The wonderful day many of us have been waiting a long damn time for has finally arrived! Mass Effect Andromeda has arrived! I have to admit that the EA Access preview left me underwhelmed. The characters in those opening hours were a far cry from those we loved from the original trilogy and, well, it seemed pretty boring. All that changed for me when I got past where the preview ended. And now I’m hooked. I have a crush on my Sara Ryder and I’m in love with Jaal (it’s a complicated time for me). The game is so big with so much to do that it can be overwhelming, but I think that’ll be great for being able to put the game down for a while and come back to it after a while.
I won’t bore you with an overview of the game. I’m pretty sure that if you play video games at all, you already are familiar with MEA. So let’s get right into the accessibility. The game has some amazing accessibility features, but it also has some complete failures. Like the visibility of the captions. You can see in the above image that white-on-light backgrounds continues to be a problem. Also missing is the ability to scale the size of the captions to your liking.
On the flip side of issues in captioning is the great speaker/recipient labeling. There are several instances in which a character is addressing two people and MEA doesn’t interrupt the flow by separating the text lines or making it have a delay. It clearly labels who is being spoken to.
My last grips concerning captioning is the inconsistent placement. I know this is done to allow for captions and the HUD during combat, but it leaves you wondering where the captions will show up and if the dialogue is short, you might miss it all together if you look in the wrong place.
One of the great accessibility features is the proximity meter that displays for some quests or objectives. The closer you are to whatever you need to look for or interact with, the more bars light up. This is a great improvement when most games with this kind of system rely solely on sound getting louder or increasing controller vibration.
Also helpful in the visual assists category is your scanner lighting up actionable items. With the red color fill, there’s also a yellow outline that appears (alongside a sound) when your scanner is focused on the correct area to get the info you need.
All in all, Mass Effect Andromeda is an incredible game. Once I was a few hours into it, I remembered everything I loved about Bioware games, despite the slow start. The only issue is the standard issue hard to read captions, which I’ve come to expect by now. If you’re a fan of Bioware, or a fan of semi-open world space games (and this one has exploration with a damn good story) MEA is one you shouldn’t miss.
Bottom Line
All in all, Mass Effect Andromeda is an incredible game. Once I was a few hours into it, I remembered everything I loved about Bioware games, despite the slow start. The only issue is the standard issue hard to read captions, which I’ve come to expect by now. If you’re a fan of Bioware, or a fan of semi-open world space games (and this one has exploration with a damn good story) MEA is one you shouldn’t miss.