After complaining in the Lynx that I got a physical box with a digital code instead of install media for my preorder, there were those who suggested I review the game and give an opinion.

First Caveat: I have, as of this set of impressions, thirteen in-game hours. On the plus side, it does not feel like the game is about to end. Though it also means I have not fully explored the character of all of the NPCs, which is an area that traditionally was BioWare’s wheelhouse.

Second Caveat: I may end up with unmarked spoilers because of my style of writing reviews. I will try to avoid this, but mistakes happen.

I took my code and typed it into Origin while the Lynx were going. After getting to 42% of the download completed, Origin installed the base game and said I could start playing. It then went on to keep downloading content in the background. So if anyone is already put off by the Origin requirement, there’s your answer. This isn’t an Origin review, so all I’ll say is that it’s a weak Steam rip-off, and I’d rather not have to have yet another sales platform installed on my machine to play games.

One of the designers also supposedly said something racist about white people

The first impression I had of the game proper was that it loaded to the main menu massively faster than earlier Mass Effect games. After poking around in the settings menu as per my habit, I dropped into character creation. There has been much said about character creation on other pages, including claims that it was difficult to make a white Ryder which prompted me to immediately try for that.

The results were passable but there were a few things wrong when wandering about in-game. One, the hairline does not actually attach to the forehead. That gets distracting in close-up shots. Two, the face looks fractionally small for the head but proportionate to itself. That could just be me having screwed up in making my changes. But one thing that kept jumping out at me – all the restraints on the character customization are artificial. It is clear that the engine as it exists could easily handle giving a wider range of variation. Two, it is easy to see where the impression that there was a deliberate effort made to try to prevent people from making a white character. Whether there was intent or not is the question.

Anyway, I had my soulless ginger, and I kept wondering – why doesn’t the hair color apply to the eyebrows? It makes it look like everyone has a terrible dye job. Actually given how the hair doesn’t connect to the forehead, it makes it look like he’s wearing a wig. This leads into the next distracting problem. I’d dismissed the fuss about facial animations, but there is indeed something seriously off about them. At times, the lip-sync is broken to the point where the Salarians have more natural speech movements than the humans. This wouldn’t be as bad, but being Mass Effect, there are closeups during dialog, and it’s right there, front and center where you can’t miss it. Speaking of dialog, the voice acting… is spotty. Some characters work just fine. No problems. Others, the voice just doesn’t sound right for the model. And then there’s the handful where the actor is just awful. The Salarian director is one such character, where I was wondering “did they leave in placeholder audio?” during his dialog. Decent voice acting is invisible, it blends into the background. Bad voice acting ruins the immersion.

Will this cavalcade of complains end? Yes, but there are a few more to get to first. Coming from the voice acting, you get the writing. Whoever wrote some of this dialog at best half-assed it. Other writing is par for the series and not so much of an irritant. The problem is the juxtaposition of varying degrees of quality. There is a side quest where you investigate a murder which is actually pretty okay, but I was doing it in parallel to some of the main quests where the glaring mistakes popped up. Little flubs – awkward sentence structure and word choice unrelated to character proclivities, things like that, but being in cutscenes for the primary plot just meant there was nothing else to pay attention to at the time. I get the feel of several parallel writers, where the less experienced members got handed the main plot.

Right, lets get on to the gameplay. Anyone who’s played BioWare’s work in the past decade will be familiar with most of the conventions. In fact, they will have played this exact game before. For some, what I am about to say is the most damning commentary I could make. For others, it’s a non-issue. But here it is. This game is really Mass Effect: Inquisition. Character picks up unique ability that requires them to personally attend to some vital task. They are dropped into a position of authority within an organization without any qualification – an organization which they have to rebuild from a shattered state and woo allies against a better-resourced foe. And they repeatedly return to the same locales to do side quests and harvest resources to perform upgrades. They even have strike team missions which fill the role of the strategic map in DA:I. These strike team missions are where the Multiplayer is slotted in, as any of them sent out using an “APEX” requirement is a multiplayer mission. I’ve not done any of these because screw multiplayer; I play video games to get away from real people.

I was okay with Inquisition, and I’m fine with its reskinning. In fact, the reskinning is one of the best things because the Environment artists did a gorgeous job. Lets take a trip from the Citad- sorry, the ‘Nexus’ to the Desert world.

The office view.

I told you it was the Citadel.

Even the star system is dusty.

The pretty view.

The Business View.

We really should pave the parking lot.

We did build that.

Fun fact, the Nomad doesn’t float.

Then we go and have a chat with an NPC and we get another good look at the character animations. And we see that there was a shortage of quality control

She stood like this the whole conversation.

Lets take our mind off that, here’s a view of the system on the verge of falling into a black hole.

It doesn’t technically suck, but it won’t be fun.

But that brings me to another problem. While exploration is explicitly a part of the game’s premise, the movement transitions take too long. You select a new celestial object to visit, the camera zooms in where you are, pans to aim at the other body, then flies over there, pauses for a full second, and finally reorients at the new location before giving you back control. You can’t skip it, and it does this for every transition. This wouldn’t be so bad, but when you’re doing stellar cartography, a lot of these planets have zero or at most one surface feature to investigate from orbit. You will be flying from world to world a lot. This gets tedious after a while.

While we’re on the subject of transportation, the Nomad is a decent vehicle in some ways, it definitely handles better than the Mako, but cannot tackle anything approaching the inclines that the Mako could. It doesn’t jump very high, but it also doesn’t leap off of cliff faces and pirouette through the air like the Mako did. It has one seriously annoying drawback – no gun. You have to get out of the Nomad to shoot anything. I’m not going to compare to the Hammerhead because that was a skimmer, and the wheeled vehicles are more appropriate parallels. The Nomad apparently has an infinite supply of mining probes packed away in the back. These probes are as big as people and I’ve launched a number on a single run without resupply. I think I’d rather have a gun.

While I joked about the aesthetic in the screenshot travel montage, I do understand wanting to keep the Initiative tech looking like what we saw in previous installments. Where the problem comes from is the lack of originality in the Andromeda aliens. I’ve seen two sapient species thus far. One looks like it got lost trying to figure out if it was supposed to head to the Star Wars set or the Star Trek set. It is an uninspired rubber-forehead design. The main villain race looks like someone tried to mix and match traits and animations from the Geth and the Collectors. They are the biggest disappointment thus far. We flew all of these light years for something that isn’t even all that alien. The ‘Archon’ has a comedically child-like face too. It’s just a bit embarrassing.

The characters look like BioWare standard fare, and I could point to the archetypes from previous games, but as I said, at thirteen hours in, I’ve not had time to evaluate them all. Except I know I cannot stand ‘Peebee’. Immediately after the scene where she introduces herself, I emptied an entire thermal clip of pistol rounds into her because she was that obnoxious. Sadly, these seemed to have no effect. There were points in the subsequent mission where I was all but yelling “Don’t follow the moron” at the pathfinder, but the power of cutscenes compelled him. I cursed when I opened the wrong door on the ship and ended up in an inescapable conversation with her. Some of the other NPCs started out grating, but became less of an irritant over time. Liam was much easier to deal with after I replaced him with a Turian and he wasn’t constantly yapping on during missions.

I am seriously distrustful of the AI, and I really wish there was a way for the PC to try to get it out of his head. That thing is just plain wrong and the first step down a lot of bad endings for humanity.

So far, I give it three dead Reapers out of five. It won’t wow you, but it can be enjoyable if you liked Inquisition. You may want to wait for a sale if you’re on the fence.