Now for the section of the review that brings me no joy talking about: bugs. While all open world games have issues due to the large number of moving parts, Mass Effect: Andromeda is a complete mess. Over the sixty hours we put into Andromeda, we ran into a staggering amount of issues in the open world, conversations, cutscenes and segmented missions. For starters, we've had party member models multiply in the Tempest (your ship), enemies fight in the T-pose position, doors refusing to open, trapping us inside, having the ability to phase through geometry, and NPCs and enemies who turned invisible (we're not talking about the ones who have a cloaking ability, either). There were also environmental models that disappeared, allies that merged into the floor horizontally, enemies either skated around or floated in the air, event triggers refused to occur, objects obstructed our vision in conversations, and we even phased through the ground a couple of times and were unable to escape. These are just a handful of the many bugs we ran into during our time in the Andromeda galaxy, causing much frustration and constantly reloading.
Fortunately, none of these are game breaking issues, or at least the ones we listed above aren't. There were a couple of instances that forced us to close the application entirely. For starters, after sending a probe to an asteroid, the camera would occasionally swoop in automatically and stay peering at an infinite abyss, with button commands ceasing any functionality. After restarting the game, we came back only to see Ryder had taken massive damage, from what I expect is from being jettisoned into deep space instead of the probe. While this happened multiple times, they don't compare to the completely broken segments and scenes. One specific instance that's still fresh on the mind is during one of the Loyalty missions, where a platform for an elevator was nowhere to be seen. After about ten minutes of wandering around a lifeless station, I jumped outside the boundaries only to be teleported back to the beginning of the checkpoint with newly spawned enemies and the elevator finally intact. After riding the elevator and defeating a handful of gun-toting raiders in the following area, the final scene for the mission completely broke animations, scene camera positions, and even character models, just before going into an endless loading screen. At the very least Mass Effect: Andromeda is generous with the autosaves, but this is just one example of many instances that occurred throughout our lengthy playthrough. It was a nightmare.
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