There was probably never going to be a world where I played Exodus and didn't think about Mass Effect. Archetype Entertainment has plenty of BioWare history behind it, and the similarities between the two games aren't exactly difficult to spot once you have a controller in your hands. Combat feels familiar almost immediately, especially once you start issuing commands to your companions, and the dialogue system regularly brought me back to choosing how I wanted Shepard to respond during a conversation. But even though Exodus plays an awful lot like Mass Effect, I was surprised by how quickly it stopped feeling like I was simply playing another version of it. There is something different about the way Exodus feels in its atmosphere, design, and the execution of some of its best ideas, and after a little over an hour with the game, that ended up being one of the things I liked most about it.
I recently attended a preview event in Austin with Archetype Entertainment and Wizards of the Coast, where I got to spend a little over an hour playing Exodus. The preview focused on Khonsu, an orbital platform above Jun Aslan's homeworld of Lidon that is maintained by an Awakened species called the Kay, which are basically giant talking frogs. Gideon Aslan has taken control of Khonsu and enslaved the Kay, so Jun and his companions head there hoping to remove Gideon's forces and give the Kay their home back. Things naturally become much more complicated from there, and without giving too much away, the mission eventually presented me with a choice about what should happen to the Kay once they were free. I actually had to sit there for a second and think about what I wanted to do, which is a pretty good example of why I came away from my time with Exodus considerably more excited about it than I already was.
First of all, Exodus looks incredible. We have obviously seen plenty of the game by this point, but actually playing it made me appreciate the amount of environmental detail here much more than merely watching one of its trailers ever could. Khonsu feels like an actual sci-fi space station, and I regularly found myself slowing down because there was so much happening in the environment. Some games can look great while still making their worlds feel a bit too gamey once you actually start interacting with them, but I never really had that problem here. This felt like an actual place I was getting to visit for the first time. Effectively, it transported me.
The animations were just as impressive throughout what I played, especially during conversations where I could get a much closer look at the characters. Voice acting helps tremendously as well, because every actor I heard delivered well. Obviously, I only heard a very small portion of what is probably going to be a dialogue-heavy RPG, but I never had a performance pull me out of what was happening. If I'm going to spend dozens of hours listening to these characters talk, that's something I need the game to get right, and nothing I heard during the preview made me worried about it.
What surprised me more was the overall atmosphere. Exodus still has the kind of large-scale sci-fi presentation I expected, but something about its world felt heavier to me. Khonsu wasn't just dark in a literal sense. There was something about being surrounded by all this ancient technology that made humanity feel small, and I never got the impression that Jun or anyone around him completely understood everything they were dealing with. The future doesn't feel comfortable or particularly safe, even when you have some pretty ridiculous technology at your disposal.
Khonsu feels like an actual sci-fi space station, and I regularly found myself slowing down because there was so much happening in the environment.
That's where Exodus separates itself from Mass Effect the most. The gameplay similarities are obvious, but the tone felt different almost immediately. There's something more grounded about the world even though almost everything happening in it is pure science fiction. I don't necessarily mean realistic, because, mind you, I was literally having conversations with giant frogs, but Khonsu felt like nothing I would have encountered in Mass Effect. Starfield, maybe—but not Mass Effect.
The situation on Khonsu gets more interesting the more I learned about the Kay, especially because the mission isn't simply about killing Gideon's forces and moving on. The Kay are the ones who know how to keep Khonsu functioning, and their future becomes part of the problem Jun has to solve. By the end of the preview, the question wasn't just whether I could free them. Instead, I had to decide what freedom was actually going to look like once someone else stepped in and offered to protect them.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://gamerant.com/exodus-hands-on-preview-mass-effect-differences/
