So, yeah - I bought Mass Effect: Andromeda (PC) during the $20 Origin sale. I'm now some 19 hours into this - 10 hours from the PC demo/trial (when they launched it in Mid-July); and approx. another 9 hours from just yesterday & today.
I'm enjoying this quite a lot actually, so far.
It feels like the story & characters lack depth and personality here. More so than anything, it feels like many characters are just....straight-forward in their style, words, language, and all of that stuff. It's not terrible, mind you - but it's all just doing enough to keep the player invested in doing the next quest & exploring the open-world...which is similar to actually how a lot of open-world games including Skyrim, do this kind of game. Dialogue isn't great, but it ain't terrible either; it's certainly often better than often what Bethesda puts together for dialogue & voice-acting. Sure, it can be spotty, once in a while - whether it's the voice-acting, or writing of the dialogue, or both - but it ain't terrible, for the most part.
Just like DA:I, when you hit a big huge open-area/open-world/open-planet - you can just get really addicted to doing quests, whether side or main; especially side stuff. A lot of the side-quests on the planets (not hubs) have to do w/ the overall building of the game-world & gathering resources from it (since you're a Pathfinder and trying to colonize planets). They feel really connected to your job, as Pathfinder - and often, I seem to be doing these. They might be resource grabbing or fetch quests, but they're actually connected to your Pathfinder role.
That's, of course, not talking about other Loyalty side-quests and other side-quests that have to do w/ doing other things - whether short fetch quests, morality quests, quests w/ their own short story, and/or things of that sort.
Combat's great, for the most part. You will be constantly zipping in and out of cover or forced to move out of cover, as they will flank you out of it if you sit there in cover too long. You have a jet-pack, so you can use that to zip in all kinds of directions. You can place your teammates to move to certain spots that you're aiming at (like ME1+2+3) - but there's no BioWare Strategic Pause (unlike ME1+2+3). Without this BW Pause, you can't tell them to use their skills and have them do combos along with you to have a synergy of attacks & skills going - so that part kind of stinks. Though, you'll likely be more invested in what you're doing in combat than what they're doing anyways, unless they get knocked-down. Then, if they go down, you'll have to get them back up.
Regardless, so far...really digging Mass Effect: Andromeda, despite my issues with both its lack of story & character depth and personality.
