Three Hours remaining

At least give it a try. What do you have to lose? If all you do is open your free packs and look at the characters, you will at least get some idea of how to navigate the menus which are a bit difficult to work through at first.

Because there's only 3 hours left of game time before they have to wait until the 21st?

Well....I started playing at ~9pm and finished at about 430am (There were breaks for chai and walking the dog somewhere in there).  I had to get up at 6am, so obviously, I had problems watching the clock, which is a good sign.  And I was drawn into the story enough that I was frustrated when I hit the content gate.  I also seem to feel the need to hoard my remaining 3 trial hours like they are some kind of treasure, even though I should be able to play the full game in a few days ... which is probably kind of telling about my overall opinion.


Spoiler free details:

The Ugly-

Facial animations are almost as bad as the detractors claim.  

The CC is not great, but I think all CC's are horrible.  To me, it seems pretty much in line with ME1's awful CC, only updated with new technology to give us more ways of making our toons look bad.  I thought the default heads and hairstyles were better than DAI's, but YMMV.  

The quest journal is _awful_, but not really bad enough to make the game unplayable.

I am pissed disappointed that there is no obvious way to directly compare the weapon I am holding with the one I am thinking of buying from a vendor, something even ME1 managed to do right.

The Meh-

Scanning with the omni-tool is weirdly addictive for me.  But I suspect I will come to enjoy it about as much as scanning for minerals in ME2.  

The main enemy is almost comically generic, as if the Bioware team picked a random single appearance alien race from Star Trek and dropped it in.  

The first 15 minutes or so of the game, replete with constant "uncle joke" efforts at comedy based around everyone just waking up from a 600 year sleep, kind of drags.  

The boring elevator ride has been replaced with the dramatically more exiting _tram_ ride.

The Good-

I really like the combat.  I'll probably love it once I stop hitting spacebar in an effort to enter cover, achieving precisely the opposite.  Taking cover is valuable, but softer and less overpowered than in ME2/3.  Enemies seem smart enough to try and deliberately pin you with fire while their allies flank if you linger in one spot too long.  Companions _are_ as dumb as a bunch of rocks, if rocks could snort crystal meth, but it would not be Mass Effect otherwise.

Jetpack is fun, despite above issues in combat.

Nomad is fun to drive.  People who liked the Mako or the Hammerhead seem to hate the Nomad.  But its hard to take the opinions of cavemen seriously.  Of course they prefer clubs to guns.

My sojourn in Eos (the 1st major quest area)  seemed a _lot_ less boring than The Hinterlands (DAI).  It took me several real-life days to rack up several hours in the Hinterlands.  Eos was all one sitting...with the last hour spent bouncing up and down in my chair.  I am not really left with the impression of "DAI in space" that has worried people.  

Undecided-

The story.  Probably the main reason Bioware fans are Bioware fans.  I've already admitted, I was sucked in by the time I hit the content gate.  But I'm kind of easy to please.  If you are expecting an opening as tight as ME1's, you are going to be disappointed.  But I think that's sort of an unfair standard to set.  ME1's opening is extraordinarily tight, a straightforward high-stakes adventure plot.  Within a roughly an hour, Shepard has a nemesis,  a laundry list of reasons to hate him AND the Council, and the entire Galaxy riding on her shoulders.  Andromeda's themes are obviously exploration and discovery, so the opening is going to be looser, pushing out a lot more questions than momentum.   How those questions are answered is going to determine whether the story is any good.

Having recently strayed past Marauder Shields (I usually stop there) I am not particularly optimistic on this front, but I'm willing to give Bioware a chance.  The end of Dragon Age:Inquisition was the best part.