Check out our full performance analysis article for more details, but PCs with moderate specs will likely want to look at medium to high quality.Īndromeda's combat helps a great deal. A Core i3, for example, can definitely put the brakes on your experience. A powerful graphics card is required, but don't skimp on your processor.
When either fail-and BioWare certainly likes to hide its worst writing and voice acting out there in the wilderness-then the repetitive structure underneath is unflatteringly exposed.Īndromeda can be a fairly demanding game, particularly if you're hoping for a steady 60 fps at 1080p or higher resolution and ultra quality. The environments and writing increase the value of your time investment, but they amount to fresh icing on a cake that's going stale. If I have a complaint, it's that using fetch quests as a vector for storytelling is such well-trodden ground for this studio-at times, Andromeda can feel like BioWare on autopilot. It feels less like a singleplayer MMO and more like an expansion of the types of areas that BioWare have been creating since Knights of the Old Republic. There is a lot of padding, but this open world structure fits Mass Effect more naturally than it did Dragon Age: Inquisition.
I've had more fun shooting people in Andromeda than in any previous game in the series There are world bosses, too-massive serpentine robots called Architects that I enjoyed taking down. When the right conditions are met, new colonies can be built that unlock more things to do. Everything you do contributes to a planet's viability score-it's a bit like the effective military strength system from Mass Effect 3, although the impact is more keenly felt. There's a lot to do on each planet, from critical path missions to the ancient alien vaults that provide the keys to colonisation. After a while I found myself noticing less and less, but it's very apparent early on and that can make an already-slow start harder to connect with. There are complex cutscenes here that wouldn't have been possible in a prior Mass Effect game, but there are also too many instances when somebody spends a dramatic moment gurning like a Taser victim. Andromeda is sometimes better but frequently worse, and the funny thing about animation is that you only really pay attention to it when something goes wrong. The original games' lip sync was far from perfect, but it averaged out at acceptable. The other unavoidable issue is animation. Weird keybindings betray the fact that this was designed to be played with a pad, and while keyboard and mouse controls served me well in the long run it's more confusing than it needs to be at first. Andromeda's revamped combat system, open world mechanics and RPG structure conspire to throw a lot of clutter at you very quickly.
There is also quite a lot going on with the UI.
The funny thing about animation is that you only really pay attention to it when something goes wrong