The Mass Effect Andromeda prequel has one thing to do, and does it badly
Total Playtime is a Patreon-supported podcast about videogames, hosted by Alice Bell, Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell and Nate Crowley. Jank has partnered with them to bring their premium episodes to our paying subscribers - but we’re making this episode free to all.
Text Adventure is Total Playtime’s videogame book club, in which we read a videogame novelisation and try very hard to like it. In this episode, first released to Patrons last year, we were joined by RPS’s Edwin Evans-Thirlwell to read Mass Effect Andromeda: Nexus Uprising, the first of three novels about Bioware’s ill-fated sequel and the first chronological instalment, telling as it does the story of how the wheels came off the Andromeda Initiative well before Messrs. Ryder showed up at the start of the game. That means it’s the first Text Adventure book that isn’t forced to slavishly reproduce the events of the game, an advantage it proceeds to squander at some length.
The end goal is right there in the title: the uprising on the Nexus space station, the aftermath of which greets you at the start of Mass Effect Andromeda, along with a few characters who survive the book. "Surviving crew fall out while resurrecting stricken space station" is a reasonably broad brief with quite an interesting ending which should be enough to enable a taut, claustrophobic thriller, but what we actually get is an overlong, only occasionally interesting slog that captures all of the grinding irritation but very little of the drama.
The plot flips clumsily between a selection of characters, most of them somewhat underdeveloped in a way that suits Bioware's choose-your-own-morality mechanics but not the written word. The lion’s share of it is dedicated to Sloane Kelly, the station’s head of security, who is granted a notable excess of personal background in a way that suggests she was the only one who had a pre-existing entry in the lore database, presumably because she’s a reasonably significant NPC in Andromeda proper.
This awards her a lot of memories and introspection but to little end beyond a lot of gratuitous swearing, including a single use of the c-word delivered with unsettlingly ostentatious ceremony, like a seven-year-old debuting it in the playground. Most of the other characters barely develop beyond archetypes like Unqualified Leader, Angry Krogan and Scheming Corporate Shithead, the latter in a Burke-from-Aliens role that feels like it was clumsily grafted on because he later surfaces as an antagonist in the game.
The narrative lurches between them over the course of many, many chapters, in a way that suggests the two credited writers were taking it in turns rather than working closely together, and while this does occasionally introduce some interesting vignettes they’re given only fleeting attention before you’re yanked back to Sloane complaining about missing sleep and needing coffee.
The glacial progress towards patching the station up does eventually invoke the exhaustion and irritation of living on limited rations and in a cloud of fellow survivors’ farts, but not in a way that feels particularly intentional or makes the most of the event when it happens. The uprising arrives late and implausibly and is gone in a flash: it’s completed in a blur of barely-structured pages towards the end of the novel, at which point Sloane suddenly decides to side with the rebels.
There are some good moments: flashes of character development with moments of slightly erratic pathos and flecks of sci-fi grit between all the internal monologues. It speaks to the book’s creation back in the Before Times, when EA expected Andromeda to launch a new series, rather than a glitchy and underwhelming testament to a troubled development process that ultimately resulted in the entire franchise being put on ice. Nexus Uprising was probably created with hopes, dreams and a half-decent creative process, and was at least given room to make its own mistakes, but it never makes the most of the opportunity.
As for how it pairs with the game: Nate, who’s never played a Mass Effect game, now wants to do so having read this. Alice, who has, says it makes the game seem worse. Choose your path accordingly, but either way you should stay for Nate's guesses at what Salarians actually look like.
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