Mass Effect: Andromeda [Gameplay #14] - The Human Condition [ENDING]
0Despite there being a whole lot of content in the game, Mass Effect: Andromeda's actual campaign felt curiously short. This was maybe the result of Bioware not wanting to connect story mission progress to various arbitrary side activities like they did in Dragon Age: Inquisition. With some minor prerequisities out of the way, you could probably sprint to MEA's finish line in a 20 hours or so if you were so inclined. Indeed, I'm not even sure what my own hour count would have been if I hadn't had to retry as many lengthy battle sequences as I did playing on Hardcore difficulty.
Despite its many shortcomings and underwhelming individual moments, the best thing I can say about Mass Effect: Andromeda is that I definitely didn't feel done with the game after the 40-ish hours I spent pushing through the story, clear out a fair amount of of substantial side quests and establish several outposts. For one thing, I hadn't even visited the last big planet Elaaden when the ending credits rolled. Some 10 hours later I have countless skills and XP levels left to unlock, most of the Loyalty missions are not even initiated, there are at least two more arks to discover, many systems have not been scanned and I might have some romance-related stuff left to see as well. And that's not even counting the less interesting planet-based busywork which I've been purposefully avoiding. The game is not necessarily better at focusing on quality over quantity than Dragon Age: Inquisition, but at least I've been better at prioritizing this time around. As a result of that, playing MEA still feels relevant and reasonable engaging even though my personal backlog of recent releases is getting fairly ridiculous at this point (Zelda, Persona 5, Horizon, Nier, Nioh, Yakuza 0 and many more).