I am a long time Mass Effect fan and have been ever since it's emergence into the gaming world with the release of the first game back in 2007.
I fell completely in love with the universe, the characters, and the fresh uniqueness that the series brought. I played every game with every piece of DLC more than a few times through and made sure everything that could be done, in character to my character, had been done. I even started reading the books and the comics and spending time in the Mass Effect wikia just reading through and learning about the universe. It's simply fantastic. The first games, though not without their own flaws, are in my opinion the best Sci-Fi RPG trilogy in the gaming world to date. So, when I found out about ME:A, I fanboyed out hard and pre-ordered the deluxe edition as soon as it was possible. Then, it came.
Graphics:
This one is easy. The graphics in ME:A are simply astounding on the frostbite engine and just as they should be. There were occasional antialiasing glitches that were quickly fixed in some of the first patches, so that wasn't really that big of a deal. If you have the properly capable rig, then this game is straight up beautiful. The atmospheres, planets, creatures, everything. Hard to argue with that. Except for some of the animations for humans...
Animations: I never noticed it at first until I saw everything hitting the web on it and then started looking for it myself. Honestly, it's not quite as bad as everybody has made it out to be. There are some pretty terrible moments I'll admit, but overall, I didn't see any major stick-out-like-a-sore-thumb expression blotches that a lot of people were claiming to be seeing. I mirrored some of the exact cinematic scenes on my rig with the screenshots online and mine didn't do it. Maybe it was partly due to rig quality, idk, mine is super beefy. I know the issue is found in the animations of the game itself so they were definitely there. I just think they were clearly worse for others depending on how well their rig could render those animations. Make sense? And to be totally fair, the first games, all three of them, had some pretty bad facial animations at times. Any game that is going to focus on life-like facial expressions is going to have issues in this area unless every single expression is nitpicked like The Witcher 3 was.
Part of the reason why the animations were bad was that the upper management wanted all expressions and animations to be touched manually, while at the same time, giving this major release to a team that was honestly not large enough or experienced enough to do as much as what they were wanting them to do. They obviously did what they were told to do, but ran out of time and then EA told them to just finish with an algorithm that was obviously not polished for crap because they weren't even planning on using it. Then voila, we have what we have now. It's EA's fault and rushing of the game that caused this, not the designing team's fault. So at least we can be understanding of that.
Overall, I don't think this can really be faulted all that much because I seldom noticed the issues. I feel those that are saying it's just utterly terrible are obsessive compulsive perfectionists, who are the kinds of individuals who make small things out to be really really really really really big things. Not to mention this is a problem for nearly every single RPG game like this to some degree. This is not an Andromeda problem, it is a technical limitation problem for the most part.
Flora & Fauna: The environments were very well designed. Each planet, in terms of climate and world-type, were very well designed and there was lots of variation between them, offering you a breath of fresh air for every single planet you went to. However, the problem was the fauna (wildlife). Idk if this was intentional or not (because I couldn't bring myself to stay interested in finishing the game), but literally there was a multitude of creatures that were literally THE EXACT SAME CREATURES on every single planet that you could go to. Even though they were totally different planets, with entirely different climates and ecosystems, and entirely different everything, you saw a handful of the exact same creature on every single planet you visit. I can't remember the names of them, but a couple of them are the giant raptor things and the massive bull-like blue things that charged you. These are literally on every open world environment in the game, and it annoyed me to no end! It was honestly lazy, inattentive and careless. The wildlife on these vast open world environments was and still is extremely lacking, and the copy/past job was painful to see every single time I encountered them.
The flora suffered from the same copy/paste element, again seeing the exact same vegetation on completely and utterly different planets and climates. This literally makes no possible realistic sense, and just ruined part of the immersion for me.
Story & Character Development
The story isn't all that bad, though it is sorely lacking in filled-spaces and detail if know what I mean. It seemed to just randomly jump from here to there with no real depth and progression to it. Yes, the story is still good and there were lots of awesome moments, but it just wasn't polished as well as it should have been. Simple things that shouldn't have been missed were missed, such as "who what when where why and how", you know the basics of storytelling technique??? These elements are mostly present, but there are gaps where the story misses some of these key elements and has you sitting there like "da fuq??? What is dis?! Where you come from!" It was bad to the point where I didn't really find myself wanting to finish it. There, I said it. It wasn't awful, but it was so mediocre that it just utterly failed to grab me like the stories in the first three games did, and it was because of the simple things the writing team failed to pay attention to. All in all, the story is this big awesome idea with a lot of dead space between each progression, and it was annoying. It would almost get me to the point where I was like "yes yes yes YAAASSSSS!!" and then it just flopped like a flaccid dong, never delivering on what it spent so long building up to, and then forgetting to address or readdress things. One day I just forgot to turn the game back on and stopped playing.
Characters: The characters suffer from most of the same things that the story does. There is just missing details and immersion from what I call a "quantity over quality" complex. Yes, that is a thing, and they are different things in my professional opinion. When they put a smaller team on this game, they should have been wise enough to not bite off more than they could chew, and that's what they did. The characters had history, decent dialogue options, and I was glad they brought in the loyalty quests again, but everything was still lacking. Everything is there, it's just mediocre. Again, lacking in a lot of the "who what when where why and how" factors that complete the backbone of any stories writing foundations.
The voice acting is pretty good from what I can remember. Nothing was better or worse than what we had experienced in the previous games, so it was pretty on-par in terms of quality and immersion in this department.
Combat & Mechanics
I personally found the combat and movement mechanics better than in the previous games. It is more free, less clunky, and more fluid. In the previous games, you would be sprinting and try to turn somewhere, but your character felt like it was stuck on a railroad. Movement fluidity, options, and pretty much everything is better in this department, in my opinion, but this is one of the more subjective points. Weapons handling is better in my opinion as well and the introduction of mobility combat while on foot was a nice breath of fresh air from the world of reality where you actually can fire your weapon while strafing and jumping and whatnot.
There are lots of people who abhor the new movement and battle mechanics, but I feel like that is more of a matter of people not wanting something to change that wasn't broken. After 7 years of gaming on the same mechanics, I can understand why some people were not very enthused. Take your pick and decide for yourself.
I honestly didn't really have any issues with the combat and additional mechanics. I thought it was very well developed in this area and never had any issues. I personally liked the menu, the movement, the combat, and all that stuff. It's definitely an improvement on the first games, but just very different. So it'll probably be confusing at first for seasoned veterans of the series like myself.
Crafting System: I rather enjoyed the crafting and customization in this game and found it more thorough than in the previous games, even though there is a higher amount of pointless crap to accumulate. I had a lot of fun gathering resources, researching and unlocking blueprints for awesome equipment. Even though not much was available for your party members, they were still at least allowed alternate appearances like in the previous games so that's good.
Inquisition-like Features: I loved the features they carried over from Inquisition, an amazing game, and implemented them into this. They real-time missions you could activate that actually did some form of good for you and the outposts was pretty cool seeing. It allowed you to see your effect on the galaxy around you and not just for your team. Though this system wasn't as polished in ME:A as it was in Inquisition, I still found it useful and enjoyed using it.
Outposts: I really liked the outposts mechanic that they brought in. Though there wasn't very much major stuff in it and was acting more as a place filler, it was a step in the right direction, looking at the context of the game was to establish outposts. They kinda dropped the ball on having these as a real groundbreaking feature, but each outpost is still unique and offers a number of quests, material, and other things to help keep your game less monotonous.
Conclusion:
This review may be updated in the future, if/when I decide to finish the game, but for now I don't think I can give it higher than a 6 rating officially, and a 7 rating personally. The game had everything it needed, and a little bit too much. This caused almost everything to be watered down and lacking. As already stated earlier, this game failed to wow me as the first 3 games did, and I eventually literally just forgot to keep playing. When I did remember it, I was like "meh, very underwhelming". For Mass Effect veterans like myself who know the glory of the first games and who also know a lot of about the universe in general, this game is worth $25-$30 at the most. If you haven't played it yet but want to just give it a shot for yourself because you owe it to yourself as a fan, then wait until it's within this price range.
For newcomers looking to dive into the series fresh, some of the issues in this review won't be quite as bad for you. With a fresh slate, you might actually really like the game, not having anything to compare to in the current series.
For avid RPG players in general who have seen the goodness of games like The Witcher, Dragon Age, the original ME trilogy and more, you will still be underwhelmed by the story and character development. It's not garbage, but it's not worth the AAA title that it carries. Play at your own discretion, and just be prepared to be a little upset.
Official Rating: 6 out of 10
Personal Rating: 7 out of 10
Game is not worth more than $25-$30 so don't spend a penny more on it.