Within minutes of starting there’s a cutscene in which a soldier type is shooting an already entirely dead corpse, and someone else has to say, “Hey, hey, take it easy,” and he fires off a few more shots and declares himself satisfied. I can’t even imagine how anyone can feel okay with writing that into a script without experiencing enough shame to just get up, walk away, and keep walking until they fall off of or into something.

Side quests feel like something from a 2004 Korean MMO. Just complete nothingness, running from map icon to map icon, scanning objects with your scanner when told to, and then AI companion SAM letting you know that, yup, the source of the defects has been found/animal has been captured/toddler reunited with rabid tiger, despite your actually doing nothing relevant to the tissue-thin narrative.

It’s so very, very bizarre to be playing a BioWare game where the characters are so empty and dull.

The exposition hangs off the dialogue like eighty ton weights, drowning any hope of emotional connection. Characters painfully tell you what their personalities are, rather than, say, having one. (“I tend to live the way I work: kinda “feel it, do it.” Not a lot of close ties, no real sense of purpose.” – Actual dialogue someone wrote on purpose.)

- Mass Effect: Andromeda has over 1,200 unique speaking characters, almost double what Mass Effect 3 had at 670

- This does not include shopkeepers or random NPCs spouting dialogue, these are characters with actual dialogue wheels

- The number of lines of dialogue are more than Mass Effect 2 and 3 combined. This means that there aren’t just more people to talk to, but conversations are deeper and longer than ever.