At release it was loaded with laughable bugs and plagued with bad paid content practice, most of it being the result of a long and troubled development. A few months before getting into it i had read Blood Sweat and Pixel, which dedicated an entire chapter of the book to Andromeda and its development woes (great read, highly recommended) so i had some previous insight of “issues”..

Having played the entire trilogy with female Shepard i of course straight away picked Sarah Ryder and.. she’s no Femshep. Yes the bugs were fixed, but the uncanny valley of stupid facial expressions makes it incredibly difficult to follow along a serious story and develop any kind of feelings towards the main protagonist. By the end of ME3 it was a culmination of memories and emotions, i had lived something with Shepard. With Ryder I rolled my eyes every time she showed up in a cut scene (come to think of it i should have enabled the ‘Helmet on’ option for cutscenes..).

In a similar fashion, the crew was my no1 appeal for the original trilogy. I my opinion the crew members and their side mission is why Mass Effect (2 in particular) is so great. I.. eerrr.. i dunno who my crew is in Andromeda. Even the Tempest feels like a cheap knockoff the Normandy. All of this mainly due to the fact that the main story doesn’t make a ton of sence, i still don’t really know why they have left the milky way. It’s a new galaxy but nothing feels different, the same relationships, hatreds, and connections still apply exactly the same way as the original trilogy. Being so far away (and in the future) it doesn’t make a ton of sense to still have the whole Salarian vs Krogan argument just be the main plot. Not to mention that everyone seems totally cool being the invaders in a brand new galaxy..
There’s a new species, the Angara, who unfortunately feel a bit “token ethnic” all the way down to the accent.. However were there be sequels (lol) i’d be interested i discovering more about them, and i quite liked Jaal.
The one positive about the crew i definitely have, is the Nomad 😀 In Mass Effect 1 it was so tedious, but they finally made terrestrial transportation quite fun in Andromeda, nice!

Then there’s the gameplay, i won’t brush over the much Multiplayer since didn’t try much of it, however worth pointing how dishonest and sneaky they’ve hid multiplayer missions. Going through basic inventory management in the Tempest i once saw myself leaving my single player game to be dropped into a multiplayer mode (not via the main menu but during the story campaign!). I did not want nor ask for this.. c’mon EA, this is Mass Effect: i do not give a shit about multiplayer, sure have it on the side but don’t force me into it. Dick move yo.
The combat is quite fine, it’s snappy and follows in the path of ME3 cover shooter mechanics. The jet pack is very fun i’ll admit. But then there’s the RPG elements. I’m sad to say after a while i just ended up auto leveling my characters… and just the fact that an RPG gives you the option to “auto level up” should tell you there’s something wrong in the first place. This whole being a “jack of all trades” thing is fine of paper but in the end i just ended up being nothing at all and not caring about where i allocated my skill points.
Then… there’s this crafting system thing. You collect random materials, then you craft blueprints then you build gear. urgh, This was just so complicated and messy i gave up on it very early, maybe it’s due to to the UI being confusing, or maybe it’s the actual concept i dunno.. but it was not fun. It’s all very tedious and meaningless.

I wanted to like this, and i did in parts. Taking time to converse with my crew in the Normandy, eer.. sorry, Tempest, felt very reminiscent of my hours with Commander Shepard. It’s a tough legacy to follow, and maybe it is unfair to compare a fresh new start with it’s previous legacy, and i would be ok if it were a good fresh new start. Unfortunately, even taking the ‘mass effect’ away from Andromeda i didn’t think it was a great experience.

Conclusion: TL;DR:
Is this a decent sci-fi space opera with light RPG elements? Yes, it has good pew-pew.
Is this a good Mass Effect game? No, it is not.

not bad not good…
its not like the trilogy at all but still enjoyable

I’ll caveat this review by saying (1) I was already a fan of the Mass Effect series before I played this, (2) I heavily prefer rich, story-driven games generally, and (3) I played this for the first time a year after release (i.e. when a lot of the bugs that plagued the initial release and invoked so much early criticism were patched) after picking it up on sale on Origin for around $12.

Caveat out of the way, I really liked this game and thought it was a good entry to the Mass Effect IP, and a great game overall. I would recommend that any gamer than enjoys a good story-driven action game ignore the internet rage and play it, and I think the game landscape today could benefit from more games like it (at least the patched, year-after version I played).

Mechanics
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Over the course of ~55 hours of gameplay, I only encountered 2-3 instances of egregious facial animation weirdness, and never encountered squadmates/enemies freezing or flickering across the screen.

The combat is superior to all previous Mass Effect games, the explorable environments were gorgeous and larger in scope than previous ME games, the voice-acting of the main cast is great, and driving the Nomad around was perfectly fine (in controlled doses of course, since when is roaming across open, barren landscapes for extended periods of time ever really that fun).

I’ve heard criticisms of the crafting/inventory system, and I would say they are warranted, but that since I personally weight such things on the low side, I didn’t find that it significantly impeded my enjoyment of the game. Regarding crafting, it’s more elaborate than it needs to be (3 different types of research points? Weapons need research _and_ development? There are augmentations _and_ mods?) and more of a tutorial would have been appreciated, but I didn’t find that I needed to dive deep into crafting to be able to play the combat effectively/enjoyably. Both crafting/inventory suffer from some odd controls (I’ve never been so prone to mis-selecting things in a game), but nothing insurmountable. The inventory can also feel like a lot to sift through, and there weren’t great options for categorizing/filtering.

Characters
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I would say the characters are on-par with or slightly lower than ME1 but don’t hold a candle to ME2. That being said, I still find that to be a pretty high bar, especially considering how underwhelming character development is in games generally.

I definitely found myself attached, and while I had criticisms of some characters’ tendencies, I don’t think it’s due to bad writing (at least, not all the time), but rather due to the fact that I personally prefer some behaviors to others. As with ME2, you’ll get a loyalty mission per character, and I also enjoyed the small just-go-and-chat-with-them missions scattered for each character throughout the story. Wandering the Tempest and hearing ambient conversations, receiving emails, reading the Tempest crew info board, or mixing up pairings on outings and listening to conversations in the Nomad was also interesting and fleshed out the individual characters and their chemistries.

I did find myself annoyed by the way romances were locked-in – there’s no confrontational moment as in e.g. ME2 but rather once you lock in a romance, all other romantic interests’ flirting options just disappear. That I did find annoying and indicative of lazy writing. So, player beware.

Story
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It’s decent. The main storyline will feel derivative, but I still found it enjoyable and (not to sound like a broken record) vastly superior to the majority of games out there. Even the secondary quests (e.g. searching around for the lost arks, activating planets’ vaults) felt impactful to me, which for me translated to their being enjoyable.

That being said, there will be a number of loose threads by the time you finish. I found myself placated with how the game chose to end, though not really satisfied. Being prone to consuming expansive fantasy/sci-fi media myself, I’ve become somewhat accustomed to this sort of open ending that leaves room for further development in subsequent installments, so I probably don’t share the rest of the Internet’s rage about it.

I am usually a heavy critic of everything that I know, also Mass Effect isn’t exactly my favourite series, however Sheppard’s trilogy was good enough to make me keep playing it. The story was good, characters were pleasant and even the ME3 ending wasn’t that bad IMO.

Andromeda, on the other hand, is really bad, the combat system is good, exploration is good up to a point because it gets repetitive, but we know a game can’t rely only on that, plot wise the story doesn’t surprise, sometimes it is even “meh…”, squad mates are uninteresting and some times annoying, the best one is Nomad because it doesn’t talk idiocies and can help you get to places.

Andromeda won’t be further updated, so don’t expect DLC or nothing of the sort, not that the ME series was known for its great DLC content , but they have given up on Andromeda, which is a bad thing, the game had potential, but it went down the drain.

the fighting & exploration is diffidently better than the trilogy, but story/characters/conversation is not as engaging as i expect from a bioware game.
it was fun , but not that great.