Luckily Andromeda gives you a lot more freedom in how to deal with hostiles than the series ever has. I wasn’t sure who or what were friendly and who or what wanted to eat me alive. Sure, my character was going to alien worlds for his first time in the original trilogy, but they were largely charted already. Aided by an engaging musical score, there’s definitely a palpable tension that runs throughout the campaign due to the fact that nobody knows what the heck to expect anywhere.
Luckily the planets themselves, along with their more animalistic wildlife, are much more enjoyable to discover. I “get” what they are all about, even if there are some new twists with how each race’s demeanor and way of life respond to life in a new galaxy. Sure there are still Krogans, Asari, Turians, and other favorites, but I’ve seen them before. Both of the organic races are humanoid, the robots look pretty much like you would expect combat robots to look, and none of them are particularly engaging visually.
But, for some odd reason, Andromeda decides that two new sentient alien races and some robots are a better way to go. I was excited to experience the sense of discovery that comes with new alien races with new conflicts and new personalities. While I wasn’t naive enough to think nothing would be humanoid, I was ready for some really off the wall race designs. Moving to an entirely new galaxy, I expected things to get weird. Unfortunately this is perhaps my greatest issue with Andromeda. Though the races you’d interact with the most were relatively humanoid, there were still oddities like the jelly-squid Hanar, the misunderstood insect-like Rachni, the hulking Yahg, and literally dozens more. The alien races had nuance and depth, from the Salarian-Krogan genocide to the Geth quest for a place in the universe, and it made everything seems so much more alive and real. Like Star Trek or Star Wars in their respective primes, the different flora and fauna of the various planets were engaging and creative. The original Mass Effect was an exciting experience for many different reasons, but perhaps my favorite of them was the immense sense of discovery. It may sound kind of like an Interstellar rip off, but by and large the setup provides the perfect opportunity for a new story with new characters not chained down by the events of the previous three games. Forget humanity leaving our solar system, this game leaves the entire Milky Way galaxy behind as some ships with a few hundred thousand beings or so depart in search for a potential new human home via the Andromeda Initiative. That being the case, Andromeda’s strategy is about as good of an idea as I can think of to keep the series alive. With the possibility of life as we know it being either completely eradicated, roughed up, or just fine depending on the choices made during your play-through, there really isn’t a single canon ending to continue things from. If you have played the first Mass Effect trilogy, you know that figuring out how to do a true sequel would have been nigh on impossible.
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