This past weekend, I finished Mass Effect: Andromeda. It was deeply disappointing. After a five-year wait since the end of Mass Effect 3, I was hoping that BioWare’s follow-up would offer an exciting story, but instead it offered a retread of plot points from the original trilogy married to a protagonist who shouldn’t be the hero of his/her story. While the game wants to celebrate exploration and discovery, it ultimately casts you into a savior role you shouldn’t be playing. Instead of making the galaxy feel bigger, Andromeda reduces it down to a handful of problems that only humanity can solve.

[Spoilers ahead for Mass Effect: Andromeda]

When you arrive in Andromeda, you soon learn there are other species. One is the boring, malevolent Kett and the other are the enslaved, beleaguered Angarans. Since this is a Mass Effect game, your attitude towards the Angarans will vary based on your dialogue choices, but your actions will keep returning you to the same place—this indigenous people cannot defeat their oppressors without my help.

By making the conflict between the Kett and the Angarans a central point of the game, Andromeda runs into a whole host of problems. The largest is that the only person who can solve this conflict is an outsider. While you have to earn the Angarans’ trust, you eventually do what they could not. You destroy bases, you retrieve information, you accomplish all sorts of various missions, and eventually you defeat the Kett. You’re the hero.

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Image via BioWare

But the whole time I was playing, I felt like I was the wrong person for the job. Rather than forging a partnership with the Angarans, I felt like I was patronizing them. It’s not that my character, Ryder, is more technologically advanced or that I have unique tools that help defeat the Kett. I run into the Kett independently of the Angara and then discover that the Kett are a common foe. So the Angarans, rather than a people with their own history and culture (no matter how many NPCs you talk to), serve as little more than background to my heroism.

The Angara are further diminished when you consider that their liberation doesn’t come because I brought an army with me or because I’m technologically superior. Ryder defeats the Kett because he fell ass-backwards into merging with his A.I., SAM, which then allowed him to access the Remnant vaults. And even if you take the Remnant out of the equation, you still have every problem solved by Ryder and two companions. That’s all it takes to end a war in the Andromeda galaxy.

BioWare takes the problem even further when you find out what happened to the other Pathfinders. In the game, there are four arks—Human, Asari, Turian, and Salarian—on their way to the Andromeda galaxy. The original human, Asari, and Turian pathfinders all die, and whether or not the original Salarian pathfinder survives is based on Ryder’s actions (I chose to have her live because it would just be too weird if every single original pathfinder died). But the larger point is that the Asari, Turians, and Salrians would all be screwed if Ryder hadn’t come along to save the day.

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Image via BioWare

The game gets particularly cringeworthy on Cora’s loyalty mission to the Asari ark. Cora is a biotic who trained among the Asari and was brought up in their culture. When she reaches their ark, she proceeds to human-splain their culture and how they should behave. It would be like if Lindsay Lohan’s character in Mean Girls, who grew up in Africa, spent the entire film lecturing the black students. It’s insufferable.

Of course, Mass Effect: Andromeda can’t offend Asari, Turians, Angarans, etc. because they’re fictional species. But the message remains the same—the “other” cannot survive without our benevolence. In an “Us vs. Them” struggle, “they” can only succeed with “our” help. While the game’s climax features everyone you helped in turn coming to help you, Ryder was the one who had to make the first step, and the universe would be in disarray were it not for his/her actions.

Compare this to the original Mass Effect trilogy where you’re still human, but you’re the underdog. In the original trilogy, humanity is the new kid on the block. You’re the first human Spectre, and you have something to prove to the galaxy. All of the other species are more advanced, so your actions have weight. Even though you’re helping these species and on a mission to save the galaxy, it feels more like a team effort. Both games give you a crew of diverse species, but in the original trilogy, it felt like you were stepping into a larger world that was already happening. In Andromeda, you’re taking the lead because the game says you’re the lead. Everyone is screwed unless humanity saves the day.

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Image via BioWare

And that’s not a hero I particularly want to play. For a game based around the thrill of discovery, there’s not much to discover. In the original trilogy, the world was alive and well, so I had to learn about other culture. In Andromeda, you’ll find either one of two things—Angarans or colonists. You may stumble along the interesting criminal world of Kadara, but ultimately, anyone who isn’t Angaran or Kett is a newcomer to the galaxy. There’s been no time to build diverse or unique societies, so even though Andromeda might offer wide, open spaces, what you’ll find is painfully redundant.

Throughout the game, I kept feeling like the hero shouldn’t have been Ryder, but Jaal, an Angaran resistance fighter who comes along on your journey. I kept Jaal in my party throughout the game not because he’s a particularly great fighter (he’s fine), but because I wanted to see his world through his eyes. He had a wealth of historical and cultural experience I lacked. And yet he could never be more than a supporting character. At the end of the day, Ryder is the one making all of the decisions, and that feels insulting to the Angaran.

Mass Effect: Andromeda bends over backwards to create the notion of a benevolent colonialist. It assumes that there could be conditions where instead of subjugating an indigenous people, we could work alongside them against a common enemy. It’s a nice notion, but it doesn’t feel honest, especially when you consider who the game prizes as its true hero. What Mass Effect: Andromeda presents isn’t about the proper way to intimate first contact; the subtext is far more insidious and unsettling. It presents a world that can only be saved by outsiders. Culture and history are pleasant details, but they don’t determine anything substantial, and certainly nothing that can’t be fixed at the end of an assault rifle.

When I finished Mass Effect: Andromeda, I didn’t feel a sense of accomplishment. I didn’t feel like I had finished a great story. I just felt disappointed.