Polygon gave Mass Effect Andromeda a 7.5. BioWare Montreal was dissolved three months later.
The Original Review
“Mass Effect Andromeda is a messy, uneven but ultimately worthwhile role-playing adventure.”
Let's run the numbers. Polygon's previous BioWare scores: Dragon Age: Origins, 9.5. Mass Effect 2, 9.5. Dragon Age: Inquisition, 9.5. Mass Effect Andromeda: 7.5 — a two-point drop that Polygon positioned as 'honest criticism,' but which still lands in the 'recommended' tier of any sane rubric. Meanwhile, the Metacritic user score settled at 4.7. That's a 2.8-point gap between Philip Kollar's professional assessment and the conclusions of 56,000 people who actually finished the game. The math is not mathing.
The review calls the game 'a messy, uneven but ultimately worthwhile role-playing adventure.' Worthwhile. This is the word doing all the heavy lifting. Worthwhile enough that EA announced the dissolution of BioWare Montreal three months after launch. Worthwhile enough that all planned DLC was cancelled before it shipped. Worthwhile enough that the Mass Effect franchise entered a seven-year content silence and the entire animation team became immediately available on LinkedIn. At what threshold does 'ultimately worthwhile' stop being applicable to a studio that no longer exists?
The facial animations received one paragraph of coverage — described as a 'rough patch in an otherwise competent presentation.' What followed was six months of viral memes, YouTube compilations, late-night talk show segments, and a genre-defining documentary of uncanny valley failure. 'Did they move?' entered the cultural vocabulary approximately 72 hours after this review published. The review was written inside a 10-day embargo window, from a build provided by EA's PR team, before the meme cycle had run its course. The rough patch, as it turned out, was the whole road.
Final scorecard: Polygon predicted 7.5. The market delivered 4.7 user scores, a studio closure memo dated June 2017, and a Mass Effect 4 that wasn't announced until 2020 and still has no release date. The gap between 7.5 and 4.7 is not a difference of opinion — it's a 58% variance on a 10-point scale. In any other measurable field, a 58% variance gets your methodology audited. At Polygon, it gets you a byline. The math ain't mathing.
