Tag Archives: mass effect

Thoughts: Mass Effect Andromeda

Mass Effect™: Andromeda_20170328205525

I started Mass Effect: Andromeda last Friday with every intention of finishing it, or at least finishing the majority of it, by Sunday night. Based on my experience with other Bioware RPGs this seemed perfectly doable; my completion times for all three previous Mass Effects clock in at under 20 hours and I had nothing else to do that weekend, and they’d all at least been fun enough for me to blitz through them in a similar timeframe. It’s not Bioware, but when Alpha Protocol came out I completed it three times in a single week1. What I’m trying to say here is that I have absolutely no problem smashing my way through an RPG in a very short space of time, and I’ll usually enjoy doing it unless the RPG in question is Dragon Age 2.

On Sunday morning, faced with the choice between playing more Mass Effect: Andromeda and doing literally anything else with my time, I instead elected to clean my fridge. I took all of the shelves out, washed them in the sink, dried them, thoroughly wiped down the inside of the fridge to remove some pretty gnarly hidden stains, replaced everything, and then went on to clean the microwave and the easy parts of the oven for good measure. Doing a proper job of it meant enduring a couple of hours of the sort of mild intellectual tedium that accompanies all housework, but you know what? It was an infinitely, infinitely more thrilling and satisfying experience than playing Mass Effect: Andromeda.

Continue reading

  1. Ah, the things you can achieve when you don’t have a job.
Tagged , , , ,

Thoughts: Mass Effect 3, Part Two.

This part of the review has more spoilers. I’m not going to reveal important plot specifics, but I am going to talk about the story structure and how some of the more promising mechanics actually panned out at the end of the game.

Continue reading

Tagged , , ,

Thoughts: Mass Effect 3, Part One.

This is going to be split into two parts: non-spoiler where I talk about the mechanics of the game and how I feel it pulls them off in as vague a way as possible, and then another part where I go into slightly more spoily plot details. This is the non-spoiler half of the review, but please bear in mind I have to talk about some really, really general plot points like the basic premise of the game in order to explain how certain bits and pieces work. It’s only stuff that’s revealed in basically all the marketing material for the game, but if you’ve somehow managed to avoid that and want to remain unspoiled I’d stop reading now.

Continue reading

Tagged , , ,