Is it worth it, MEA?
I have played about 60hrs worth of MEA early last year around its release time. Then I stopped it for about a year until last night where I re-installed it. But I could only play another 1hr before...
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Planned...maybe not, but still may be in the works. I don't know if they will go back to the Milky Way in either a prequel or some later time frame, or stay in Andromdea, but I doubt Mass Effect is dead. On hold, sure, but not dead. I hope I am not wrong on that, but Mass Effect is a fairly big franchise in the SciFi gaming world so I hope Bioware hasn't killed it with it's mismanagement. I personally feel they will wait a few years, see how Anthem goes, and then probably dig ME out after DA series and see about returning to it.....so maybe 5-7 years and we see another ME game.
And if you don't agree, well, only time will tell, and I will hold onto my hope until the end of time.....
I had to uninstall it again. It was just so boring, so much open lands and maps with nothing exciting todo, too many lifeless boring fetch quests.
I think this game is ideal for a 12yo, but for a grown man I just cant find time for it unfortunately..
I think this game is ideal for a 12yo, but for a grown man I just cant find time for it unfortunately..
Is ME:A on par in greatness and replayability to that of the first three? No.
Is it even a really good game? Subject to opinion, but no, not really.
However, it does offer some gaming enjoyment, if your expectations aren't too high. The writing is weak in a lot of spots, thus many of the missions, parts of the main story, and especially the side quests, can be quite meaningless and shallow. But is there any fun at all in there somewhere? Yes, absolutely.
Even with latest patch (1.10) you'll still find certain quests feeling unfinished, some are, some were just the result of laziness rather than oversight.
But still, it's fun tooling around in the rover, patrolling the wastes and clearing out camps and installations of pirates and Kett. The fights with the over-powered Architects are long and repetitive, with no auto-save points created during the entire process (thus one wrong move after 30 mins+ of battle and you're back to square one), but yet every time I've beaten one it's given me a good feeling of me/Ryder having accomplished something no one else in the Initiative can do or has done.
The jump-jetting and jetpack-forwarding took some getting used to, but I'm finding that to offer some fun as well, getting to places I previously thought unreachable.
And it's more Mass Effect to play.
I like the concept of the story, of this massive trip to another galaxy, the trouble on arrival, finding new aliens both hostile and friendly, etc etc. As I said, the writing is just weak is all, which tends to render many of the conversational choices as all the same, often having the same outcome to an encounter or task no matter which way you respond or now you play it out. The game tries, but it just falls quite short of having the poignant impact on the player that the first three games had.
But is it WORTH playing? Yes. If you love Mass Effect, then by all means there's at least some fun to be had. So yes. And that's in no small part due to the fact that it's on sale at a greatly reduced price. Fact is it's now price about exactly what it's worth.
I played the heck out of the first three games. More times than I can clearly recall, actually. I was well primed to gobble up MEA with a spoon. I look back on this game, and while I can recognize that a lot of hard work went into what made it to release, I can't shake the disappointment on several levels.
I don't mind the open worlds, I'm good with that - applaud it, really. The Frostbite engine seems to create beautiful environments, but doesn't seem to do much else without fitting it in with a sledgehammer. Otherwise the graphics just looked like someone took a sledgehammer to them. I was frankly amazed that the game was published with such glaring graphics problems. What. The. Heck? If I can fire up ME and have the animation and graphics be more appealing than MEA... Houston - We have a problem.
The quest mechanics seemed bugged and incomplete. There were many "collection" quests with issues. Ew. Some quests were just plain broken.
And... multiplayer. While ME3 got me playing multiplayer again, I was saddened by MEA. When I heard that there was no beta test, cancelled for some rather unbelievable reason, that was the first time I felt uncertain about the game. When I actually tried multiplayer, I was, again, amazed. Not in a good way. Best shotgun in the game was a pistol. Best AR in the game was again, a pistol. Many "adjustments" later and while there are more viable weapons, silly things like useless Cobra missiles rankle. Multiplayer was far too buggy, corrections far too slow, and over-corrections far too annoying.
On the other hand, the prime/trigger mechanic of several powers works better than it did in 3, and while I like that, so many other disappointing things persist.
Finally, the main story - spoiler tagged for those who might possibly not have gotten the memo:
SpoilerReally? Years in production, a brand new galaxy, and we're still fighting Reapers? Oh, well, we call them Kett here... but they are to the Angara as the Collectors are to the Protheons. Almost exactly. Well, at least we don't have the Geth to deal with any... more... Right, OK the Remnants. 600 years and a very expensive bunch of arks later you are doing space-sudoku in a temple when you realize that the old saying is true: Wherever you go, there you are.
While I didn't hate Ryder, I also didn't really connect that much with her. Is it bad that when the N7 died, I really wanted them back instead of their kid? Did they really have to symbolically kill off the N7? I won't say there weren't funny bits, or bits that made me smile, and bits that I truly liked... but...If we were going to have to abandon the existing storyline and characters, I expected to actually get a new storyline, not a re-tread. I don't blame the writers... I blame whoever approved it.
..Annnd the companions. It took three games for people to get to know and truly enjoy the unfolding personalities of the NPCs in the trilogy. MEA seemed to be in a rush for us to love them, cramming that all into one games worth of character development, and it was just... a shot-gun companionship.
And now we have a story that will never get salvaged/finished.So bottom line:
If you have never played any Mass Effect before, and have $20 burning a hole in your pocket, I'd say go buy the Mass Effect Trilogy. You'll only get a minimum of the DLC (for ME1 I think), and will have more hours of more fulfilling game play. Once you get through that, and if you have $20 more... go get as much of the DLC you are missing for ME2 (Overlord, Stolen Memories, Lair of the Shadow Broker, etc). With your next $20, get DLC for ME3. Then come online with ME multiplayer - people are still playing that and having fun. Its easier to fill out a PUG match in ME MP than in MEA MP.
When you've exhausted all the DLC and are hungry for a little more Mass Effect, then spend the $20 on MEA.
