Exodus Hands-On Preview

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.