MEA = ME1 + DAI - worldbuilding + 100 little annoyances (may contain light spoilers)

Is this good or not? Well.... yes and no. Observations:

First, I have to say that this theme of exploration and colonization works for me. Which is nice, since I had serious problems with the dominant themes of the MET and how they were presented to us. This time, I'm ok with going along without, so far, any major criticisms. In this aspect alone, mind you.

MEA and ME1
MEA occasionally reminds me of ME1. I'm exploring, often in a vehicle so very reminiscent of the Mako, on new worlds which have their own aesthetic appeal and identity, occasionally picking up stuff, random and not so random, investigating odd structures  etc.. The mining is extremely inefficient compared to other ways to gather minerals, and I suspect we'll have fewer such worlds than I'd prefer in the end, but all in all this is really nice. The world is also almost as seamless as ME1's was, so your sense of place is mostly intact. The world, however, continues to appear small, something I've also held against the MET. Movement between locations simply doesn't matter much. Poof, you're there. I think this is inappropriate but more about that in the worldbuilding section.

MEA and DAI
MEA also occasionally reminds me of DAI. Unfortunately, the first such aspect that comes to mind is not one DAI's better parts but one of its worst: collection tasks. Exploration on planets often does unveil interesting stuff, but it also unlocks a set of collection tasks like "find these 6 broken drones" or "place scanners at these 6 locations". These are optional, but there are far too many of them, and they clutter up the journal and the maps with icons which suggest something signficant but only point at chores you'd rather be done with as fast as possible.

There are also collection tasks featuring unmarked sites placed partly in excessively hard-to-access areas, of which I managed to complete not a single one so far, since I suspect the reward in no way justifies the effort - even if it was just with a really nice view, for while the scenery has its appeal, it in no way approaches the impact of DAI's landscapes. In the emotional impact of its landscapes, MEA even stays behind ME1, even though obviously, the visuals are way more technically advanced. Also, why does simply going to specific places increase planet viability? That makes no sense. The secondary mission system where you send teams out is a straight copy of DAI's wartable mission system, as is the system of leveling up the Nexus, but with far less groundwork in lore. Such a system does not work well in an environment you do not already know, and "leveling up the Nexus" is insufficiently explained. The system works and I use it, but as opposed to DAI, it doesn't add significantly to the experience.  

Worldbuilding? Uh...what's that?
Which brings me to the worldbuilding. Which is, in my opinion, MEA's worst feature by a very big margin. Did *anyone* actually think about making the world interesting and consistent? Humanoid aliens again? With primary enemies looking like barely-masked copies of the MET's protheans/collectors and your first potential ally species taken right out of the SW universe? And of course they're also humanoid. And that's just the boring parts, don't get me started about the annoying ones. There we have this giant robotic thing we have to deactivate in a mission on a planet. It is a robot and it has, by its name, a clearly designated technical task. OK, good. It also looks like a Thresher Maw made of metallic parts with three legs added. Not really inspiring, but....OK. Then....it proceeds to roar like an angry Thresher Maw. WTF?????? Believe me, things that strike you as "just wrong" in similar ways are a regular occurence.

Here's another one: Pebee says the Milky Way was "so been there, done that. Well, not I, but someone did". Well....no. By the old Codex, the Milky Way was 97% unexplored and would've had enough unexplored space for a hundred plots like that of MEA. We all know why we are in Andromeda, and I don't have a problem with it, but characters need a plausible in-world motivation. Whoever wrote Pebee here clearly didn't have the faintest idea of what was plausible. It would've been better to omit saying anything at all. I mean, it isn't as if such motivation would be hard to conceive of, right?

And another one: I had some talk with a character I've forgotten about how they scanned the Heleus cluster from the MW. I got some very convoluted explanation about what amounted to FTL scanning with geth tech. FTL scanning was impossible under the MEU's technical paradigm but I might've gone along with it had it solved an important problem. Well....that wasn't the case at all. It solved a non-existing problem. Planets, my dear writers, as a rule don't change that much in a million years or two that their viability is affected. So if you scanned this place from two million light-years away and got, as usual, two-million-year-old information. you actually could expect the planets to be still viable when you arrived 650 years later. They did change, but that was for non-natural reasons, which is explained well enough and part of the plot. Congratulations, you compromised your world's integrity for no reason at all. Epic fail.

Should I go on? With how the skies change immediately after you do some important stuff on a planet and it immediately becomes 50% more viable? This was awful in "Total Recall" and it isn't any better here. An enforced delay of, say, a hundred more years in cryo-sleep would've added a nice SF aspect to the plot, but no, we can't have that. It must all be as everyone's living in the same city, how else could the moron players ever understand what happening? Or wasn't it the supposed player's incapability of understanding, but rather the writers? "SF writers don't have a sense of scale" is a trope supposedly widespread, but most of them, judging from the books I read, make at least a token attempt to make things plausible. MEA? Nope. Nothing at all. Not that I find this all that surprising, since apparently the only writer ever employed by Bioware for the MEU who cared about such things left in the middle of making ME2. 

And another one: has anyone thought of a plausible placement of these memory thingies we need to unlock Ryder's past? I mean, well, it's obviously completely plausible to find one on a world neither you nor your father nor the AI has ever been. If it was *my* memory, I could justify it, after all memory triggers can be odd, but it's an AI's memory that, to top it all off, was purposefully hidden from me. That makes no sense at all.

I just hope that the explanation of the Remnant retains some plausbility.

Writing and VA:
...have a disparate quality. While the main interaction scenes with major characters, while not exactly on the level of most of the MET, are done reasonably well in most cases, much of the rest is....sorry, there's no way to say this politely....uninspired, bland, generic, cheesy, campy, childish, boring, groan-worthily predictable and bare of anything that would engage you intellectually or emotionally. Among other things, I'm thoroughly sick of family stuff. As if there wasn't anything more interesting to have a conflict about in a new galaxy. As if that wasn't enough, many characters seem to read their lines from teleprompters as they appear with no sense of context. 
Having said that, while this level of writing is ubiquitous outside the main character interaction scenes, it doesn't have all that much of an impact once you're back from your first planet mission. And resigned to it. After all, ME's writing was always full of cheap drama and contrived emotion only loosely grounded in lore, with some notable exceptions that carried much of the stories alone.  

Minor annoyances:
I've already written enough for one post so I'll make this short: several aspects of the game, as a game, aren't up the standards I expect from a game that cost me 70€. Coming from TW3's and DXMD's smooth movement to MEA feels like a step 10 years back. In fact, MEA's movement reminds me of KOTOR's movement when it first came out. I replayed it last year, and it didn't feel significantly different now. It's as if they're still using the same code as then (yeah, I know that can't be). Here's a minor example: when you activate your Witcher sense in TW3, you can't climb or jump. When you activate your scanner in MEA, you also can't climb or jump. In principle, no problem at all, but there's a difference: in MEA you can't walk up steps while scanning (or at least some steps, I don't know what the conditions are), so that for instance, a 10cm step up to a platform stops you from moving, and you have to switch off the scanner and jump. That the mantle-up function is so finicky in its requirements that it's basically useless doesn't help.
Add the animations and some characters' pasty faces. I guess that's a well-known complaint by now, but it's not less significant for being "just" an aesthetic feature. There is more but I have to stop now.

The overall picture that emerges for me is a game that works overall, but at the same time, annoys me so often and so thoroughly that it has a significant impact on my enjoyment. I'm really tired of bringing TW3 in as a counterexample, but if you've played that, it is clearly recognizeable how much more thought went into TW3's smallest detail. Maybe it's a budget problem, but I'm hearing MEA cost 40 million. Where did all that go? Thinking about how you can make your character presets more ugly?