Mass Effect: Andromeda (PC) review "The biggest issue with having so much cringe aboard an exploratory space craft is that the jokes never land"

Mass Effect Andromeda had all the hallmarks of a hilarious disaster upon release back in 2017. It was a buggy, disjointed, ugly mess of a game, a production hell behind the scenes, and an amphitheatre of pointing and laughing from its audience. Even before this, it faced a weird legacy challenge; the original trilogy was (and still is) widely adored, meaning it had very large shoes to fill. At the same time, Andromeda needed to rally against the exceptionally poor reception garnered by the lacklustre ending to Mass Effect 3 that had finished the series on a sour note. To combat this, EA gathered the celebrated creative team behind the previous three games and put them right to work. On new IP, Anthem. History has not judged this to have been a good idea. Instead, Andromeda was to be built by an entirely new team. On an entirely new engine. With the scope and direction being changed completely every time someone in a position of leadership was cycled away from the title. Which was shockingly often.

The new engine meant that none of the assets from the previous games could be reused. Everything from entire galaxies, character animations and muzzle flashes needed to be created anew by an unfamiliar team with revolving door management. So, it's of little surprise that what day one buyers got was a game populated by murderous-looking mannequins with lizard lips and legs constructed entirely of kneecaps. Walls became suggestion rather than reality. Stairs were a softly whispered rumour, unascendable monstrosities of broken dreams, the possessive guardians of slightly raised platforms. But the faces, dear reader, the faces have gone down in derpy meme legend. Many were bad, but the truest victim was that of the female default protagonist, who seemed to have been expertly sculpted to scientific imperfection. The unsettling facial tics, the disturbing smoothness and expansive reach of the cheeks and forehead. Eyes that can't help but wander, as if trying to escape the hellscape in which they were trapped. But it was mainly that smile, equal parts predatory and gormless. It haunts my dreams.



Fortunately, the walking nightmare that was Sarah Ryder has since been patched to the point where she's merely just horrific to look at. Structural integrity has been enforced so most walls are no longer constructed of mist. Cut scenes no longer feature suicidal characters holding their guns backwards. It's better, but not perfect. For example! During my playthrough, one member of the crew was so intent on avoiding a conversation that his pathfinding took him into and through a computer embankment, where they stayed until the next time we docked the ship. Another time, upon completing a side mission, an in-game cut scene triggered where the team gathered around their won objective and discussed the next step. Only, the world around them remained active and a pack of ravenous space dogs spawned in and killed everyone while they calmly stood around chatting. I wasn't even mad; ignoring a horrific mauling while casually discussing the mundane transportation of glowy space rocks was pretty funny.

As of right now, the game is as solid as it's ever going to be, its oft-mocked technical flaws relegated to frustrating rather than game breaking. For people like me (Gary Hartley, noted Mass Effect enjoyer) who avoided the game at launch to join in with the pointing and laughing from afar, that reason for abstention isn't nearly as valid. It was brave of me, I know, to wade in to see if there was something hiding there behind the bug wall. In my 100 or so hour odyssey through Andromeda, I still found plenty of things to be disappointed by. But more than my fair share of pleasant surprises.

Let's start on a high. The main idea and mission behind Andromeda are great. Trilogy hero, Shepard, was a Spectre agent who, by design, had all their universe's political weight and resources at their disposal. In contrast, Team Ryder has been bundled aboard an ark ship, frozen for 600 years and transported an entire galaxy away. There's no safety net; there's no resources or help at all, and anything they need they're going to have to scourge up themselves from a collection of unexplored systems. The only upshot is that before they left the Milky Way behind, they'd managed to earmark several golden planets, ripe for habitation. That was a lie. Instead, they find inhospitable death worlds filled with unbreathable air, intolerable atmospheres and homicidal local wildlife. The first plant you visit is a disaster; crash landings, scattered crewmates, heavy background radiation and rock-faced xenophobic aliens trying to gun everyone down. It's far from the shiny new home the expedition promised. There was also supposed to be a huge hub ship constructed by the time you arrived, something akin to a smaller scale citadel from the original trilogy. It exists, but it's bare bones. Half constructed, low on power and short staffed. Many people died during the construction, many more abandoned the project, exiling themselves, gambling on having better luck on the scattershot planets that are only nearly inhabitable. More still stay cytogenetically frozen; the way things are, there's not enough resources available to justify thawing them.



Your first real mission is supposed to change that. There's a nearby planet that would merely be a horrific place to live if not for the absence of water and sweltering non-stop desert heat. There's been two previous attempts to establish a settlement, both of which have led to the death of many prospectors. The few survivors returned so damaged and shell-shocked, they were placed back on ice. It's a suicide mission by any optic, but it's also the best part of the game. Failure means everyone dies, so you need to brute force yourself through the endless obstacles your would-be hellfire home presents. At this point, all that really awaits you is various shades of failure. You're under levelled; you're under equipped and if you stray outside the heatproof barrier set up inside the now dead settlements, you'll fry on the spot. Also, those barriers, the only thing keeping you alive, are all failing. So, you scrape and you scramble, and you aim for little victories. There are scavengers picking the bones of the sites; To Shepard, this would be a minor inconvenience, one easily bullied, manipulated or shot into compliance. Ryder can do none of these things; they can only appeal to the scavenger's humanity and shared interest in the newest expedition's success. But this does net new resources. A small victory, but one that gives you more options, the ability to push a little further into the planet. It's the Wild West out there; unexplored desert plains filled with unforeseeable dangers. Lost alien artifacts, acid-spitting sand bugs, rolling metal-melting heatwaves and rock-faced alien arseholes with laser rifles.

You can't do much, but you can do something. So, you scrape. And you scramble. You find little pockets of progression and each small win makes the world of difference. As the planet is slowly tamed, as your foothold in this new galaxy becomes firmer, things change in your favour. You find ways to make the planet more hospitable; you find ways to drive hostile forces out; you find the means to establish a new settlement. With the means to support more life, more people are defrosted at the hub; new areas on the ship are opened and become explorable. Old departments are expanded, looking into newly discovered life and flora and geography. And you've done this. You've explored the unknown and you've been directly responsible for every advancement. You've seen it grow in real time. It's as exhilarating as it is short lived; none of it is present for the remaining five planets.

One can only assume this is one of the many things bemoaned as lost within the hellish development cycle. New planets are still settled, and exploring them is still the game's highlight, but that sense of growth and progression ends abruptly at site one. The hub ship never grows any bigger, the departments swell no further. All purported growth strictly takes part off screen rather than the small, interconnected stories you first find. Like finding a diary that belonged to one of the first settlers hinting at her bitterness at her failure. You can investigate that; find out she was one of the few survivors and ask for her to be defrosted to see if her efforts weren't wasted. From then on, you can find her wandering the new settlement for the rest of the game, appreciative to be there. It's a little thing, but it hints at much bigger things, in what happens in the world around you. It makes you a small part of a much bigger picture, but one you're responsible for painting.



Anyway, more of that would have been great, but you can't have it. So, what's left? You're not expected to work alone in establishing the Milky Way's glorious expansion into alien territory, so you get to assemble a crew on the fly. Sadly, Ryder has an uncanny habit of attracting unlikeable weirdos and it's in the people you'll have to suffer that you'll first see the steep decline in writing quality. I could be charitable and suggest that, back in 2017, maybe we weren't all done with "so, that just happened" quirky humour nonsense, but I won't. Because we were. Early in the game, you get stuck with Liam; for the first section of the game, he's a permanent squad mate until you fill out your ranks, and I hated him. I suspect he's supposed to be the chirpy, upbeat companion that smooths the edges of all the grim disasters you initially face, but he just comes off as hopelessly naïve and fundamentally stupid. Getting into a firefight in Andromeda is a more tactical affair than the previous games, which expected you to bunker down for the most part and kill everything from cover. I mention this because, even then, the old crew would yell warnings about newly arriving or flanking forces, which would have been a great help here. Andromeda enemies are more mobile, and the game doesn't want you to be a meat-made turret sniping everything from the edges of the battle; it wants to force you into direct involvement, reacting to flanks, or organising your own. Using your jump jets to weasel out bunkered enemies in a three-dimensional plane for the first time. Splitting your group to react to your enemy's own evolving tactics. An active rolling report from your comrades would be great, both in the context of the new style of fighting, and in the immersion needed to switch up your tactics to stay alive. Instead, as a huge alien in heavy armour lumbered through the flank Liam was guarding to empty his minigun into my poor unsuspecting kidneys he said "I think I pissed that one off a bit. Probably because I shot it in the face!" Then paused for laughter that never came. Not just because it wasn't funny, but also because I was dead.

To be fair, some of the cast grow from their painful trope caricatures into something resembling a recognisable human. Maybe Cora is supposed to be hard to like at first, with her girlboss attitude and space Karen haircut, but she's also feeling hurt and betrayed that Ryder got the job she's been training for through open nepotism. She wants to be angry at you, but she also wants to do her duty and struggles to correlate the two. But then, some suck forever. Peebee is a ridiculous asari with a ridiculous name, constantly on an energy high like a toddler who's ingested too much sugar but also, like, a super genius or something. Then there's head mechanic Gill who I hate so perfectly I don't want to talk about.

It's not completely fair to compare them to the previous crew who had an entire trilogy to get fleshed out, but, also, it only took the one game to make me Team Garrus for life. Also, direct comparisons are bloody hard to avoid - tell me which of the Mass Effects this plot summary covers. You're forced into a desperate underdog war for survival against a mysterious alien enemy who is harvesting your people for means unknown. You're outmatched and the only way to possibly win is to use the remnant technology of a long extinct other alien race. You need to adapt this lost technology before the hostile aliens overpower you. Tick tock, bitches. If your answer is both, congratulations. Your prize is disappointment. For a game so desperate to remove itself completely from the Mass Effect galaxy, it seems very reluctant to remove itself from the Mass Effect galaxy.



It's the sense of exploration that ultimately saves Andromeda from itself. Of poking through ruins that no living thing has set foot in for centuries, of discovering mysteries you know you'll never solve, the answers long lost to time. Where narrative storytelling fails, environmental storytelling flourishes. In balancing the risks and rewards with pushing forward into the radioactive wastelands; there might be something significant behind that next dune, or you might just creep past the point of no return and doom yourself. While exploring Voeld, a planet suffering a small-scale ice age event, I brute forced myself through frozen mountain and house-sized shards to come across the coldest explorable area available to me. The cold was sapping, chewing through my life support system with alarming speed. And there, right in the middle of it all, was an abandoned mining town. Abandoned, but not empty; a huge alien machine had taken residence, a coiling mass of steel tentacles, missiles and EmP blasts. Curiosity courted disaster, as the story usually goes; thinking it just another unexplainable oddity, I investigated and then managed to be surprised when it dropped from the skies and attacked.

I was not ready; I don't think I was meant to happen across it at this point. My equipment was lacking, my levels low, but the machine did not care. So, we fought, for what seemed like an age. My goal was to destroy all three of its legs, but every one I took down saw it retreat further into the village. Temperatures plummeted and, suddenly, I had more to worry about than just Skynet Squidward; if I stayed out in the cold too long, I would freeze to death. The last third of the fight was a desperate running war, darting in and out of razed buildings, not just to escape the endless waves of rockets and lasers and minions routinely launched at me, but to give my environmental life support systems time to reheat. It was a war waged on the slimmest of margins; numerous times, I was a single blow away from death, or a few seconds away from freezing. When the last leg fell, it was a desperate race to the centre mass of the machine. I didn't have time to reboot my tactical suit's heating - what if it got back up? In my mad dash between burning limbs and exploding drones, I died in agonisingly slow slithers, hoping I would live long enough to complete this final objective and have enough left to limp away somewhere safe to heal.



I (barely) won that particular war of attrition in what was the standout moment of my time within Andromeda. No cringe baiting, no relatable quirky quips, no daytime soap opera drama, just an underprepared idiot venturing out beyond their means and being awarded with a discovery that should have given them a game over screen but instead gifted them a war story for the ages. A dozen or so hours later, I found another such machine on a different planet. I was in a much better position; the environment wasn't against me, I was better equipped and its attack patterns had been burnt into my very soul. Instead of razed, frozen buildings, I took the fight through a forest of crumbling obelisks jutting out through rolling sand dunes. Things were going much better until the game bugged and the machine stopped taking any form of damage, locking me in an unwinnable battle.

Mass Effect Andromeda is obsessed with getting in its own way. Though still mechanically fragile almost a decade later, the universe it has created and the means to explore it little by little just about makes it a poorly written story saved by a great base idea rather than a great base idea ruined by a poorly written story. Sometimes you'll need to grit your teeth, hope you don’t phase through the floor and listen to the idiots around you try to be funny. But then you can surround yourself with the ones that annoy you the least, lose yourself in a jungle planet somewhere and try and figure out a way to save your little chapter of humanity in between shooting invisible monkeys and avoiding Ankylosaurus dogs.

Staff review by Gary Hartley (February 01, 2026) Gary Hartley arbitrarily arrives, leaves a review for a game no one has heard of, then retreats to his 17th century castle in rural England to feed whatever lives in the moat and complain about you.