Mass Effect Andromeda feels like a game that exists because there needed to be a new Mass Effect game. It's hard, as deeply as you explore it, to find something that shows any other reason for it to be. Despite the extraordinary opportunity of a fresh start, fresh characters, and even a fresh galaxy to set it in, this feels like a lengthy rehash of what came before. It is bad in many ways, from its madcap AI, poor character faces, dated design and most of all, horrible writing, but its biggest crime is just how unavoidably, all-encompassingly dull it is for so, so many hours.
There is an odd phenomenon, however. I've played for something like 75 hours. I was being thorough, focusing on what to me seemed the most important tasks, but endlessly drawn into side quests and mini-adventures. And yet there is a wealth of game remaining, even after the official ending. It let me do that, play the way I picked (or, as the case really was, the most bearable way), and that's a huge achievement, something very rarely seen outside of Bethesda games. And in that time, I found what I enjoy in Mass Effect Andromeda, the aspects of an utterly enormous game that let me have some fun. Qualified fun, fun incessantly interrupted by bugs and irritations, mistakes and the unceasing misery that is its turgid, sophomoric writing. But some fun.
