KZN#23

Gaming
MASS EFFECT:
ANDROMEDA
Your crew,
meanwhile, is
a fairly generic
band made
up almost
entirely of existing Mass
Effect humans and aliens,
which despite their fairly
deep and enjoyable backstories,
always gave me
feelings of deja vu. After
all, how many times can
we be introduced to a gruff
new krogan warrior or an
eyepiece-wearing turian?
There’s nothing really
wrong with them, but none
struck me as memorable
stars like Garrus, Tali, or
Mordin. Peebee is probably
the best of the cast thanks
to her quirky humor and
tendency to bicker with her
fellow asari, Lexi. But the
rest seem too comfortable
with each other to be all that
interesting in the way we
saw with Wrex threatening
to tear the team apart in the
original Mass Effect. Everyone
getting along, for the
most part, is a little boring,
regardless of how flirty and
naked they get.
And my stars, do they ever
get naked. I’m not just talking
about Liam’s apparent
allergy to shirts, here.
You have plenty of romance
options for either gender,
including same-sex
and interspecies, and when
you’ve gone out of your
way to talk to them and run
errands for them (which
often involve blowing up
robots or killing outlaws)
to kindle the flames of your
budding relationship, you’re
treated to a full-on R-rated
sex scene the likes of which
the Mass Effect series has
never seen before. My wife’s
reaction as I sealed the deal
with human biotic commando
Cora was to state,
matter-of-factly, that, “This
is porn. And it looks weird.”
She’s not wrong on either
count – especially since
male Ryder appears to have
painstakingly removed every
hair on his body below the
neck – but I’d call it tasteful
porn thanks to the context
of the conversations leading
up to it.
Voice acting is almost
universally strong enough
that I quickly stopped noticing
the generally sub-par
human facial animations.
Could they be better? Absolutely
– a lot of games, such
as The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt,
have done significantly better
in that department and
in giving characters hair that
doesn’t look like solid plastic.
But some weird expressions
didn’t ruin Mass Effect:
Andromeda for me any more
than they did virtually every
RPG for the past three decades.
I’m much more distracted
by the texture
pop-in that happens during
conversations, where a
character’s face will go from
looking like a blurry mess to
having visible pores midway
through a sentence.
On that note, Mass Effect:
Andromeda is more than a
little rough in the technical
sense. On PlayStation
4 and Xbox One (I’ve yet to
spend significant time with
the PC version), it’s prone to
major frame rate drops and
hitches regardless of what’s
happening on screen. I’ve
seen it drop to slideshow
levels when simply walking
around the Nexus (the
Citadel-like seat of government),
driving through a flat
wasteland, and fighting in
a dense jungle. Animation
glitches seem more common
than in previous games. And,
though some bugs are to be
expected in a game of this
scale, between myself and
a few other players at IGN
we’ve seen a fair share of
broken quests. (BioWare has
been aggressively issuing
patches in response to our
reports and claims to have
resolved at least some of the
problems already.)
Read full review
HERE
Kzn Lifestyle Magazine • Issue 23
37