My review after beating the game. (Spoilers)

[neo63031]

Overall Mass Effect Andromeda is a good game, but does not do the franchise justice, especially after all the fallout from ME3's ending, this was not the game we deserved after 5 years. I will list what I liked and disliked about the game.

Liked:

Combat - very fun, fast, and smooth.

Story - Good, but flawed, a lot of interesting ideas that aren't fleshed out yet, a little derivative, dumbed down compared to the trilogy, too many loose threads.

Loyalty Missions - They were all pretty interesting with cool locations, it's a shame we couldn't revisit some of them, but they are flawed because there are too many breaks in between a squad members mission from start to finish, making it hard to follow and care about.

Graphics - Looks great on PC, but has some bugs, pop in, some planets are not very detailed and generic.

Characters - Most had the potential to be likable or believable, but some of the writing and dialogue choices hindered it a bit.

Didn't Like:

Character Creator - very limited, a huge step back for a AAA game in 2017.

S.A.M. - My god is he annoying, I don't need to hear every 3 seconds about the temperature change, and for being such a huge part of the story his voice is not very pleasant, I wish there was a choice to have female voice.

Animations - Obviously this has been covered with good reason.

Bugs - I encountered a lot of bugs, some preventing me from completing side missions, some graphical.

Cut-scenes - They are not very good at providing exposition or for shadowing, and are not very cinematic, they often end and begin abruptly with glitches and stutters.

Pacing - I feel like the main story is very short, which is probably why it has so many loose threads, too much padding and wasted time driving around on the planets when they are not very exciting, with recycled assets and no real reason to explore since they are all basically the same planet with different climates, and the hubs are no where near as cool as places like Omega or Illium.

Writing/dialogue - At first it wasn't a concern, but now after finishing the game I can understand the criticism. Some of it's very juvenile and corny, but there also just isn't a whole lot of dialogue, I feel like a lot of it was wasted on the emails you receive from your squad members. Why are they sending you emails when they're on the ship with you?

The ending - There is no real final showdown with the Archon, you get to this gorgeous interesting place, but can't explore it afterwards even though your Ark is there and it's a home now, all you can do is go back into the Ark. Huge missed opportunity unless it's going to be part of some DLC.

As you can tell there are a lot more negatives than positive, and a lot of the positives have some caveats to them. Even though I enjoyed the game I don't think I will replay it anytime soon, not until they fix the bugs and come out with some DLC to explain some of the loose threads. There is a lot of missed opportunities with this game, it was obviously rushed and needed more polish, and hopefully if there is another entry they learn from their experiments, and maybe add more elements that made the trilogy so great. I feel like this was a setup for more games, but that could be up in the air after all the negative reactions and probably less than desire sales.

 

[ChrisDaViking]

I think the game was overall good. It definitely suffered from the issues with animations and glitches. I don't remember playing a game that affected me more glitch-wise than Andromeda. That said, the patches have helped fix many of the issues. I was also disappointed with the character creator, but the next patch is addressing that too.

I've stated before that Although the combat was good and I am a big fan of the new jump jet, I am not a fan of the profiles and being restricted to just 3 powers/abilities at a time. I want my wheel back. When you have the wheel, you have access to ALL your powers/abilities and you still have to 3 quick use abilities available. So, I don't see this as anything as a step backwards, not a step forwards IMO.

I'm never a fan of being restricted in a game and don't like being restricted to just 3 abilities at a time. Here is where I will contradict myself and say that even though I don't like being restricted, I also wasn't a fan of the classes being removed and it being a free-for-all. I get that you could still kinda choose to set your abilities to fit a certain class, but it still wasn't the same. My 1st play through I wanted to play a straight Biotic Adept playthrough, but that was impossible because I maxed out every power in the Biotic class and still had tons of points to use, so I had to use them on other things.

I would have been happier if they would have given more options for each of the classes, created new abilities, included some of the abilities they left out from previous games and had each class just be more branched out as apposed to letting you choose from everything. Maybe that's just me, but that's what I think.

Another thing that kinda goes without saying is the fact that they left so many species out of the game. I mean I don't really care that much that there wasn't any Hanar or Elcor, but I really found myself missing the Quarians and the Geth (I get why they weren't there) and even the Batarians and Drell. And of course the fact that we only got 2 new species and one more implied was pretty underwhelming as well.

I think the crew and squad mates were decent. I really liked some and didn't care for others, but that's always how it goes with these games, so that's pretty par for the course. Give them more games to introduce more people and Andromeda will have a rich world of interesting characters with a few lame ones. Just like the Original Trilogy.

I think both the male and female Ryder voice actors did a great job and I enjoyed their work and I also enjoyed the way they worked a little more comedy into this title. Something it seemed they didn't really start doing until ME3.

As I've said before, it seems pretty clear that BioWare took their top franchise from their best studio and gave it to their least experienced one, and it shows. The ending wasn't the great ending it could have been, but it wasn't terrible. They've already stated that many of the "Loose ends" they left WERE done on purpose to be addressed in either DLC's or sequels. The only sad part is now those DLC's and sequels are not a sure thing.

ME: Andromeda wasn't a perfect game, and let's face it, it had an uphill battle from the beginning anyway. The original Trilogy was gonna be hard to follow. I for one can say I still enjoyed the game and I still want to see the game get those single player DLC's and it get a proper sequel.