Please note that these thoughts are after about 9 hours of game play, after completing the main story mission on the first planet.
Lets address the elephant in the room. The faces and the animations. I'm playing a female Ryder, I customized the face hoping to avoid some of the obvious problems by making her major features smaller (eyes, nose, mouth) and I'm sad to say it didn't help. Her face looked pretty good in the character customization screen but in the game her face just looks horrible. For some reason in some cut scenes her skin just seems a bit loose, so my young Ryder seems like she's 80.
The animation of the main character is pretty jankie at times and there are animation of secondary characters that are pretty bad. Personally I haven't run in to any of the hilarious animation bugs one can find on the internet but had some moments that where noticeable.
That being said I don't think it's nearly as bad as the internet might want you to think. In no way am i saying that the quality is good or that the problems it has are acceptable; but these bugs and problems (at least for me) don't really effect the fun I'm having with the game.
Writing and VO
The overall quality of the writing is mostly on par with that of the trilogy. The biggest problem is that in the moments when it is not up to par with the original trilogy. These moments are extremely bad. So bad in fact it takes you right out of the game to find the nearest wall and start slamming your head in to it. Small gems like: "My face is tired." or when asking a doctor how a person died him responding: "Like a hero!".
The same applies to the voice acting most of it is quite good, once again on par with the trilogy, but the moments when its not are horrible. Stuff like some characters having an annoying lisp that has no reason for being there.
Overall the characters do seem a bit less interesting than there counterparts in previous games. Though this might just be dew to a slow start and I may come to find them more interesting as the game progresses. This is also a bit hard to judge as the comparison of characters we just met in Mass Effect Andromeda to characters we've spent 3 games getting to know is unfair.
Game play
Why does every game have to open world (or to be fair semi open world)? Here's a good thing to remember for every game studio: open world does not make everything better! In fact in some cases it feels forced and has a negative effect on the game.
I should note that I'm a very story oriented player. Mass Effect games where, traditionally, story oriented shooters which made them extremely appealing to me.
By its nature open world dilutes story by at the very least stretching it out. From what I've seen so far the world on the first planet is pretty well designed, not making you go off the beaten path to much. This does not lessen the feeling that the story is spread to thin.
After getting my Nomad (the 6 wheel drive rover you get) I started exploring a bit and hit my first problem. The game hadn't yet told me that you can change the way your rover drives on the fly. There are 2 modes: 6 wheel drive is meant to get you up slopes but is pretty slow, ATV mode is meant for flatter terrain and it has increased speed. It took me a while to figure this out on my own. This made my first few minutes of exploring slow and painful. After figuring it out I forgot the problem ever came up... Until about 15 minutes later when the game decided its time to explain this function to me. At that point I just wanted to punch who ever decided the timing of that tip.
Glossing over this initial hurdle the rover is very fun to use and the mechanic of switching modes adds a lot to the experience. Driving the Nomad is orders of magnitude better than the driving of the Mako from Mass Effect 1. The one thing I miss from the Mako are the weapons, though I understand why they aren't there and why adding them would possibly lessen the experience.
I sort of miss the sticky cover form ME 2 and 3 but I'm reasonably sure that given more time with the new system it will grow on me.
Bearing in mind that I've only used 2 assault rifles so far I did like both of them. The fact that they where drastically different from each other was great. I hope this variety will continue with all weapons I will use later on in the game.
Your character does feel a lot more mobile compared to previous games in the series. For me right now this isn't a particularly good reason for praise because as I said I enjoyed the less mobile, sticky cover system from the previous games. That being said I do realize how others may find this new system to be a big improvement.
The pacing of the action in the game seems spot on, at least on the first planet. Character skill progression is also well paced. The first few levels of new skills might seem a bit underwhelming but the awesome level ramps up quickly as you put more points in to them.
Conclusion
It is true that this game has a lot of problems a game of its caliber simply should not have, in no way do these problems make it a bad game.
The overall feeling I have right now is that the game is a bit to ambitious for its own good. For example I would have been ok with a lot less dialogue that has better writing and voice acting. Though I'm not sure if this feeling is caused by a developer trying to do to much because of ambition or by a focus on quantity over quality. (Some would say that the two things are the same thing, i disagree.)
While there is a lot of room for improvement; some of which I hope will be filled soon in the form of patches; I am sure that it will provide me with an enjoyable and worthwhile experience.
PS: The following would deserve there own articles on there own:
I'd like to address the point that the game was mostly developed by what is basically the B team at Bioware. This point in my honest opinion is irrelevant. Yes it does serve as an explanation for the issues but it does NOT serve as an excuse. As a consumer I'm not spending my money on a Bioware game to give a break to less experienced team. I couldn't care less about the inner workings of Bioware, they should have done a better job at polishing this game.
Another point that should be addressed is the horrible download speed I had with Origin. To be honest I'm not sure if others had the same issue but I have a 1 Gb pipe and my download speed was barley at 300 kB/s while Steam downloads (and downloads from other sources) frequently exceed 10 MB/s without any issue. I find this to be unacceptable from a platform such as Origin. (I should say that I made sure that it wasn't a problem with my connection.)
EA and Origin do how ever get major points for allowing its users to circumvent regional release dates using a VPN service without any repercussions. This is a sound policy for the times we live in. It should be adopted by any digital distribution platform that cares for its users.