Hey guys, I'm Videodonkey.
Now anybody who knows me,
knows that when I play a game, I wanna hit a button,
*Click*
"Click it down."
and play the game.
What I don't wanna do, is sit through a bunch of dumb bullshit.
"Don't waste MY MOTHERFUCKIN' TIME!"
With Mass Effect: Andromeda, dumb shit takes center stage.
To say that Bioware dropped the ball here is to be a comedy man.
The ball has fallen off of a fucking cliff,
into the center of an erupting volcano.
On a tech level, the game has regressed five years back from the original Mass Effect.
Which came out in 2007.
Okay, things are fucked!
Uh-oh, guys.
I think I broke her.
Look at this footage from the original game.
A little stiff, but when this came out, these graphics were incredible!
Now look at Mass Effect: Andromeda
Notice how the animation looks a little off.
Originally I tried to make my custom guy look like this,
but after hours of trial and error, I realized
I just could not beat BioWare at their own game.
The default female character's face has been mathematically perfected
by a team of elite genetic scientists
to be the dumbest fucking face achievable by humankind.
*Angelic choir*
Previous Mass Effect games were solid third person shooters
that were carried by interesting characters
and a lot of self-contained episodic storylines.
The combat was fun, and a little strategic,
but it was mostly satisfying because of the context for the shooting.
Mass Effect: Andromeda is about a robot with no human emotions,
interacting with a team of fucking dickwads,
who unrelentingly berate the player with lame-ass jokes every fourteen seconds.
Liam: "I think I really pissed that one off!"
"Maybe because I shot him in the face!"
*canned laugh track*
First things first, who the fuck are any of these voice actors?
Peebee: "Aha, what have we here?
DUNKEY: That's a door.
Oh yeah guys, remember Christine Lakin?
She played Paula's friend #1 in Family Guy.
Wow, they got Gary Carr?
*vroom*
Are you really telling me you don't know who Don Gilet is?
From all these TV shows that don't even exist?
Ryder: "Let's dial down the emotion so we can be clear-headed."
Meanwhile, Mass Effect 2 was hittin' you with fuckin' Martin Sheen,
Carrie-Anne Moss,
Seth Green, Keith David, actual recognized actors
who instill a huge sense of presence and authenticity
in the characters and the world of the game.
Okay, now we're back in the new Mass Effect.
Look at this big dinosaur-looking ass dude.
Real quick in your head, just envision what you think this guy sounds like, okay?
Okay.
Kesh: "I'm Nakmoor Kesh, superintendant of this station."
That is not what you thought it would sound like.
We're just warming up now.
The combat has been dumbed down to where you can only have three moves at a time,
and you can't use your squadmate abilities,
which I assume was some misguided effort to streamline the game like they did with Mass Effect 2,
except in that game, they mostly just stripped away annoying shit from the first game.
Here, I can't even figure out how to get to the fucking mission I'm trying to do.
Okay, it's telling me to go over here.
*pop* Uhp.
Okay, this... I guess we're going this way?
*pop* Oh wait!
Wait! It's back... it's back over here now, okay.
There it is. That's what you gotta do.
You just gotta go to this thing.
Aw, shit.
Now where do I go?
There it is, you see that over there?
70 meters, there we go.
Okay, we just- *pop*
The fuck? It just went-
It's so clogged with unintuitive menus and interfaces
The fuck are cryo pods?
What am I doing here? What-
What the fuck is strike teams? What-
Look at how you upgrade your guns.
Instead of just giving you a list of the guns you've actually acquired,
it lists every weapon in the game, and then you're still not done.
You've actually only crafted a blueprint,
which needs to be researched now,
assuming you have the right materials.
On top of this, Mass Effect is now an open world game for no discernible reason.
Paaran Shie: "Follow closely. Do not try to explore the city or interact with anyone."
Dunkey: This is why I play video games.
Really, all that BioWare has accomplished by making Mass Effect open world,
is that two-thirds of the game is now driving this fucking piece 'a shit car around.
Hey Tony, gimme two drinks, huh?
Make 'em extra quick-
The fuck?
*dunkey laughing*
There's also a lot of waiting,
and really detrimental oversights
like having to watch these stupid cinematics every time you wanna go to a new planet.
Animation.
Zoom out of the galaxy?
Watch an animation.
Land on a planet?
Animation.
Oops, wrong planet.
Animation to get back on your ship.
Uh oh, here we go again.
Okay.
Just gotta... just hack into the mainframe...
just knock this out- there we go.
Simple as that.
But let's focus in now,
on what really makes this game such a shitshow:
the main character.
Now I'm not gonna act like Shepard was one of the most iconic characters in video games,
but he got the job done.
And I thought Mark Meer, who voiced him,
did a great job making that character feel like a leader.
Shepard: "I'll find some way to take him down."
Sara Ryder, on the other hand,
is such a generic, wimpy piece of trash character
who is so disconnected from the events of the game,
that it severs any connection the player could have had to the story.
The Cardinal: "I see you begin to understand the gift
that the kett bring to all andr-"
Sara: "Not likely."
Dunkey: That was so fucking weak!
It's not just the animation,
it's the dialogue and the delivery of her lines
which makes her such an unlikeable character.
Sara: "Whoa, SAM what is this?"
Dunkey: IT'S A DOOR YOU PIECE OF SH-
Sara: "My father's dead."
Addison: "Alec... is dead?"
Dunkey: You look really broken up about that.
Mass Effect: Andromeda is inhuman, unoriginal, and fundamentally broken.
Fuck this game.
(Outro)