Okay so I finally forced myself and finished the game. Reason why it took me so long was because I just lost interest in the campaign, as sad as that is. Anyways, I have 100 ish hours in the campaign. Finished almost every side quest I think, and did all but one loyalty missions (more on that later if you keep reading). So I have a pretty clear and non-rushed opinion.
If it wasn't obvious enough, expect heavy story spoilers here.I presume this is going to be a wall text so not all of you may want to read it. I'll separate the different aspects to organize this thing. Some may read one aspect and pass another.
Let's get started with
Story:Started with a good grip and then went to decay slowly after that.
The worlds are not heaven as you thought, that's fine, it's to be expected. You find some weird alien shit of a not-so-mysterious lost alien race that can fix that planet problems, oh... okay. And then is when it all starts:
Turns out there's a hostile alien species trying to get that weird alien shit for themselves because reasons. All planets in the cluster have some sort of environmental issue that conveniently enough can be easily fixed because all of those planets have also one of dem weird alien shit fixers a.k.a. "Vaults" .
You have an AI thing connected directly to your head that can practically beat the game for you and babysits you on your every step.
The premise of going into a new Galaxy where you know you're gonna have lots of issues and not bringing a military force is quite retarded actually. "We're exploring, sure bring only scout vessels, and unarmed ships and vehicles, what's the worst that could happen?" If only the vikings would have done that in antiquity, right?
The game is also filled with clichés and it really feels like a reboot of sorts as we suspected.
A hero that takes all the calls. In this case, even though s/he is not qualified because has no training whatsoever. But hey, because your dad dies in the first hour of the game you get to be the new leader. Something they spoiled in a pre-release stream btw even when they thought they didn't spoil anything (come the F on Bioware, you guys didn't even notice when you did it?!), but it doesn't matter because we all knew that was gonna happen sooner or later, right?
A hostile race/machine/thing that wants to wipe out or enslave the entire cluster/galaxy.
A lost and mysterious alien species with advanced tech that everyone wants. In this case not really mysterious because the Remnant are all over the place in every frigging world you visit. I'm surprised they don't just rule the goddamn Heleous cluster. They are literally "in your face" .
The other races from the MW using the krogan for personal benefit and then screwing them over, so they fuck off and isolate themselves from the rest being hostile to everyone. This again?
The kett as a race, what a joke. It doesn't get more stereotypical than the alien race that believes themselves superior to everyone and their mothers because reasons.
They don't give a fuck if 5 new species just showed up together from a different galaxy into the Cluster. Those 5 new species could very well have a fleet back home 50 times larger than the Kett's, a fleet so powerful that could wipe out an entire Cluster withing minutes, but nope, Kett don't care because they're convinced they're superior to everyone.
One thing is arrogance, but another is mindless arrogance. The type of shit we've seen in movies and other games and who knows where a hundred times over.
A hypothetical advanced alien species wouldn't underestimate other species unless they're damn sure they're superior. And the Kett have no way of knowing that. Our home (milky wayers) could literally be populated in every single planet, moon and asteroid for all they know, we could have a military vastly superior to theirs ready to answer the call for help back home. Because yet again, they have no way of knowing.
And the ending is kinda disappointing. The Archon just dies like a lil bitch and it all ends there with the cinematic of everyone cheering up and what not. I was in a very "you wot m8?" type of feeling.
I was expecting Ryder to be more on the lines of Saren in ME1 "shoot the muttafucka in the head a couple of times and make sure he stays dead" , and nobody mentiones anything. The Archon just threats us while we fight some remmant and "disconnect him" which immediately kills him, he doesn't say anything relevant to us. He just acts like the typical BS villain "I'll kill everyone you ever knew, muhahahaha!11"
The end is very abrupt so to say.
The story definitely had its moments though. I enjoyed parts of the story and I was genuinely interested to know who or what are the Kett, I knew they came from outside Heleous (another thing they spoiled in the stream, remember?), but wanted to know from where and why. Going into the Archon's flagship was pretty cool too imo. Gameplay has very fun moments too.
Side quests in general were a massive improvement over the mindless fetch quests from Inquisition. Most side quests in Andromeda have some sort of thought behind them, and imo they don't qualify as shitty fetch quests.
The loyalty missions were quite enjoyable too imo, and the level designs in those missions were well done (let's just not talk bugs). I liked all of them with the exception of Pebee's loyalty mission which I didn't finish simply because I didn't even like how it started.
You have to pick up remnant shit for her on the field, and it's pretty "fetch quest" like, with little purpose, and then the part that absolutely blew my mind: someone enters the Tempest goes into the escape pod and steals the robot thing from her
without anyone noticing it. Wait, WHAT?
Like, bitch, that ain't a shack on the middle of a desert, it's a fucking ship with fucking people inside. You just don't "break in" into a ship with people inside without someone noticing it. At that moment I was glad the mission went on standby because I was like "I'm not doing a step further into this mission" . Gee...
World design, Aliens and stuff:*Here's the part people may crucify me for. The world design was quite simple if you ask me.
I mean, we're on a different galaxy for christ's sake, and we got, what? 2 Sand worlds, with sand just like we have on Earth! One Frozen World, that's basically Antarctica or some shit. One tundra world that is a bit less generic imo (Kadara) and only because it has water that is not super pure like all the other water you find on this Galaxy, and a jungle world with bio-luminescent flora that is alright too.
But man, I was expecting to see weird ass shit like we saw at the beginning with floating rocks and lightning coming out of nowhere, it's a goddamn new galaxy after all! Damn they played it safe. Those are the type of worlds I may expect to see in the MW, but not on a different galaxy. I wanted they to go nuts, to do all the weird shit they could possibly think of, and instead we got a bunch of very simplistic and generic worlds.
The only one I thought it was very interesting was that moon or asteroid we got in the Turian Ark quest.
Yes, they're very open worldy (most of them at least) to a degree, and the art for those environments was pretty good (more on that later), but they were everything but alien imho.
*The 3 new races they presented to us... Oh boy where do I even start. Again, playing it as safe as they possibly can...
Remnant:
Basically robot things, we don't even know how the actual Remnant look like. Their architecture is a bit interesting though, although this whole "hexagonal pillar things" was introduced in Inquisition, they were all over the game. Seems like Bioware likes that type of structures...
Kett, Already talked about them being stereotypical, but their design is quite simplistic too, ever since we got to see them back in one of those dev video things. "Playing it safe" was never more accurate to describe them. Basically humans with a different skin.
2 eyes in the same position, mouth, nose, fucking everything just like humans. 2 arms, 2 legs. Biped creatures. And the classic 3 fingers for everything "alien" in the franchise since ME1.
Nothing really alien about them.
Angara. Same as above, but instead just add some tentacles kinda like asari and give them bigger eyes. Godd fucking dammit. What is it with the human reskins?!
They even have the same height as us...
Life doesn't evolve in a human-like way. Life is shaped by the fucking environment, you can't fucking have intelligent species that look all the same across worlds, let alone galaxies because they evolve differently depending on which planet they lived. I understand that there're some practical limitations and what not, but why making them so generic?!
Maybe some intelligent species evolved in a planet with pretty bad sun light and they have only one huge eye, and "normal" light hurts them. Maybe there's another species quite like Volus that need a toxic atmosphere to survive, because that toxic shit is what they breathe.
I always look at Star Wars for this, they added all types of weird shit, and that's totally possible. Bioware plays it way too damn safe.
ME1 added like 11 species or something including Volus and Elcor and Hanar, and they are quite different. MEA added 3 new species in which 2 are basically human ripoffs.
I mean gee, what's gonna be next? we fighting asian like and african like "aliens"? because all these "aliens" are starting to look just like humans with different skin tones.
Graphics, sound, dem animations, and the visual stuff, plus technical aspects:Graphic wise the game is pretty good for today standards I say, with some exceptions like humans looking off (a mix of weird coloration, bad animations, hair and all that). Texture resolution is great most of the time.
The details in the world are pretty good, they did this ever since Inquisition. In my review of Inquisition I said that the world had too much detail at times, every little rock and leaf and grass all over the place that made your character get stuck every so often, but it was pretty good. Here is the same quality and I think in that department they did it pretty good. Kudos to the artists for that, even when I felt the worlds weren't much alien looking.
Some effects felt washed out or overdone though, like explosions (all types: biotics, tech, regular, etc) I liked more the visual effects of biotics in ME3. More minimalist, but with a pretty strong coloration. I guess that's personal preference though. The explosions looked a bit unrealistic, same as fire.
The sound was pretty good too, especially for weapons. The attention to detail for different environments or the echo in small caves is very much appreciated.
Technical wise the game is not the most optimized thing I played (PC), has a fuckton of fps drops all over the place, one minute you're getting 140s and all of the sudden you're with 38? the fuck is that? and all in the same map and everything.
The classic "your game is gonna freeze for 4 seconds, but you can still move the camera around" a la Inquisition is here too. I wonder if that's an engine issue.
The game working wonderfully until the shooting starts in which it freezes for a fraction every time you take a shot was a common thing for me. Fucking hell of an annoyance, talk about immersion breaking.
The whole "seamless" premise is BS. First, it isn't seamless. You're still stuck on a cinematic every time you want to visit a planet or leave, there's a hidden loading every time you try to open a door in the HUBs or use the train system.
And Second, honestly I don't care about loading screens because I value stability over this false sensation of seamlessness. So don't tell me there's no loading screen when you're hiding it behind a cinematic, and that's another point:
Fucking cinematics while the game is loading. Bitch, how many times do devs have to fall for this con? You can't throw a cinematic (especially a non pre-rendered cinematic) while the game is loading a map because you're lagging the whole thing! 80% of my cinematics where lagged as fuck, because most are "live" so the game tries to do 2 things at the same time and the results are a video running at 5 fps. And that's how I ended the game btw, watching the ending cinematic at 5 fps because the stupid thing is "live" and starts right away instead of waiting for the game to load the video properly.
God fucking awful. I prefer whichever system we had in the original Trilogy.
Combat, balance, crafting:The combat is good for the most part, an improvement over previous titles. I just wish there was more variety in the encounters. Seems like it is always a long range type of combat, very like ME1. I miss ME2/3 urban combat, not only for the close quarters but also for the coolness factor of fighting on the streets and buildings of a city/hub.
The balance in SP is a thousands times better than MP, but it doesn't mean it's good. In fact is quite terrible compared to something like ME2. Guns like the Predator or Phalanx pistols are a no-no, they simply suck. I spent one entire magazine in the head of some basic kett troop with the Phalanx and the bitch didn't die, what the actual fuck. And that was on fucking normal difficulty.
A lot of guns feel alright, but I dare to say that most guns even on campaign are badly balanced. You still have to spend one mag or half a mag into someone's head to kill them, with the exception of sniper rifles. And you still drop from a couple of enemy bursts, like their weapons deal 5x damage or something.
The charge mechanic for powers is a bit underwhelming for some powers like overload. Why the hell do I have to charge it to make it useful? just fire the damn thing at full strength and be done with it. I get it about pull, because if you charge it you can genuinely use it in a different way, but for other powers it makes no sense.
I also don't like how ridiculous the damage scale is for having guns on different levels, the gun pretty much doubles its damage if you have it at lvl X, that means that at lvl I it is crap. Why we need to balance stuff this way? levels should increase other stats not vital stats like damage and magazine size, those should increase by very little or not at all. This way you keep things consistent, you know how good is a gun from the very start, it's not guesswork.
Crafting wasn't as bad as Inquisition, but honesty I don't like it. I prefer how we get our gear through the game by doing the quests instead of crafting whatever we want right from the start. I like to find the weapons and armors through missions or getting them through rewards like we did in ME2/3. I don't know if a lot of people share this feeling though.
Miscelaneous, other thoughts:*Was I the only one that didn't give a fuck about the Mako making a return? If you have flying shuttles, why the fuck would you bother driving and wasting time on the ground? It makes no sense at all to me.
*Jetpacks in your face. The entire maps made with jetpacks in mind, maps so fucking big that you wish you had a pocket SW speeder or something instead of having to spam the jetpack every 1.5 seconds to finally get to that other door half a mile away (I'm watching at you, fucking remnant vaults).
*Lack of urban exploration/combat. Kind of like I mentioned earlier, it's all about running or driving in the open, there's no quest that makes us travel through the Aya cities or something. Is not like we have no close quarter battles at all, but most of the game is too "open world" all the time, and it gets boring for the lack of detail. It's always fighting in some small ruins in the middle of fucking nowhere, which leads us to:
*Fucking encounters with rebels/hostiles on every piece of garbage on the map. Those stupid shuttles coming to drop raiders or roekkar or whatever every time we get close to anything during our travels, and they keep on and on. Not matter how many you kill, if you return a minute latter another stupid shuttle drops more. That got old real quick for me.
*Fucking SAM. Yeah, you know all about him guys. The motterfucker babysits you since the first minute and every single quest involves him. The premise of having an AI attached in our head is stupid enough (confirmed once more when the Archon fucks with our head near the endgame) without the fucker reminding us everything from turning on the scanner to washing our hands after using the bathroom. Fucking hell I never thought it would be so annoying, how they never thought of this is beyond me.
*Badly handled first contact for alien species. With the kett it was Ryder walking like an idiot with his hands up (we're talking aliens here, hands up could literally mean "I'm declaring war on you"), but I forgive this because it was a complicated situation and s/he didn't have much time to think. Another thing that shows that Ryder has no experience in anything.
The Angara contact. This was the worst.
So the guys arrive with their ship and land, the Angara instead of handcuffing everyone and their mothers just let Ryder walk through the streets without a fucking armed to the teeth escort to the rebels base. WHAT? If the Angara were so afraid of aliens because of the Kett, why the hell they acted so casual? Also, one minute and we can communicate already with 99% of perfect translation? holy cow, alien contact was easy as fuck then.
In the trilogy we technically knew all the species so there was no need for a contact. But in Andromeda they really fucked the first contact...
*Scanner mechanic being too overdone, and I saw this coming. Everything in this game involves the scanner, but the worst part is how in many occasions you have to wait until fucking SAM points out that you'll solve the problem with the scanner, because if you turn on the thing before that you wont see the power cables or whatever the fuck it is you need to see through the scanner. We've done it hundreds of times, it's obvious that we have to use the scanner, and yet you have to wait for SAM to point it out.
*If you go to the ship you immediately leave the planet. What? motherfucker maybe I just want to go to the ship because I want to talk to someone, check some stuff in my room, customize and go back, I don't want to fucking leave the planet! goddamn that was frustrating. Having to digest fucking 2 loading screens because of that garbo wasn't fun at all.
*Run like headless chicken type of quests. Goddamn, you know those quests in which they have you go on like 5 different planets to just talk to one guy in each one of them? Jesus... how annoying, couldn't that get solved in one place? How many loading screens I have to endure during a simple "talking" quest? Damn I hated those.
*Lack of detail. And by this I mean the "omni-Avenger" for cinematics (btw we complained about this ever since ME2, is it so hard to get it done?) that worked awfully inconsistent. Sometimes it was the Avenger, some other times it was the "prop" gun AX5 or something, you know, the "trailer assault riffle", and sometimes it was one of the guns you had equipped. Like the game couldn't made its mind on which gun to show in every cinematic.
Also how everyone and their mother use the blasted Avenger, even the Angara at the beginning of the game (like how the fuck they even got access to those guns, and why they use them if they're so wary about the aliens, this is especially true for the roekkar rebels that hate aliens). Turians, salarians, krogan, everyone running with the same gun. Where's the variety? is it so hard to make npcs use different guns? much more older games have been doing it for decades.
And the fact that the raider faction in game has Angara working with them. Again, Angara are supposed to dislike most aliens, and they sure as hell wont work under the leadership of some human raider.
*References to the trilogy are appreciated. I'm glad Shepard was mentioned, the reapers even, although all very secretive. Not a lot, but they mentioned something for all of us veterans. I appreciate that.
Final thoughts and verdict:
I feel like newcomers get the best out of this game because they didn't play the trilogy, they didn't know what to expect, they didn't had a standard for a Mass Effect game. Me personally, being a die hard fan of the franchise, didn't enjoy the game as much as I needed. I wont say it's terrible, but is not a great game.
I know that some people even here that had played the trilogy loved this one too, but for me MEA is missing a lot. And it lacks in lots of departments, and not only for being bugged as fuck or having bad animations.
I mentioned this lots of times during my comment: they need to stop playing it so safe and innovate with the new alien species, these species they added were generic as hell. Also the open world thing, I don't know... Open world is fine, but add in some more hubs, more quests related in hubs. The Dantius tower quest from ME2 was one of my favorites, having Illum as background.
The game was too "colonial" like ME1 (you know, small settlements on huge maps) which I get because that was the story about, but hopefully this changes for future tittles.
Oh, and for all of you who went through the epilogue (appreciate to have an epilogue Bioware, once more). Quarian DLC confirmed, right guys? And here's me waiting for Batarians [insert skeleton image here]... and people get bitchy for Quarians.
I'll pick the "okay" option in the poll, but If I had to give a number I'll give the game a 7.I as many consider ME2 the best in the franchise, simply because compared to 1 and 3 is the one that had the best "balance" between shooty and great story. I'd recommend once more Bio devs to check out ME2 and see why we always say it's the best.
I know my review was very much negative more than positive, but that's only because I don't want this to get any more longer than I need to and I mostly want to address the issues the game has. Remember, I still gave it a "7" otherwise this would be like a 5.
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Oh my fuck this was a walltext... Trump approves, I suppose.
You brought 136 hours amazing journey in my life, I met new very interesting friends, my femRyder felt in love with Liam (very сute romance! : 
) and now I start new PT with mPyder (romance with Peebee). And it will be not over...