So what's the hate on Andromeda all about?

Well, it had a lot of bugs when it came out. Second reason is: It hasnt got Shepurd in it.
Those are the main reasons, and then before it was out, people were already ready to hate it, because of reason #2.

I personally love it, it is with ME1 the best of all 4 for me. 2 was ok game but not good ME game, 3 the same although a bit better than 2.

Internet hate bandwagon & youtube clickbaiters.

Andromeda does have some real design flaws. The loot and XP gameplay loops strike me as being very badly conceived.

Loot combines the pointless upgrade treadmill of ME3 with the blizzard of irrelevant garbage of ME1, and then adds annoying deconstruction/construction loops on top of this. DAI's similar system works better because shops have some utility (schematics are hard to come by), equipping the whole party makes more stuff useful, and fade-touched materials are more interesting that finding another augmentation of a type you already have. Weirdly, Anthem seems to have some of the same issues. (I'd just as soon go back to ME2)

XP has a diminishing returns problem. The dopey 3-power limit means that your character reaches her final gameplay style very early. After that it's just fiddling around with situational profiles.

And when loot and XP aren't worth chasing, designing maps with a lot of pointless kett and scavenger camps just rubs the player's face in it, constantly.

I second this, it is spot-on.

When I started Andromeda in 2017, I was not a big fan of games like The Elder Scrolls and Fallout and the play-it-safe plot did not hold my attention for long (tho I liked how Ryder is not a Shepard clone). Since leaving it behind after the "NO DLC COMING" news, I got really into Skyrim and Fallout 4. Had more than a dozen playthroughs on both games combined and started to appreciate the open-world designs.

Coming back to Andromeda while waiting for Cyberpunk 2077 after all this time, I realize that I quite like it. This game is going as far as the narrative allows to pursue an open-world future for Mass Effect. And now that I'm an older man than I was during Mass Effect 3, I find the Tempest crew quite likable. Liam Costa back then felt "1-dimension" to me~~now he's like that one colleague I enjoy working on projects with in real life.

I can't put into words how much I like Andromeda currently, whether I like it more or less than the original ME1-3 trilogy~~~I just want a sequel to this game. This new galaxy has potential. As do all the characters introduced with it.

To be perfectly honest, did it deserve a lot of the blind hate that it got? No. However, it also doesn't deserve a lot of the blind praise either. It's...a decent game. Having played through it, it's probably a $30 game really. It really should have not come out as fast as it did (even though some will say it already had far too much time to develop anyway, but all that's another story).

As Gileadan said, a lot of the 3 - 8/10 reviews are rather fair. Both extreme ends of the spectrum (for and against Andromeda) are just as bad as the other from what I've read and seen. The game has flaws. And is it a great game? No. In fact, my final rating puts it at about a 6/10 maybe even a 6.5/10. Is it worth playing? Sure, at least once; heck, maybe even twice. At least though for me, I didn't feel a need to do multiple runthroughs. You might, and if so, that's great! (I did about 4..and I felt that was good enough) In the end, these are all just opinions from strangers shouting on a message board. The main critic you need to listen to is you - what YOU thought of it.

Agreed for me it sits probably around th  esame level as ME1 though for me that's on personal taste though for me MEA just about sneaks ahead. TBH I would only compare it with ME1 if I had to compare it with the trilogy at all mainly because of the nature of the story as both start new stories within the franchise. For me I like MEA as a whole more than ME1 though again for me both deserve their place in the ME universe. For me whilst I think ME1 has the best story of all the ME games I think in terms of all other departments though I'd say the other 3 games beat it. Because for me even MEA has better gameplay better graphics and better everything else. For me the main reason why I still play ME1 is because of the story being fantastic. I still enjoy the gameplay and everything but nowhere near as much as how the other games work. In some ways I'm kind of glad it's the shortest of the 4 games as it makes getting through it easier in the end. I still enjoy ME1 so don't get m ewrong as I wouldn't be playing it still today otherwise as I started a new playthrough last night but the other games including MEA for me are superior compared with it. Right now I'm mostly focusing on the trilogy as I'm kind of using the trilogy to kill a bit of time atm until my bathroom is done as work on that is starting next week. As I know November is going t obe a bit stop start in terms of how much gaming I can get done because of that and because of this it's best to do it with games I know well. Once I'm through the trilogy again I'll probably have a crack at HZD. I may come back after HZD to play Andromeda again then but we'll see.

Thats how I and many friends in Gaming Industry are doing it these days, the reviews are just ridicilous mostly, although a bit better now again...

I agree with you both.

I started replaying it for the first time since its release in 2017. If I take a step back and view it as its own thing rather than a legit ME game, I find myself appreciating it more.

Having said that, I get burnt out pretty quickly with all of the backtracking and open-world grind. Had BioWare cut that shit out and stuck to the original linear formula, I feel the game wouldn't have copped so much hate. They clearly didn't listen to the audience who condemned Inquisition for its open world grind-overkill.

The other issue is the characters and plot aren't nearly as thrilling as the OT. The whole Kett/Angara scenario is recycled from the ME2 plot, making it stale and unoriginal.

Add to that, character creation was pretty poor and roleplaying/choices for said character was poor, and it boggles my mind as to why BioWare would lack in that department when much of its audience plays their games for this reason.

Other than that, it's your typical open world game (there's a lot of those these days) with cutscenes and dialogue. It's thankful that the combat is fun, and smooth as oppose to the clunkiness of ME1, for example. Cruising around in the Nomad can be fun as well, it's just a shame that there's so many empty "fetch quests" and "tasks". And yes, I'm well aware that they are optional. However, the main storyline and companion quests involve a lot of backtracking to planets which is kinda unavoidable.

Well, thank you


As for the open world grind/exploration debate, I can really can see both sides of this argument. However, I think it does work in favor of Andromeda, because it is what we're meant to do. That was one of the biggest issues I had with Inquisition - I just got tired of exploring ever little area on the map just to gain resource power and XP, which got annoying.

The combat system did work for Andromeda as well. Some of the enemies were a bit...fluffed....in my opinion and I don't think I was a fan of the profile system. It has potential I think, and Bioware gets an "A" for trying something different for certain. But overall, I really wasn't buying into it. For me, at least, the game just felt like it was missing....something. I don't know what, and I can't put my finger on it, but it was just lacking something that really wasn't making it click with me.

Despite that all being said, I still stand by in my saying this is still a game worth playing. If you're a fan of the series, it's worth playing at least a couple times. And yes, I tend to disregard both ends of the spectrum with Andromeda - the ones who's posts just seem to boil down to "NO U!" type arguing. 

My original closing line (See above) I often point to when FF VIII came out. Everyone (and I do mean EVERYONE) in my circle of friends that played it, felt I was insane for saying it was a garbage Final Fantasy game. The constant praise, the rave reviews, the talk about Squall and Rinoa, and blah, blah, blah! The game just...fell flat for me. And just really lacked what I felt made Final Fantasy what it was. FF IX seemed bring it all back, and my friends had to force me to play it, because I swore off Final Fantasy after VIII. So yeah, you can listen to reviews, you can listen to your friends and hear what they think. But in the end, play it for yourself and draw your own conclusions. Too many these days when talking about Mass Effect seem to forget that we're ALL fans of the series and just want to see it be successful.

Don't ever forget that everyone - we may disagree on the games of the series, of which one was better or what we'd like to see going forward. But at our core, we're all fans of this franchise. A passionate group of people that just want to see this continue. Sorry for the rant or the soapboxing...just...sometimes it's gotta come out.