Mass Effect: Andromeda

 Bioware Embarks on a Bold New Adventure. There’s Some Turbulence

- James Nouch

There’s something really quite romantic about striking out into the unknown and the unfamiliar. It’s the reason dime novel authors imagined cowboys as heroic frontiersmen, out to tame the wild and lawless borderlands. It’s the reason we celebrate Antarctic explorers and revere deep-sea divers. And it’s also the reason that compels one hundred thousand adventurous souls to leave the Milky Way at the outset of BioWare’s sprawling new role-playing game. Their goal may be to establish a new home within the Andromeda galaxy, but their motivation is a starry-eyed desire for adventure.

Right off the bat there’s something a little idealistic about Mass Effect: Andromeda, and the sense of dire galactic peril that energised the original trilogy is by now all but spent. If Mass Effect 3 was the story of a united galaxy’s heroic last stand, Andromeda has an altogether scrappier tone, depicting a gaggle of space faring trailblazers improvising their way out of trouble. And trouble doesn’t take long to find them. Following a 600-year journey spent under the frosty duvet of a cryo-bed, the men, women and lumpy spacealiens of the Andromeda Initiative wake to discover that the verdant ‘golden worlds’ they’d been promised are nowhere to be seen. These pilgrims left everything they’ve ever known behind, and they arrive to find a desolate rock.