Peace in Andromeda.

It's taken 2 years and the heat death of Bioware's talent pool for me to take a deep breath and say.... "Andromeda was a deep, rock solid, single player RPG with some script/story problems." If anyone else besides Bioware made that game I would have given it a 9. Though some of the bigger worlds reek of asset scuttling in that it's just a bunch of finished locations vomited out on a bland canvas. Had I never played Inquisition and appreciated how all those areas felt like real places I never would have been as harsh.

But there's the game's biggest issue: lack of imagination. It takes place in a whole new universe yet the most interesting aliens came with you. There's only 2 new talking species and about a 3rd of the way through you figure out... there is only one species. This game needed to get Weird with a capital W but settled for doing a good job keeping the original trilogy's lore in tact. Krogan are still prickly battle toads, Salarians are still overly polite, arrogant, geckos. While I like Jaal, the angaran ambassador, his race is just kinda there. I can't sum them up like I can everyone else. Their "thing" is hiding from the Kett. That's pretty much it. It's a humongous wasted opportunity.

But the story itself, your reason for questing, is pretty solid. Your people are starving and need a colony to work. That's your gig, use your shmancy AI powers to make a home. Sometimes for your people, sometimes not. For a game that's mostly about shooting things there's a refreshingly constructive bent to it's narrative. You may choose not to be in Andromeda to make friends... but you probably should be.

Movie night on the Tempest.

As for Ryder him/herself I got a big ol' "meh." Ryder doesn't hurt but he doesn't help. Coming off of Shepard, the greatest speaking RPG protagonist ever, this is a criticism that still holds. I've seen worse but that doesn't keep him from getting a solemn C-. Though I will give the male Ryder the edge because the Nolan North impression he's going for is SCARY good sometimes. But the rest of the crew? Pretty good! Your salarian pilot gives a lively performance. Drak is an endearingly sarcastic Krogan grandpa and almost edges out Wrex on the incidental dialogue front. Liam sucks but that's mostly because his actor can't read a script to save his life. Helping him move a 600 year old cryo sealed couch is a hell of a scene-let. Natalie Dormer knows she's slumming it as your medic but she's still such a pro shes a highlight.

But the planets themselves are hit and miss. What's more, the 2nd and 3rd are easily the worst. The late game picks up with a desert Krogan colony and a space pirate paradise but I wouldn't blame anyone for bailing out before then. It's a 10 hour sprint to those places including a plodding trip to the angaran hideout that walk-locks you for 12 minutes. I know running NPC's make no sense but neither do pop up windows or inventory screens. Let me run!

If there was just one more Kadara (space pirate) planet in the mix I could have called this a good game at the time. But I digress. This game was built by mass effect 3's multiplayer team and while they may not have the strongest sense of place They. Get. Combat. The gun play is sublime and the gear crafting almost more so. You can make any type of weapon at any time. You just need the right materials. If you want stronger versions of that gear you need to research stuff. You need to finish quests for that. To keep your favorite weapons on the bleeding edge you need to do a bit of everything. This makes it the single greatest in-game economy I've ever seen. I haven't tried the new game plus but you would need that kind of time to level up different weapons and that's a pretty good excuse to keep grinding.

In light of Anthem, AKA Bioware's funeral pyre, I'm ready to make nice with my laundry list of Andromeda based quibbles. This is a fine 8/10. They did a good job. As long as you have it running on a solid state drive the load times are minimal and the patch jobs they did since launch let me run the best textures at 60 frames. If this is to be their last classic Bioware game... well it's certainly a better place to leave it than ME3.

We'll always have pirate planet...