Mass Effect: Andromeda is something of a confusing experience. On one hand, it's something of a poorly written game that has a lot of bugs and janky gameplay, but on the other hand, it's also oddly fun despite most things about it being rather forgettable. It's a far, far too long game for what's really in it, but at times, it just feels breezy and pleasant to play, if you don't take it too seriously even when it is taking itself far too seriously. It's kind of like a bit better Greedfall, which in itself wasn't that great of a game and in many ways suffers from the same issues as Andromeda. Despite these games having different developers and a couple of years between them, they are oddly comparable in writing to the gameplay and worlds that don't quite work.
600 years ago, the different races of the Milkyway decided to hedge their bets and send colony ships to the Andromeda galaxy. Humans, Turians, Krogans and Salari placed 10 people in three massive arks, which have now finally arrived at Andromeda at the beginning of the game. The human ark soon wakes up to trouble, as Andromeda shows its nastier side from the get-go when a dark energy cluster hits on the ark's way. Also, their chosen planet seems not to be suitable for colonization either.
You step in the shoes of a daughter or son of the human Pathfinder, Alec Ryder, who dies during their first planetfall mission. Before dying, he decides to make you the next Pathfinder by giving you his helmet and access to SAM AI, which can analyze stuff and be all-around helpful to have around. It's also the Deus ex-machine device of the game, digging Ryder out from any tight spot the writers couldn't find any other solution for.
After a disastrous start, the human ark Hyperion finds the Nexus base, that was sent to Andromeda beforehand. Things have been going badly there as well, as no other arks have arrived and there's been a mutiny, which has caused a lot of bad blood and many people have been exiled because of what took place.
As the Pathfinder, your job is now quite clear: find out what's the deal with the local hostile aliens, make contact with friendly aliens, find habitable planets for the people still in cryosleep, find the other arks and overall, be the gold standard saviour of the wholly foreign galaxy. That's one hell of a to-do list for a single person, no matter how good a crew they have on their side. But a hero gotta do what a hero gotta do and all that old jazz. And sleep around their crew for a morale boost.
Besides sleeping around with your crew, you mostly spend your time hopping between the different systems around the now-not-so-golden Golden Worlds that were chosen for habitation. On chosen systems, you get to land planetside, where you then do various missions to strengthen the viability of the planets. The most important part of the terraforming is turning on the ancient alien tech terraformers, which are not functioning and which have caused the planets to decay. You also need to make nice with the local inhabitants, be they former exiles or the friendlier of the two new alien races present. You know, the old standard peace and love for everyone except those other dudes.
While most of the missions are, in the style of the previous Mass Effect games, about mostly shooting all kinds of enemies, turning on the ancient terraformers does have a small puzzle element in them in a form of solving a symbol puzzle, where you need to place a set of symbols to correct order. But if you aren't good at solving those, there are override keys to them that can be bought from merchants or looted. I think there might have been some ideas of implementing stealth, as a stealthy approach is mentioned a couple of times, but no real stealth system exists in-game.
As the planets are, at first, decaying, you need to move around with a ground vehicle. Before you get the purifiers running, getting on foot will slowly decay your shields, so you can do only short combat bursts on foot. Generally speaking, a good practice is to drive around as much as you can and open up new quick travel points, which makes conquering the planets much easier. Driving itself is and is not well made. It's fun, but at the same time, you very easily drive through places you are clearly not meant to drive through. You can even fall down rather steep cliffs. It's all rather silly, really, especially when your squadmates complain about your "too careful driving" while the ride is falling down a cliffside after you've driven over a mountain for a shortcut.
Combat is a pretty standard real-time affair. You have your guns, up to 4, ranging from pistols to sniper rifles, as well as biotic powers and tech attacks. These can be strengthened with skill points pretty freely, so you can build your character as you see fit. After spending points on specific skills, you also unlock archetypes, which can enhance different aspects of your character's abilities, like making them better biotics and whatnot. It's generally speaking a perfectly functional system, but I can't say I did much with the archetype system, I mostly ignored it as nothing in the game seemed to demand caring about it.
For those wanting to tinker, there's, obviously, a crafting system in place as well. Like every proper hero, you can spend time scavenging ore and other crafting materials, which can then be used in, surprise, crafting better armour and weapons. It's something of a pointless exercise, as I didn't have any big problems in finding decent loot, so I didn't even have to use much money in buying stuff. This is yet again a good example of a tackled, pointless system, that exists only because other games in the genre have it as well. There's no additional value to be found from here.
Space travel gets old very, very quickly. It's mostly just a slow-functioning menu system, where you jump from system to system, scan planets and find some anomalies. It's more tedious than it sounds, though luckily you can skip the approach sequence in space. Unluckily you have to watch the landing and leave animations for each landable planet every time you come and go. While they look nice, they don't look THAT nice.
Apparently, there were more lavish ideas for space travel in Andromeda, with procedurally generated planets with multiple locations and whatnot, but difficulties during the development forced BioWare to abandon that idea and just have a handful of landable locations with other planets having only a couple of scannable areas, that provide some extra bonuses. Again, the end result is not that interesting in terms of gameplay or content.
In the end, the only real reason to play Andromeda is some of the more interesting story beats that it has going for it. While the writing is, as a whole, cliched, a tad naive and relatively uninteresting, some of the beats the overarching narrative has are very good. Those snippets of intrigue did manage to capture my interest in quick enough intervals, that I did manage to play the game through.
As far gameplay goes, Andromeda doesn't offer anything spectacularly great nor terribly bad either. It's at times clunky, far too long and filled with tedious busywork and filler and it does end with a cliffhanger that will most likely never be realised, not as a standalone game at least, as Andromeda was the first flop of the Mass Effect series. There's a lot going against it and that is the massive caveat that has to be noted before recommending it to anyone.
All that said, there's some fun to be had with it, if you don't expect it to be a game you feel compelled in pushing through as fast as possible. If you don't mind putting the game down for a week or two from time to time, it can offer at least some fun. And that's probably the biggest praise I can give it.
Mass Effect: Andromeda can be bought from Origin and Steam. It's also available for consoles. Interestingly enough, the player response has become far more favourable towards it, so I guess it's not all bad. And besides, you can get it with less than a fiver from time to time, so that's a pretty good deal.
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