I wont deny I had fun with this game. Actually still am. I'm on my second play-through with male Ryder, my first one was with the female Ryder. Now im actually enjoying the gameplay more because I have a better idea of how things are different from the original and I'm being more flexible instead of just going full tech like the first time. Now im using a very fun combo of tech and biotics and enjoying the story even more because im not overwhelm with all of the stories thrown at me at the same time because now I have a general idea of where this is going.
So this game has a lot of good things but also for each one of this good things it has something i personally dislike and here im going to try to explain them and hopefully help you make a decision if you wanna invest money in this game.
-Gameplay: Its fun has hell if you are flexible enough and try different things. When you find 3 powers that are just fun for you, mix with you favorite guns, its gonna be a blast for sure. Ryder is not a commander like Shepard so he does not command his team mates, but he is a pathfinder so he uses tools to explore the environment and a jump pack to move around the battlefield making him or her different from Shepard. That is awesome.
At the same time some of the enemies animations during combat can take you out of the moment. For example the dinosaurs enemies, you shot the crap our of them and they look like a mine craft enemy when taking damage, they don't have a realistic reaction to your attacks.
It would help too if we get more enemies waves but they die faster instead of one group of enemies that take a Sh#t load of bullets, especially the ones with the red energy (no armor no shield). Enemies with no protection can take a massive amount of bullets in the face before going down. Felt like Destiny in that regard. I rather have more enemies wave that would die of two shots in the chest or one in the face with a couple of armored and shielded ones to make it harder than a couple of weak enemies that can take 3 or 4 headshots before dying. Note: You can blow their head of instantly with a sniper rifle. Also I'm cool with shielded or armored enemies taking more bullets before dropping dead.
It could also be like this: the weak enemies could have a shield that can take 2 or 3 bullets before going down so you can one shoot them in the face after and save your powers for stronger enemies or to help you take down a bunch of weak enemies flanking you or just to save bullets. This feels more realistic and helps the player to feel like they are there fighting a real enemy and not a bullet sponge group of foes.
Also if you shot them in the leg its not like they don't get a limp. When you go back to the trailers and advertisement for this game, they tell us how much they where pushing boundaries. But is just the same enemies that we had in previous games, you shot and bullets don't seem to affect them in a more realistic way.
-Graphics: this part is ok, its not great, its ok. The attention to detail on the armors and weapons is very nice and planets look good. Actually the armors are pretty badass, love them all. The problem is this, if you go back to the promotional material you gonna realize that the graphics had a MASSIVE downgrade. In my opinion this game was falsely advertised. They try to sell a game that looked 10 times better than this game end up looking. The first time playing I knew something was off, but didn't hit me till I looked for old trailers and gameplay footage. I remember telling my friend 5 month ago, that i wish Bioware would make an Old Republic game with Andromeda's graphics, but as i played the game I was like, damn was I crazy? But no, they advertise a different game that what we got graphic wise. Again the graphics are not bad, but this is not a new franchise, this is Mass Effect, this series has tons of fans already and past games that looked better than this one for the platforms they came for before and it deserved better than this because it looks like a new game that is not sure is gonna make it so it does not push itself to hard.
I've seen games with better graphics that take your breath away and in the old promotional vids for this game you actually feel like in the graphics are amazing, but that we saw is not what we got.
Just once, on the plant where New Tuchanka is, I said "Oh this looks nice" but i was not blown away with anything i saw visually speaking. Its funny when characters would say" wow look at that view" then when i checked the view I felt disappointed. I wanted to be blown away by Andromeda's environments but it didn't happen.
Also the Asari where space babes, now they all look the same, the same face for all of them and they are ugly as hell. Its like the Asari said "well lets make the Asari more hot by sending all the ugly ones to Andromeda and keeping the good looking ones on the Milky Way". Listen I don't care about your views on beauty or what you think is political correct, you just don't F with millennia of human evolution and the eye knowing whats hot or not and you don't trash the Asari that way! The same freaking ugly model for all of them? even the doctor on your ship! Goddamn! At least Peebee is there to save the day. She is cute at least.
Another model thing is that all animals in all the freaking planets are the same dogs, fiends and dinosaurs. How can they say they are pushing things to where we the fans have never seen before and then give us the same freaking animal in every planet? How about a spider type of creature on Havval and some snakes, some scorpion ones on eeledeen or a nasty bird creature on Kadaras badlands? Even better an unique type of alien creatures almost sentient on Eos that appear at night and is scary as hell? And yea why not a night and day circles in this game? How is this lack of imagination pushing gaming further? There is nothing in the game that hasn't been done before and at the same time things are missing that have been done before.
Hell even this few animals in the game feel like enemies on a map and nothing like an actually wild life doing their thing in the wild and you observing them and maybe engaging in combat.
-On the graphics and models topic... Sara Ryder: I went with Sara Ryder because when I first saw her on the trailers, I though she looked cool as hell and I played with male Shepherd on the past so I wanted something different, kind of an Ellen Ripley type of heroine for this new adventure. But Sara's model was treated poorly, she looks like a mix of an old and young person mix together, it looks weird and not badass at all. Even her intro, where she wakes up from cryo is different, it looks like cheap game intro. Scott looks way better than she does and I'm almost tempted to make him my main character. Hopefully she will be treated with respect in the next game. And to make myself clear I don't want her to be hot to fall in love with my own character, no, the whole purpose is that I'm my own character weather it is female or male and I want to look good like she looked on that intro trailer. I look normal in real life, I wanna look like a model in games! XD( and for those who wanna look ugly then the option should be there, but give options, don't take them away!)
--------Update: So i decided to play again with Sara Ryder, fix some of the mistakes I made on a 3rd playthrough. I decided to actually customize her character, something I've never done in mass effect game just because her default appearance looks like crap. I'm Latino, but I have a whiter tone and I wanted my Sara to have my skin tone. I can't because there is no option other than Indian and black in this game. This game is racist against white Latinos or in my case clear skin Latinos and is racist against everyone but whites. Listen you are gonna tell me that only Latinos, Indians and blacks migrated illegally to Andromeda? THATS RACIST!!! (Using your social justice against you)
-Story: I liked the story and the sense that there is a bigger mystery waiting to be discover. I like the ending and the way many question are still unanswered, opening the doors for more Mass Effect. the Main story and the loyalty mission where fun and I loved them.
Side missions can be a little boring but at the same time they make sense for what they are in the situation the characters find themselves, just that sometimes, like i said they can be a little boring and you can get so many at the same time that you can forget what are you doing and for whom. Probably it doesn't help that they feel like quest instead of missions. Maybe because of the open world structure of the game? I'm not sure but in the past side missions felt like mission of their own, now they feel like errands and on my second play through I wasn't as exited to do all of them because there was nothing to look forward really except to finding out that some of them didn't relate to the main story as i though in the past, i got some quest mix with the main story because there is no structure, they just give all the quest at the same time instead of giving you some here and there and then unlocking more as you get more reputation with the angara or the nexus.
Still there's a lot of things to do in this game, lots of secrets to uncover, caves to explore and artifact to analyze and that is awesome, It can take hours and hours of gameplay to do it all so there is a lot of value to get from you purchase.
----------Update: on my second play through I was soooo tired of this side missions, especially when they ask you to go around the galaxy map looking for clues or something. The galaxy map is tedious as hell and getting 100% exploration can be a booooring task. And even though i loved having so much content, I now wish i had less more exiting and meaningful missions with characters that had an impact in the story even though they are side characters. But this missions feel too much like quests from an MMORPG, like errands and I don;t want to do them, first time in mass effect I don;t wanna do missions!! :O
-Dialogue: for the most part was good, some cheese lines here and there, some stupid ones but for the most part is good and there are some good jokes and some popular references. But it all comes down to you either being a normal rational human being or an emotional tampon and being emotional is probably as good as you will be and you being rational being as badass as you gonna get. There is no renegade or paragon dialogue which can be good because you don't wanna feel like Shepherd but at the same time its feels like you don't really being what you want to be in the game.
-Characters: I really like this team, talking to them every time we hit the Nexus or just chilling in the Tempest help them grow on me. Then doing their loyalty mission just solidify them as individuals for me, nothing better than earning someones friendship by working for it. Their back stories are pretty cool too, not saying they are Thane or Garrus, but they are cool in their own unique way.
But characters bring me to the biggest problem of the game, the animation. There is very little animation in this game and they all belong to the Pathfinder, and most time they looked weird. The rest of the characters always have the same dead expression in their face making it hard to lose yourself in this adventure. I remember the first time I spoke to Suvi I thought she was a mentally challenge character and this is no joke, specially when she talked about faith and God I though she was high on crack, but she is very smart and a nice lady, she just look like a freak. I wonder which sick bastard would romance her.
Mix this bad animation with not so impressive graphics for a triple A game with an already establish fan base and prior games that push the bar with each entry, plus bad reaction to your attacks from some enemies and tons a bugs and glitches and you destroy the vision of whole team, that probably care a lot about this game and wanted to create something special.
I really don't know what happen to the Adromeda team and their vision but Im sure this is not what they wanted to deliver and I feel bad for them and the fact they are getting a lot of heat from many people. But the reality is people are very passionate about franchises they love and when you get false promises from trailers of what the game is gonna look like and you pay 60 dollars for it, this can happen.
Hopefully they will get their shat together and make it up to fans in the sequels to Andromeda. Because with all its flaws, I actually enjoy this game and liked the story and I'm willing to give any sequel a chance.
I've been disappointed with 3 of my favorite games series, Final fantasy with ff 15 and the incomplete story after 10 years of waiting, metal gear with MGS5PP with the crappy story and stupid plot twist and mass effect with Andromeda and its disappointing visuals and animation. But even though mass effect is broken, of those 3, Mass Effect is the only one I would pick and play again. If these game didn't have half of the bugs it has and decent animation I'm pretty sure people would have appreciated for what it is.
Again this glitches and bugs with the animation problem piss the crap out of me and destroy my immersion in the game many many times, but with all those issues Mass Effect Andromeda did work for me and if this issues I talked about get fix I have no doubt the next mass effect would be the mind blowing experience this one try to be. But if the next one fails, if there is a next one that is, then mass effect would be lost for us fans and the world.
I give this game a 6. If it had 60% less bugs and descent animation on release I would have gave it 8 because it is a good game, it just does not do anything new and promised a lot and didn't deliver. If it had 60% less bugs and superb animation both on scenes and combat, mix with variety of wild life to explore and analyze on each planet with day and night circles and graphics like in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRBlWc-ApUI or this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZwwAfO-lCg, plus meaningful and more exiting side missions, even if there where a little less side missions, for sure I would have give it a 9 because deep underneath it all, there is great potential with fun characters and a new enemy in a galaxy far far away XD.