Things you feel "Mass Effect: Andromeda" does well

I forgot a major strength: Tom Taylorson was phenomenal!

Many people would agree that this game was heavy on jokes and light-hearted banter. Tom's wry delivery of the humor really helped tone down the cheese and make it more palatable. He was also dead-on in pretty much every scene, in terms of (seemingly) capturing the writers' intentions. These VAs often read their lines with little or minimal context. It shows through when you get those lines that emphasize the wrong word, or seem "off" in tone. I can't think of any off the top of my head that Tom missed in this very lengthy game. He nailed inflection, tone and mood throughout in a very impressive way.

This game should've been the one that made him a big name among VG VAs. I hope his exceptional work was noticed by those who matter most in this regard.

I thought the combat was out of place in a ME game. It took CoD's stupid ideas about flying around the battle field, and implemented them. That's fine for CoD. This game? Sorry, you've jumped the shark one too many times.

Ya know, before it was a lowering of our expectations from a video game... Here it was raising them. So we went from a 3 to an 11 on a scale of 10. To put it in more basic terms... It was going from SR3 to SR4. SR4, while it was fun, just wasn't the same game as SR3 was. Not by far, but by enough.

Meh.

I've said my peace.

Not forcing you into Multiplayer, as ME3 did with it's galactic readiness. It was a welcome change that you could assign strike teams instead of multiplayer.

The Gameplay.
The Tempest.
Sara Ryder.
Jaal.

Visuals, movement animations and H-047c (that's a big one).

The planet I enjoyed the most, it felt the most like I was exploring another planet.

Here's to hoping Starfield will be good. Hopefully a month after they announce it, it'll drop.

Agreed. I didn't want to list everything in the OP.  I have issues with the timing and tone of some of the banter, but it contains great character-development. You get to know your crew through those conversations they have via Nomad banter. The Nomad itself is excellent. While the crew may not have hit the spot for everyone, their believable shipboard movement and interactions are way ahead of any previous ME game. Everyone seemed to have various jobs and leisure activities that moved them around Tempest. Their chats were interesting, and those chats didn't repeat.

Pre-release, I had expected/hoped for a greater inhospitable worlds to visit and explore. (Not even ME should be all terrestrial worlds.) H-047C seems to have gone over well with most players. I suspect that they'd intended to do more of this, but cut a ton of ideas/content as development progressed. I'm still waiting for a low-G spacewalk. We have jump-jets, now. It's a small step to add tiny maneuvering thrusters for a single low-G scene. It would've been cool to explore some of those vessels, satellites, etc... that we find throughout Heleus.

Story - IMO, the story is pretty average for a game... and that means it's pretty much on the same level as the OT as far as I'm concerned. The OT's story, IMO, was only average and had numerous flaws as well. It's has a very different tone than the OT's story, and I very much enjoyed that difference. After the dire atmosphere of ME3, I was absolutely ready for something lighter. While I appreciate that other people wanted something darker with a more renegade PC, I really didn't miss it at all. To those who feel "cheated" by a lack of Renegade options... well, I would have loved to have been able to play as a Shepard who was more happy-go-lucky like Ryder. Character range will always be more limited than people want.

Side quests - They had a large variety of side quests of differing intensities. Most, if not all, were relevant to the story in some way. There were too many of them overall. Ideally, I would like a shorter game (about 60 hours vs. the 100+ that we got). If they do another one this long, I would like to see either a higher percentage of main story (compulsory) missions or the longer variety of side quest missions (as opposed to a myriad of shorter sidq quests that are loosely strung together). This would result in a game that is less open-world... and that would be my preference.

Planetscapes - I really liked them. They still have a ways to go towards making them more dynamic (changing weather and day/night cycles, for example), but still an improvement nevertheless. My favorite individual planetscape though is still Lessus in ME3.

Combat - This is definitely the high point of the franchise for me. I absolutely love it. I absolutely love the jump jet and the general increased mobility of combat in this game overall. Enemies spawning could still use improvements... such as finding ways to prevent them from spawning inside rocks and walls, even though the OT had the same sorts of problems with enemy spawns. I did like that enemy spawns during missions are less predicitable than in the OT. There is enough variability, that I'm not yet able to say for sure that I'm going to get X enemies of these Y varieties at this exact point in this mission (which is something that, after only a few playthroughs of the OT, I was absolutely able to predict - to the point where I could even aim my weapon before the enemy spawned in that spot). After patching, I liked the system they used for leveling up the enemies as Ryder leveled up. It's still not an insanely difficult game at higher difficulties, and I appreciate that.

Voice Acting - Excellent in most cases. I can't think of any lines that grated on me the way FemShep's come on to Jacob does ("I just want to talk for a bit.)

Characters - I think all of them were reasonably well done and there was a great variety to them. Certainly, I did not like them all... but that just makes the game more interesting than playing a game where everyone is likeable.

Sudoku - I just know I'm going to get eye-rolling for this, but I'm putting it here anyways. For the record, I like Sudoku and I like mini-games within games, but I am also aware that some people would prefer there not be any at all. What Bioware did right is insert an easy in-game way to solve the puzzles (Remnant Decryption Keys) that was available as loot, but could also be affordably purchased throughout the game. They did a similar thing in ME1 with omni-gel, but removed that sort of "out" in ME2 and I would occasionally lose out on some credits because of a failure while hacking. In ME:A, I thought the penalty for messing up in ME:A was fair... just a few more enemies to fight that actually gave the player some XP. I just wish there was a similarly easy way to get through the various quests involving gwent in TW3.

Nomad - I really liked driving in this game and, although heavily criticized, the vast open worlds were perfect for it. I can spend hours just "dune buggying" on Elaaden or "moon buggying" on H-047c or "tobogganing" on Voeld... an the handling on each of these worlds reflects the changing in the type of material under the tires. Huge improvement over the Mako. I didn't miss the cannon, but recognize that other people got hung up on that. Their problem, IMO.

Galaxy Map - I loved the scenes moving from planet to planet and honestly don't know why people complained about it. All the ME games had those sorts of animations. In ME1, some were even longer... with the ship first leaving the dock before being shown flying through a relay. Also, we didn't have to faux fly to indicate where we wanted to go.

There's more.. but I'll leave it off here for now.

And kept the power wheel. 

Yeah, the entire world was great.  That and Habitat 7, the places where you couldn't use the Nomad.  I think they couldn't design the levels in a way where they could render fast enough to keep up with the speed of the Nomad.  I guess that's why your horse was so slow in DA:I.

But one thing they could have done was have you go into caves, or descend into subterranean caverns that might have given you a glimpse of what the planets used to look like because those areas were protected from the scourge like that cave on Habitat 7.