No more hips. Prepare for dem lips.

I think they look cool as hell, and not derivative at all. People bring their own assumptions to art.

Me too... wouldn't be surprised if this "new" race is actually related to the Protheans or Turians, the design is too similar. I mean, I know, aliens have to be somewhat "familiar" looking to keep us emotionally invested, but why is it always cat, lizard or bird people?

Well I just did a Google image search on "unique alien design", and there's some pretty cool stuff!  However, since they are already on Google I guess they can't use those either...dang.

So what they need to do is watch ever sci-fi movie/tv show ever, read every sci-fi book for descriptions, look at every cover-art, go through all of Deviant Art, go through all the comics, and then come up with a design that looks NOTHING LIKE ANY OF THOSE!  Easy peasy!  Get on it and show Bioware how it's done, Man! 

I'm not sure they're tentacles. They look like a kind of head/neck frill to me. I just love those females though. They have a kind of retro sci fi look to them. The head pieces too. 

I hope we have one as a companion, i don't expect them to announce it if we do... it would be better as a surprise. Gonna be weird conversing with hostile kitty cats. 

Because it is a video game and it has limit.

Hanar, Leviathan, Elcor, Rachni and that plant thing I forget the name are good example.
These creatures are more alien-like than any other in the game yet they have almost no animation.

We are used to animate and interpret humanoid figures : Eyes, Mouth, arms, Fingers, legs etc...
I could come up with Giant Horse-Squid-Crab creatures but how could I animate them ? Creating dialogue with them if we have nothing familiar to interpret.
The Rachni and the plant thing used humanoid to communicate for that reason, it's a cheap (yet effective trick). When you want to create a race in a game you want to interact with, your choices are indeed limited or you could go for the "I look different so I don't move when I'm speaking".

It is no mystery than in any animated SF universe almost every race are humanoid and the one who are not are not present.
It is not because all the SF authors, animator or writer are lazy and does not have any imagination at all and every gamer would be way better at this that them.

Though we could see other members, extra legs, tails, wings that would not alter this.

I agree about the female ones. If any Zelda fans are here, I would say they remind me of the Zora but with less wide heads. The male are much more feline looking, though I think Jaal is intentionally unique because he is probably joining us.

The problem with Quarians is their adaptability and that might be harder to explain. We know what happens to them in Shep's time, but based on our choices, we can eliminate them all, so maybe they'll sneak some in later or in a DLC.

Must be hard puttin on high collar leather jacket with all the tentacle..things..around your neck.
But seriously I'm not "feeling" it..design feels too heavy and exaggerated in some features.

Something about the Angara reminds me of Cathar...

Still, I wonder what the Angara are like...

I'm still confused as to why you have yet to grace us with a unique and creative alien design that works as a companion in a cover-based shooter RPG.

You can't use designs on Deviant Art.  They already exist, and so that means they are no longer creative if Bioware used something similar.  Also, being a cover-based shooter is important, because those companions have to be able to behave in such a way that they can, ya know, take cover.  They also need to have similar animations so that the dev team doesn't need to spend more time creating an entirely different animation system because video game systems have a certain amount of memory (one of the reasons the "holster" animation was cut from ME3, not enough system memory) or why Evolve couldn't have been made for the previous generation (PS3 and Xbox 360 didn't have enough capacity to create enough foliage for cover for the monsters.  So you have to develop within the constraints of the system.  That's why the characters need to be bipedal of similar height and have two arms, etc.  It saves on memory for the game because they can reuse animations.  So a smoke-monster companion or one that looks like a giant lobster doesn't work because they can't take cover effectively and they don't reuse animations which is required for the game to exist on the console.  Although by your standards neither of those would be original anyway (just derivative) so those wouldn't work anyway.  But I hope you see the point.  Having creatures like the Thorian or the Hanar or the Rachni are interesting, but note that they don't move very much and are only involved in a small amount of gameplay.  The fact that this is a GAME and not an actual alternate reality means it must exist in the confines of the system and the fact that the devs only have 5 years and "x" amount of money, instead of 30 years and ALL the money.  And if you just mean that the Angoran's look too much like a twilek and not unique enough, I'm still waiting for a unique-looking alien that isn't derivative of anything we've seen in sci-fi before from you, because there have been so aliens in various media that making a completely original alien at this point would be near impossible in the constraints of the system.