If anything, the meta-game here is significantly more involved than is the game itself, which involves solid but unexceptional bouts of fighting waves of AI attackers, with a mix of gunplay and hotbar powers. Experience points, three different types of in-game currency (one of which can be paid for with real money), character classes, character levels, character ranks, character skills, character Apex ratings and character-wide universal buffs, weapon rarities, weapon mods, short-term percentage boosters, purchasable packs with randomly allocated rewards. The experience of battle is not of a desperate fight for victory or survival, but of hoping to ensure you will earn hundreds of thousands rather than merely tens of thousands of experience points.īeneath all else, MEA's multiplayer is concerned only with an absurd amount of numbers, many of which also involve absurdly, meaninglessly high denominations. Mass Effect's multiplayer is AnyGame clad in a superficially high-tech skin, an endlessly spinning merry-go-round of shooting indistinct enemies for ephemeral prizes. It is Mass Effect 3 multiplayer redux and will likely satisfy its fans, but it's hard to feel moved by more of the same - especially when it's more of something that was derivative in the first place. This is not to say that MEA's multiplayer is bad, or even that I dislike it - instead that, simply, it feels perfunctory. Moment to moment in Andromeda's multiplayer, it took real effort to recall exactly which Mass Effect game I was playing and what year I was playing it in. On the one side, it's using solid foundations, but on the other it suffers from the same creeping sense of 'been there, done that' that the singleplayer campaign has. I rather enjoyed that, as a series of lightweight but engaging skirmishes that were more about having a blast than trying to be lord of all. Instead, what I found was yet more evidence of Mass Effect Andromeda's by-the-numbers design.īroadly speaking, Mass Effect: Andromeda's team co-op vs AI multiplayer is quite similar to Mass Effect 3's. Frustrated by singleplayer, where the single greatest problem has been not feeling invested in its events, I turned instead to multiplayer, hoping that, free from rubber faces, leaden lines and an absence of intriguing sci-fi ideas, pure and simple space marine warfare might allow me to enjoy Andromeda.
Adapting to a reality where that has not happened - one where a new Mass Effect and I simply have not clicked - is an ongoing challenge. Why would that change now? I did not expect revelation from Andromeda, but I expected to spend a couple of weeks entirely absorbed by it. The series has had its ups and its downs, but it's always had games that I gladly play every minute of. Over-the-top space shenanigans every few years, videogame sci-fi at its most ostentatious - a reliable constant.įor the past few years, I've been simply presuming that Andromeda would continue this trend. Though never a full-blooded enthusiast for the series, for the past decade or so it's been a more-or-less happy mainstay of my gaming life. Here's the thing: even after some twenty underwhelming hours with singleplayer, I still want to love Mass Effect Andromeda, to the point where I repeatedly dispute the drab evidence right before my eyes and ears.
In singleplayer, this is to some extent disguised behind crusading dialogue and regular planet-hopping, but in multiplayer it is laid bare. I do believe that it feels like a game made to spec, and is oddly soulless as a result. I don't believe that Mass Effect: Andromeda is a train wreck.