for landmarks you have already hit to save time. But it's still viable to drive since you are able to mine resources from the car as well.

Dem Duke boys is crazy

Which makes me wonder why the hell we still have to scan every single planet still. Either for meager resources or map completion there very rarely is any functional reason to do it. There are handful of areas where you scan that adds areas of interest to the map. These should be the only things we need to scan for, the rest is just pointless fluff.

It was especially bad before the initial patch where every time you wanted to transition from planet to planet or from galaxy to galaxy you had to watch this extended interspace travel sequence. Prior to the patch, there was no way to skip these sequences that basically slowed down planet exploration to a crawl. I'm sure this had to do something with load times but there are only so many planets you actually set foot on. Thankfully, this got quickly adjusted and once you are in a new galaxy, you are able to skip most of these flight sequences.

The transitions are so long that 15 seconds of gif isn't enough to show a whole one.

Speaking of patches, I found this one to be especially bad when it came to glitching in general. I would have tons of problems of animations bugging out, interactions messing up, falling through floors mid fight, things bugging out that wouldn't allow me to finish off the quests, and one situation where backing my PS4 to a new drive almost ruined my progress. Thankfully the majority of these were able to be fixed by simply restarting the game, but it gave the entire game a very unpolished feeling to me.

There really isn't much to add about the multiplayer. If you played it on Mass Effect 2 or 3, it's basically more of the same. There is a new companion app for you phone that you can use to earn more research points to unlock more weapons or equipment, more characters of the online mode, but I only really dabbled with it a few times and it destroyed me on the easiest setting, so I didn't really bother with it.

I'll give Bioware this, they always manage to leave me totally confused at the start of a Mass Effect game as they drown me in terminology, backstory, and massive opening map locations, but by the time I get rolling in the game I am completely dialed in. The story in this one is pretty straight forward for the most part, and while there aren't a terribly bountiful amount of boss fights (a handful of architect fights really), it does still get pretty exciting by the end of it.

But the one thing they got very right is that they finally did away with the stupid Paragon/Renegade system. Typically when you play this series you pretty much make the decision in your head at the onset if you are going to play this game good or evil, since there is generally no real benefit to play things neutral. You generally needed to be all good or all bad to make certain decisions, and the game suffered for it.

I liked Peebee a lot. Lived in an escape pod in the event the other shoe dropped.
Kept everyone at arm length. Behaviors I could certainly relate to.

Now instead of those options, you have conversational choices of formal, logical, emotional, or casual. I like these options better because while they aren't exactly clear what that logical response could be, it allows me to better play to the character I am talking to. Most of the time I just went with casual because I tend to be a bit of a smart ass, but in more harrowing moments I could shift to emotional and it made sense. Or meeting a new race of aliens, formal made more sense to me. Conversational trees felt better in this one, more natural.

But the biggest thing I applaud them on this front is not the conversation trees, but the decisions. Again in older Mass Effects it was: Do you want to save the box of adorable kittens? or do you want to light the box on fire. I always hated that there was no middle ground or if there was it was not worth picking. Not so in this one. In a large number of critical moments during the game you are presented with two opposing, but equally viable options. No good or evil, paragon or renegade. Just two varied grey possible options. And they fucking killed me to the point where I would sit and agonize over what selection I was going to make. It made it truly feel like my decisions mattered, and would leave me with consequences of those decisions. It really was the best aspect of this game.

So did I like the game? Yeah I guess so. When the narrative got going I was able to see it through to the finish.  There were certainly enough characters I liked to want to see their story through, and even the ones that I didn't care for I cared enough about the story to do their missions as well. But ultimately, when the final credits rolled I was with the distinct feeling of "Whelp, this certainly was a Mass Effect game." It's certainly not a game I felt I needed to keep playing the moment I had finished it.

Mass Effect: Andromeda feels like a cash in to try to draw back a fan base that felt scorned by the ending of Mass Effect 3.  I enjoyed that it took the story back in a new direction and honestly I didn't mind a return visit to this universe. It was met with somewhat lack luster reviews and similar sales. It's certainly not the greatest one in its series, but it's certainly playable.  It pushes no boundaries and breaks no molds. It simply was just a another game of the series.  If you are a fan of the franchise you certainly will find yourself enjoying your time with it. I don't think it's a must have or can't miss, not sure if it's a hard sell for new fans, but I wasn't unhappy with it.

Seriously, how long does it take to set up a goddamn movie night?

Dead Space 3 (PS3): Resident Evil 6 Syndrome....

During the time when EA was running those ads "Your Mom Hates This" for Dead Space 2, I was proudly exclaiming how much I loved it by using such phrases as "I wish this game had a liquid form so I can get naked and roll around in a tub of it." I'll let you sit on that image for a few seconds.

Aside from some slight pacing issues, it basically improved on most of the the complaints I had with the original Dead Space. I have always been a huge advocate of this series feel it never got the credit it should. So naturally I was a bit hesitant when I learned Dead Space 3 takes place on icy planet and the game features 2 player co-op. Not exactly thrilled about that, but I love this series too much to not give it the benefit of the doubt.

DEAD SPACE 3:(PS3)

Two months after the events of Dead Space 2, our survivors Isaac Clark and Ellie Langford have fallen into a bit of a tumultuous schism and have broken up. The Unitologists have taken their cultish fervor to military form, going across the galaxy to activate "Markers" and speed up the Necromorph infection to cause convergence and allow them to be reborn after their grizzly murders.

We cut to Isaac looking older, tired, and heartbroken as he replays a answering machine message from Ellie. She tells him he is going to continue the fight against the Necromorphs and Unitologists without his help. After a bit of a fit throwing some pictures on the ground, his room is invaded by two soldiers of EarthGov: Carver (the co-op player) and Cap. Robert Norton (a massive douche). After a less than friendly introduction he is basically escorted at gunpoint to go after Ellie whom these soldiers lost contact with. Begrudgingly, Isaac follows them but before they even make it out the door the Unitologists attack them.

While technically a good guy, Robert is a first class douchebag.

So with this premise, I was accepting an ready to jump in to the fun that is the Dead Space universe. As soon as I take control of the game I follow my marker and meet up with the two pricks and immediately I am swamped by unitologist soldiers firing machine guns at me. But thankfully, it tells me tapping R3 will allow me to crouch, which is pretty handy considering all the cover around like chest high walls or parked cars.

Fuck. You.

It took me less than a matter of seconds of taking control of the game to be so gut wrenchingly disappointed I almost put the game down. Dead Space is a game that was hinged on creepy monsters, dark claustrophobic settings, and scary atmosphere. If I wanted to fucking duck behind cover to pop my head up and shoot at asshole human beings with guns, I could have picked up ALMOST ANY OTHER FUCKING GAME WITH A GUN IN IT. Fuck. 

Grrrrrrrr.......

In my last review I said I wasn't so backwards thinking that games couldn't update or change, but seriously, come the fuck on. Why would you take a very interesting property and try to make feel like every other 3rd person shooter on the market. I know they sell well but we're good on those, we have plenty. I want to play Dead Space.

Thankfully, this mission lasts only really long enough to serve as a tutorial and once I get away from the shitdick soldiers we get ourselves into space, and then Dead Space starts to feel like it should all over again. The controls will be pretty familiar to series regulars as they are virtually unchanged from the previous titles in this series. The only real functional changes that I was able to find is that usually R3 was the guide button to show you which way to go (a feature I love, btw) but now you have to hold it a second because as I mentioned above, it shares with crouch. On the other analog, they have also added in a dodge roll, but to be honest I never really found an enemy where it was useful.

There was another bit of a jarring shock to me is I was only able to carry two weapons this time, another throw back to the 3rd person cover based shooters they are trying to ape. This to me on one hand was kind of disappointing because I don't like it when a game tries to limit me, but on the other hand I played most of Dead Space 1 and 2 with the initial plasma cutter you start the game with. The more you would upgrade that thing, the more of a beast it would become.

The problem is, that brings us to one of Dead Space 3's newer features, fully customizable weapons. In the previous Dead Space's  you would unlock a weapon and then have to add power nodes to increase its clip, rate of fire, power, and so on. In this version you collect various parts and depending on how you add them it creates a new weapon.

This can be incredibly intimidating because the combinations are pretty plentiful. After a few minutes its easy to get frustrated and even worse its hampered by the fact you can only hold 2 guns. there really isn't even a good way to look at all of the weapons you've created to see which are stronger back to back aside from equipping them then unequipping them. It requires going through too many menus. However, the game does have a cool little workshop feature where you can load a save, tinker with your weapons then let in some monsters to see how they play out. I kinda wish I noticed this feature first because my starting cutter really wasn't cutting it (ba dum tsss).

But if you have the ability to make tons of different weapons, then how are you going to sort out ammo for all the different variations of them? Well, this gives us the unfortunate issue of only having one type of ammo. Its dropped virtually all the time, its very cheap to create, and works for everything. So a lot of the tense fear you would get from not having enough ammo is effectively dashed. Seeing 4 necromorphs baring at you and knowing you are on your last 10 shots of your cutter just added to the fear and atmosphere. Now I can pretty much just rapid fire with little fear of ever running out of ammo. 

Something else I noticed early is that necromorphs are WAY harder to kill this time around. That's a good thing too. The seasoned Dead Space player knows the score: knee shot, arm shot, stomp. In the previous two games this was pretty much all you needed to take down virtually everything in the game, so really you had no reason to upgrade your other weapons because the initial plasma cutter was such a necromorph wrecking beast.

Not my video, but thank you RetroKid91 for doing a game play video without Commentary.

Now the baddies have a lot more spring in their step, they have much more sporadic movement, and they a much harder to put down. It didn't take me long to realize I have to bulk my weapons up way more often or I wasn't going to last.  There is a handful of new types of zombie like Necromorphs as well which also add to the challenge, but generally, you know exactly what to do on each type of monster you come across.

I've said before that this series always kind of struggled when it came to the pacing. What I mean by that is never really get around to building tension by letting fear sink it. Its just start, monsters, shooting. Dead Space 3 really makes no attempt to try to pace the game for horror, because much like all the other 3rd person shooters its emulating it'd rather you start shooting at shit right away. And again, that's disappointing to me because survival horror as a genre just seems to be fading to the wayside.

Easy to kill on their own, but if they get you in groups things can get hairy.

I guess that's why the story feels like it matches this frenetic pace. There are only a handful of downtime moments in the game before shit starts to go haywire. A simple briefing on the bridge of your ship results in all the glass on the ship getting destroyed and sucking you into space (which for a spaceship, seems like a massive design oversight) and as you fling into space you have to fly past meteorites and mines to catch up to the cargo box so you can fly it to the ship you were trying to land on. This is just one example and this kinda thing happens at almost every turn. The final sequence of the game to put it simply, goes completely fucking bananas to the point where I can't figure out what the hell is happening or how we even got there.

That being said, this is the game where Issac really comes the most off as a human being. He was basically just a silent protagonist in the first game and could have been a robot for all we care. In the second game they tried to give him more of a face and dialog, but it came off as kind of generic. In this game, we have some back story, some history, some missing information to learn between games. There is some interesting and realistic emotion between the cast and their interactions (except Robert maybe), so from a story telling standpoint, this is probably the best Dead Space has done in this area.

There is one incredibly jarring flaw I've been trying not to get worked up about. As you have probably already heard before the release, one of EA's big moves "for" the player was to introduce micro transactions you find in mobile games. Their logic is if you want to get more supplies and guns and whatever, those players have the option to pay a little bit to get a few more items in the game.

Oh EA, does your generosity know no bounds? EA, you are notorious and roundly hated for your constant cash grabs. I personally hold you guys responsible for the reason I can't pick up a used game and give the online modes a try without having to pay an extra fucking 10 dollars for it, (I mean I never would, but its the principal of the fact).

But you know what? I was willing to let it slide, It didn't affect my ability to play the game at all and for the most part I didn't seem at all hampered by the fact that I was playing the single player and not the multiplayer. I also discovered the glitch that infinitely respawns some of the items you are supposed to purchase. EA said that stuff is there on purpose, and they don't intend to patch it. Alright then, good on you EA. I was able to play through the game start to finish and didn't feel handicapped, and after a while had a pretty good time with it.

But then you guys did make a patch like 3 days later, and I'll be fucking damned if that glitch wasn't the first thing to fucking go. Right after you said you weren't going to remove it. Seriously? Fuck you guys. 

I'll tell you what though, much like Resident Evil 6 before it I had a laundry list of complaints about this game when I picked it up... But then a few levels into the game they became something I just shrugged off. Not much longer after that I didn't even notice it anymore. Then I managed to beat the game and did something I very very rarely do: I kept playing.

Set the game to hard mode, modded some new weapons, went to New Game+ and played the game almost completely through again. In today's 6 hour video game world we live in, where new triple-A releases come out on a weekly bases, this almost never happens. I crank out a story and them bam, off to the next game. So despite all my bitching, I still managed to get more than 60 dollars worth of entertainment out of a game I did nothing but complain about my first time through.

So again like Resident Evil 6,  I find myself at a bit of a loss for if I recommend the game or not. So I guess the way to go about it is like this: Is Dead Space 3 fun? Yes. Does Dead Space 3 have a great story? Yes. Does the game feel like it belongs with the series? ehhhh, that's where it gets grey to me.

As I said earlier, I bought this game because I wanted to play Dead Space. This is a game that hinged its first two games on ambiance, loneliness,  fear, and excessive gore. The game manages to draw an immense fear in you because for two games it sets the pace that you are completely alone and every single dead body has the potential to rip you limb from limb if you don't see it in time. And one of the big aspects I liked about is, you couldn't headshot things. Lots of crazy different enemies and different weaknesses on a lot of them.

Dead Space 3 didn't feel like Dead Space to me, at least not the whole time. It launched me right into a segment where I have to duck behind cover, and shoot at people holding guns. That's Uncharted, that's Gears of War, that's Mass Effect 3(another example of this), that is NOT Dead Space.  Its infuriating to become invested in something, grow a passion for it, love it, advocate it, then have that love betrayed because it wants to be something else because it sells better. 

The game I love is in here somewhere. As I play through level there are a large number of segments that feel exactly like how this game should be. But then every so often I'll reach this open area with a bunch of containers strewn about that are about chest high and I groan loudly. They don't need to be there. They shouldn't be there.

But ultimately, yes Dead Space 3 is a good game and fun to play. It plays enough like it should to satisfy me as a gamer, but I can't help but feel a twinge of disappointment that they knuckled under and tried to copycat other shooters.

Dead Space, you sold out.