MEA: a Master Class on SciFi 3rd person shooters? Maybe...

There are a few tweaks and always more to be added, but this is why I consider MEA to be my favorite of the four games. Combat's biggest improvement going forward needs to be in the diversity of the enemies. Having more mini bosses and different types of combat scenarios would only further improve the gameplay. I also think they should turn the melee button into the ability to equip/holster the melee weapon just like the guns. Each melee weapon can have its own move set and combos much like the swords or hammer in Destiny.

I would not associate the term "Master Class" with any of those things. The open-class system is a gimmick. It's a counter-intuitive design that removes the concept of "classes" entirely rather than making them better. Jump jets is like yeah yeah whatever. Jumping worked fine in Halo too. Crafting was much better in Inquisition and I think Dead Space 3 did something similar to Andromeda anyway.

Either way nothing in Andromeda from a game-design standpoint felt very special to me. Never mind how unpolished the game is. It's just nothing to write home about IMO but it's decent fun overall.

Actually, I feel like saying that Andromeda is fun is a common misconception for a lot of similar games. There's a difference between saying that a game's mechanics are fun and enjoyable and a difference between saying that the game is fun overall. I think the mechanics are all pretty great. I just don't think the game itself is very fun despite it because the exploration areas aren't that interesting and the linear levels aren't super special either. What it led to for me was making the game feel stale. Honestly I felt the same with ME3. Everyone went on about how much better the combat was in 3 and I agree as far as MP goes but the singleplayer had worse encounter design.

ME2 is so underrated in the gameplay department. It felt clunkier perhaps but every level is pretty memorable because of enemy placements and obstacles. ME3's levels felt like experiments. You had a level where there's suddenly a gimmick where it "matters" whether you go to the upper floor or lower floor, then there's one where there's a giant wall of ray that pulses and you have to take cover from it and darkness segments where the characters talk a lot and the game teases a "horror" atmosphere but nothing happens, or you're stealthy and then there's no actual stealth etc.

Andromeda is kinda in the same vein as 3 I feel like. There's not a lot of consistency outside of the vaults and stock buildings on each planet but I did like a few setpieces like the Cardinal encounters but even disabling Kett strongholds kinda sucks because all you do is press switches while enemies sometimes respawn and sometimes the PS4 version can't load in the enemies properly because the area is so big that they become invisible.

I don't think the gameplay is anything special in this game but you can have some novel fun with using certain abilities, but it's more of a Garry's Mod thing where the fun is because of how it feels to control rather than being challenged and interacting with hostile NPCs.

MEA had good shooting, but poor enemy variety, lack of memorable enemies and lackluster weapons didn't allow it to be anything more than that. I found the crafting disappoiting as well, especially in late game as it start to be meaningless. The only cool thing was being able to name our weapons.

As just a shooter? The only thing I can compare it to is Titanfall/Planetside 2 in that respect, and they are both much better at being "sci-fi shooters".

Uh, it offers great possibilities for sure, but the implementation is terrible. Instead of iterating on the ME3 weapons bench so the new augmentations could be part of the modding process, they brought back inventory management, probably the least missed ME1 feature. Why doesn't researching new upgrades simply increase their respective item's level? It's not like we need multiple copies of weapons to equip them on squadmates...

And don't even get me started on 10 blueprints per item.

If it's just about the combat, then yeah. Probably. Compared to the other MEs at least.
Game still has crap balance on most weapons (ARs are pointless, most pistols too). But combat is fun, more than the trilogy.

*Don't like the stupid 3 power limitation, though. Stupid AF, just because we can switch profiles we have to be so limited in power selection? May as well create 4 "engineer profiles" to be able to play like a ME2 engineer. I still miss classes, not gonna lie.
*Ammo as consumable in campaign. Meh, don't quite like how scarce it was and how crappy it was at doing what it was suppose to be doing. Also equipping it every few shots got old real fast.
*The mobility is great (bugs aside), you felt like a robot on rails in ME2/3, here you can mover everywhere. Maybe too much actually.

As a shooter fan even looking at ME:A as a shooter I still have to say that despite combat being pretty much the highlight of the game, it still doesn't hold up all that well to other pure shooters. Looking purely at the gunplay, I would rather be playing something like DOOM over ME:A. Titanfall, Battlefield, etc. are all better at gunplay because that's all those games do.

The biggest problem they have is balance. On the lower difficulties the enemies just aren't threatening to a veteran FPS gamer and on the higher levels the overwhelming majority of guns are downright useless, which makes the whole "The game as a ton of customization" thing rather pointless to me. Most of the use I unfortunately got out of the crafting system is building weapons I would ultimately find vastly inferior to my Sweeper and just ditch after a few minutes of trying it.

The other place where customization takes a hit is with the new profile system. It took me almost an entire playthrough to max out my Adept profile so if anybody is watching Alec Ryder in the tutorial mission and thinking how awesome it would be to switch between Engineer, Soldier, Sentinel, etc. it's going to take you quite a bit of playtime to unlock that many things to the point where you can actually set that up in your profiles(unless you want to rather severely gimp your builds by not taking any passives).

After an entire playthrough where I got 100% on all planets and did every loyalty mission I could only do a few variations of Adept, and had some points in combat passives. I didn't have any more powers that I would have had in ME3, but I had a cooldown between trying to access more than 3 at a time. It's something that might become interesting after 2-3 playthroughs when I do have everything unlocked, but not in the first one.

Starting with Mass Effect 3 the franchise has become good enough to call it a competent shooter in its own right, but I wouldn't quite call the shooting master class yet.

If I had to play this game as a pure shooter I would be bored beyond tears. For a straight up shooter the level designs and enemy variety are abysmal. The open class system is done in by the 3 active skill limit which makes having access to points in all the skills at best irrelevant and at worst an actual detriment to your characters power level. Crafting weapons and armor is cool but requiring you go to the ship or a forward station to switch up limits your ability to actually use a variety of weapons during gameplay.

I do like the jump jets though, they were cool.

I agree with you OP. I judge the combat as a main factor if I enjoy a game or not, and MEA has the best combat of the series. You can craft your own weapons, pick any power you want, and fight any style you want as compared to the strict class system of ME3. I believe comparing MEA to first person games is a fallacy because MEA is a third person game. They function differently.

I haven't played the Division or Gears of War franchise, but I have played Defiance and Warframe. If I were to compare MEA to those two; I would say it is better then Defiance because of the Jump pack. It is lower then Warframe though because Warfame was built from the combat ground up. That is not to diss MEA though because it would take a lot to bear Warframe; MEA is a still an excellent third person shooter though. Try to compare its combat to that of WildStar(God bless its dead soul).

Yeah, the combat mechanics were really well done, no doubt about that.

Another thing is that I love starting new characters and building them up. But as mentioned here in the thread, it takes way too long to really be able to get some good skills and passives. So if you want to have some diversity, you could be well far into your game before you get that. I think part of the problem is that the skill points given are actually opposite of how they were in ME1. You got more skill points at lower levels and less at higher levels. I think there they need to give you bonus skill points for each level until you hit about 20. Like maybe 2 extra. Getting six skill points at level 80 feels silly. I feel like early on I could have used them much more to have more diversity than being so reliant on a few skills and guns while sinking all into my passives to get some solid use out of those skills. Early on you have nothing going for you and your weapons suck. So you can end up playing just three skills for a long time and I don't feel that captures the fun of the game. Profiles are the big boon here. I found it much more fun and useful to be able to switch to tech/infiltrator for specific circumstances then back to adept for my standard stuff. As I leveled I was biotic or engineer in my characters and as a result I didn't really get into the other. But the diversity is actually key to the story so they really should empower you to have that diversity early on. And they need to lose those cooldowns when you switch profiles because then you actually have the 12 powers and it's just a matter of switching to access them. This three power shit gets old very fast. It's what many disliked about DAI and they chose to use it here. It's a console thing and a real time thing. I get that, but that makes it a boring thing. The more powers you can use, the more diversity you have and as a result, the more fun. Tedium causes people to stop playing. Always.