Checking in at the PathfinderвЂ™s email terminal, for instance, reveals some legitimately hilarious and heartfelt messages from the colonization team. But for all its familiarity, the game still has fantastic character moments.

So while the moment-to-moment story is different, itвЂ™s hard to shake the feeling that everything in Mass Effect: Andromeda has been done before. The details are different, but Andromeda treads the same narrative ground, right down to individual characters that eerily resemble their Mass Effect trilogy counterparts: hardened soldier Cora is a less snooty Miranda, Drack is a more affable Wrex, Vetra isвЂ¦well, IвЂ™d call her a female Garrus, but sheвЂ™s way cooler than that. The central conflict in Andromeda revolves around a hostile alien race who seeks to control mysterious ancient technology, which impedes the central character (a вЂњPathfinderвЂќ) on his or her quest to find a habitable new world for humanity. To be plain, the Heleus Cluster of Andromeda, the people who inhabit it, and the events that transpire there differ little from their Milky Way analogues on a fundamental level. It feels joyless, even cruel, to dismiss Mass Effect: Andromeda as creatively bankrupt, and yet it is undeniably crafted from the same mold as its predecessors. ItвЂ™s a story that speaks to the resilient spirit of humanity, but also one that runs uncannily parallel to the Mass Effects of days past, proving that people are the same pretty much everywhere - in the hands of certain writers, at the very least. One group of would-be pioneers, meanwhile, envisioned a new life somewhere else in the distant cosmos, and it is there that the story of the Andromeda Initiative begins.

In fiction, mankind has a propensity for packing it up and heading to space when things go sour on Earth - but what happens when our galaxy isnвЂ™t the brave new frontier we had hoped it would be? The original Mass Effect trilogy depicted a vibrant and detailed vision of the Milky Way it was a place where humans and aliens coexisted in something a few steps shy of harmony, their destinies forcibly entwined by the common threat of a machine race hell-bent on eradicating all life in the galaxy.

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