Mass Effect

So I've now played through the original Mass Effect.  And, uh, Mass Effect Andromeda is kind of a better game.  Anyone that says otherwise is probably looking back through nostalgia goggles.  The top three criticisms I see against Andromeda is the story isn't as good, the characters aren't as good, and the facial animation/graphical glitches.  Please.  Anyone saying that Mass Effect is better than Mass Effect Andromeda, go back and play it.  The characters are not really all that fleshed out.  I kept talking to them, trying to get some personality out of them, but all they do is speak entirely in exposition, and never feel like actual people.  Shepard is a piece of wood without a personality.  And the story feels more like a collection of side quests rather than an actual story.  It does have a pretty cool ending, and the villain is better than the one in Andromeda.  I ran into way more graphical errors and glitches in this game than I ever say in Andromeda.  The facial animations are pretty good even by today's standards though, so there is that.

Anyway, this game is just not very fun to play.  The controls are pretty broken.  Oh, you want to turn the camera to the right?  You can't do that, there's a wall 12 feet behind you blocking the camera's movement, so sorry.  The combat is kind of bleh, again, I don't really like shooters all that much, which is why I've avoided this series until now, but the combat in this game is really, really clunky.  Where it kind of grew on me in Andromeda, I was constantly fighting the controls in this game to do even the simplest of things.  It makes a game that would otherwise have been okay just a chore to get through.  And omg, the freaking mako.  Just, holy crap, the controls on that thing are sooooooo freaking broken, so are the physics.  The thing feels like it weighs nothing as you attempt to drive it around.

This is the shortest Bioware RPG I've ever played.  I finished in less than 23 hours, and I did every side quest that came up, and surveyed every planet. 

The variety of planetary environments are pretty imaginative, but the actual maps themselves are all pretty copy and pasted.  The planets that are story related are a lot bigger with a lot more to explore, but at the same time, all of the imagination is pretty much gone from the environments.  Kind of a sad little trade off there.

Anyway.  I didn't hate the game.  I enjoyed the story well enough, though it did feel less like a story and more a collection of things that happen.  Like with Andromeda, this game kind of feels like a big, glorified prologue to a more interesting story to come later.  If you can get past that terrible controls and not very enjoyable gameplay, the story isn't bad, but holy crap, I can't believe anyone ever bothered to pick up the second game on release after playing through this thing.

So yeah, my probably unpopular opinion: Mass Effect Andromeda is a far superior game to the original Mass Effect.  Playing them back to back as I did really illustrated how much better the gameplay and all of Andromeda was.  I'm glad I played this one, and I'll be happy never to play it again.