by SlightlyJames » Mar 28, '17, 9:51 pm
I'm fairly early in the game, what I've felt seems to be consistent with what the people I've spoken to are experiencing.
The facial animations definitely do take you out of the game a bit, and there is some baffling writing, like the infamous "my face hurts" line. That stuff would bother me more if I felt like it was distracting me from anything particularly worthwhile but I honestly feel like the biggest crime this story commits is being boring. At least at the time of this writing I've yet to find any hook to get me invested in what's going on, compared to the original Mass Effect which drew me in immediately.
From a gameplay point of view I'm torn. The actual combat I feel is better than all of the previous games. Things like the jetpack add some really nice mobility to fights and let you turn situations on their head at times where normally it would just be waiting for an enemy to pop out. The weapons have a nice feel to them, more bang bang than pew pew. Nice sound design there. I like the feel of the biotic powers, in particular the shield where you hold the button down and deflect bullets where you're aiming. The pull/throw combo makes me feel like I'm playing The Force Unleashed and that's pretty sweet too.
That said, as fond as I am of the gameplay I feel the game itself suffers from the "exploration" emphasis. In theory exploration is great but the way that actually materialised as far as I can see is they just took the combat areas and spaced them out so you had to do a tedious driving section to get between them. It's a design mindset that I feel needs to go away, emphasis on map size is atrocious because more often than not it means being bare of content.
It feels pretty disappointing that in a Mass Effect game the story and characters are the part I have no time for but that's the situation at the moment. I'm enjoying the combat and I look forward to getting into more of that but pretty much everything in between needs a lot of work. This game isn't as bad as people have claimed, but it is by no means a good game by Mass Effect standards.