T w e n t y S i d e d

I said earlier in this series that the dialog is a mess. I’m not going to document every single non-sequitur, cringy one-liner, false binary choice, and incoherent bit of exposition. We’ve already established that this game is lacking in polish and there’s no need to belabor that point. But even beyond the lack of polish you can see problems that couldn’t be fixed by throwing more time at them. Even if the game had been fully baked, the cutscenes would still be clumsy and inefficient. There’s a conversation here on Kadara that really drives home the crude way the dialog is put together.

You head to Kralla’s Song, a local dive bar. The goal is to to meet with a contact who will go by the name “Shena”. But before we talk about the cutscene, let me ask some rhetorical questions about this bar…

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Andromeda Part 18: Choose Your Own Misadventure”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

The next stop on our tour of the Heleus Cluster is Havarl. Like the other planets, the climate is out of whack. Unlike the other planets, this place suffers from an overabundance of life rather than a shortage.

Havarl

Havarl is overgrown with a thick jungleYet another single-biome planet.This is the one planet where you can’t drive the Nomad. and all of the native flora and fauna is exceedingly dangerous. Everything is toxic, poisonous, or filled with murderous intent.

The game says this is the ancestral home of the Anagara and that they had to abandon it when it became too inhospitable, but that doesn’t really fit with what we’re shown. I’d expect to see bits of Angaran cities poking out of the overgrowth. They’re a spacefaring species, so their cities must have been pretty impressive. But instead the “cities” are just endless sections of Remnant architecture that form horizon-smothering black walls around the play area. I imagine this is another detail that would have been ironed out if the game had been given time for polish.

I do like that this world offers some contrast with the other four and isn’t yet another lifeless hellscape for us to colonize.

As with the other worlds, you need to visit the monoliths, then do the vault, and then the game tells you the planet is stabilizing. Then you run around and do fetch quests and kill the mooks congregating around map markers until the planet hits 100%. Whee.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Andromeda Part 17: Welcome to the Bungle”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Elaaden is where the Krogan decided to settle when they left the Nexus. There’s some local politics you need to sort out here to stabilize the region. Morda has appointed herself as “Overlord” of all Krogan here. She’s bellicose, confrontational, and prideful. She’s also proof that bringing the Krogan on this expedition was a foolish move, surpassed only in the foolishness of betraying them. I much prefer stories that have a sort of inevitability to them, where mistakes are grievous but understandable. The mistakes made by the Andromeda Initiative are so idiotic that I sometimes lose interest in helping out. I often find myself thinking, “Screw it. These morons deserve everything that happens to them.”

Assuming you’re not going to turn the game off, you’re going to need to deal with Morda. There’s another Krogan, Strux, who is more cunning and less overtly warmongering. I really thought the game was setting up a choice between a warmonger Krogan leader or a devious Krogan leader, but you can’t actually side with Strux. Instead, Strux attempts a coup that brings about his own downfall, and the only choice you get to make is if you want to screw the Krogan yet again. Like the confrontation with the Cardinal on Voeld, it’s like the writer deliberately ignored an interesting choice to offer you a shallow one.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Andromeda Part 16: Morda Meets The Eye”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.