Exodus, the new game being led by BioWare veteran James Ohlen, finally reveals some gameplay, and boy it sure looks like Mass Effect

pcgamer.com:

Exodus didn't do much for me when it was first revealed at the 2023 Game Awards, but my interest in it started to grow after Matthew McConaughey began dropping daily Exodus trailers like some kind of deep space David Attenborough. Today we got our first look at some actual Exodus gameplay, and I hate to say it but I'm back to feeling rather ambivalent about the whole thing, which to my eye looks like nothing so much as an alt-universe Mass Effect.

To be fair, you can't take away too much from any individual trailer: They're tiny slices of hours-long games intended to generate hype above all else. But there's just so much going on here that so closely echoes Mass Effect, right down to the glowing neon space-magic stab-glove. You can call it «celestial tech» all you want, but come on, that's an Omni-Blade.

Even the very brief bits of dialog leave me cold. There's a snappiness to it that reminds me of Fraser Brown's thoughts on how Dragon Age: The Veilguard has «become BioWare's Avengers,» taking conversational cues from a Marvel formula that's grown awfully close to wearing out its welcome. «Loaded weapon is a hell of a way to greet your new partner,» our hero quips, before the grizzled veteran throws out—presumably after everyone's figured out that it's all just a big misunderstanding—«Now that we're all best friends, let's make each other rich.»

I, along with pretty much everyone else at PC Gamer, also have questions about why we're fighting the bear. «The space bear should be this game's Wrex,» news writer Lincoln Carpenter opined, and he's absolutely correct. But I also think there's a better-than-good chance that the space bear is this game's Wrex, and much like the earlier «loaded weapon» encounter, this whole fight proves to be a misunderstanding in which space hero and space bear grudgingly earn each other's respect and become rock-solid partners in countless future adventures. Or maybe there's another space bear. Either way, if there's one thing we learned