T w e n t y S i d e d

So the team is here on the planet Eos to fix the climate by fiddling with the inexplicably intuitive and user-friendly alien vaults.

Once we get the Nomad and do a little tutorial stuff, we settle into the rut the game designer has planned for us: Drive to three different monolith towers, shoot the inhabitants, do the puzzle, and then go to the alien vault to reset the global climate.

The Monoliths

The three Monolith towers work something like this: Once you’ve murdered whoever is guarding itThe Kett, ancient guardian robots, or (very occasionally) local pirates or other assorted jerks., you’ll find a console. The aliens who built this thing may be from another galaxy, but by a strange coincidence they just happened to use computer consoles that are the right size for a human being. You’ll need to hop around the environments and do some light platforming to reach hidden glyphs on the tower. Once you scan those, SAM can hack the alien computer or whatever. You do a sudoku puzzle, the tower lights up, and you drive to the next one.

It’s not bad by the standards of BioWare puzzles. Or at least, the first couple are okay. But when you realize you’ve got to do three of these on every planet the whole thing starts to feel very Ubisoft-ish. It wouldn’t be so bad if each tower had a different gimmick, but the designer runs out of ideas very quickly and from there you’re just repeating the same task again and again.

Once you do three towers, a secret vault will open up somewhere on the map.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Andromeda Part 11: The Vault in Our Stars”

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.

There are a total of five (eventually) viable planets in the game, and early on the game makes it clear that your goal is to heal them all using the alien monoliths. Each planet has some sort of environmental problem: Radiation, extreme heat, extreme cold, caustic water, and out-of-control wildlife. We’re fresh out of the introduction, and already these alien gizmos have lost all sense of mystery. We know what they do and we’re confident we can use them. They’re reduced to obvious mechanical contrivances.

Fine, we’re not doing a sci-fi mystery anymore. Instead we’re doing simple action adventure. We can argue about whether or not that’s a good idea for a Mass Effect game, but it’s not an inherently bad idea for a story. But even if we’re going to use Andromeda’s galaxy-sized canvas to tell a simple story, there’s no reason to portray it in such a boring way. Everyone just assumes that the alien monoliths can fix the planet and they assume they’ll be able to figure out how to use them. You could make this plot significantly more interesting by just having the characters show some level of apprehension or uncertainty.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Andromeda Part 10: Eos”

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.