There are times when you might forget - or at least not consider - that games are made people, rather than just created out of programming code and rendering.
It's that very idea - human error - that makes Mass Effect: Andromeda so very disappointing to play, because you can see it right throughout the game. At the very start of the game, there's a spelling error in the character naming screen. It's a small point, sure, but it acts as a microcosm for the game itself; it's sloppy and filled with mistakes that could have been easily avoided. It isn't just the poor animation - that'll come later - that makes the game such a disappointment, it's a myriad of reasons.
For one, the game doesn't really offer anything particularly new from the franchise. Exploration, action, weapon customisation, they've all been covered before in Mass Effect and made much more cleanly and efficiently. Even the fact that you can now jump - which, really, isn't that much of a bonus or a game-changing feature - isn't handled particularly well or smartly. More often than not, you'll find yourself trying to jump over or onto things that the game doesn't want you to, and before long, it's glitching out and showing up all those animation problems that have gotten so much reporting.
It's true, the animation is poor and what's more, it's distracting and pulls you out of the experience. During our time playing Andromeda - approximately 30 hours or so - we spotted a wide variety of glitches and animation bumps, a majority of them in cutscenes and more than a few in the gameplay itself. Even the customisation of your character's face is limited, much more limited than previous Mass Effect games in fact, making the game feel a lot less personal than you'd like. Where the game begins to pick up is in the exploration and it's clear that most - if not all - of the efforts in game design went into.
There really is a vastness to the game that means you'll be able to continue playing the game long after the main campaign has finished and the colonisation / viability aspect of the game is an interesting one. It's not like in, say, No Man's Sky, where you drop down to a planet and zip off again. Here, the game wants you to invest time and effort into each planet and will reward you accordingly. The action, for the most part, is as previous Mass Effect games and the variety of weaponry and mods for them is expansive enough.
The story itself, however, doesn't offer much in the way of stakes or excitement - especially when you compare it with previous entries to the franchise. The characters you'll interact with as part of your squad aren't particularly compelling and there's no real sense of personality or difference between them. What made Mass Effect so interesting previously was that you became invested in your squad, through loyalty missions and the like, whereas now it's simply just a question of the right tool / character for the particular mission. Moreover, the dialogue choices in cutscenes aren't all that different from previous games and are split more along personality than Paragon / Renegade choices.
Mass Effect: Andromeda has some good points; the exploration, the varied side-quests, the multiplayer and so on - but they're outweighed significantly by incomplete and jittery animation, gaping plotholes in the story and a sense that the game suddenly came upon a deadline and was rushed out. It's hard to believe that five years was spent trying to get Mass Effect: Andromeda to market as the game really does have a incomplete feel to it. Subsequent patches will likely iron out a variety of the issues raised so far, but for now, Mass Effect: Andromeda is a missed opportunity.
