Not really. But also maybe if you can settle in to a sweet spot with it.
I pre-ordered because, like many, I'm a deranged Mass Effect fan. I took me until last year to actually beat the fucking thing. It has awful pacing and some truly uninspired quest arcs. It's filled with content presented with purpose but ultimately boil down to hamfisted fetch quests. That being said some of the quest arcs are a lot of fun, namely the loyalty mission equivalents.
It does its entire premise and concept a disservice due to being overly sterile and unambitious. It's so safe in how it desperately panders to nostalgia, even if there's moments of original, thought provoking intrigue that shine through. I wound up liking the cast well enough, but much of the game is thematically so flat and dull that you rarely feel like you're moving towards anything interesting. It's too busy being tonally erratic (SUPER SERIOUS DIRE but EVERYTHING FUNNY QUIPPY YOUNG ADVENTURE WOO) to feel grounded. And too desperate in clinging to Mass Effect tropes to be original. That being said, I found it picked up
a lot towards the very end where a lot of the more unoriginal story beats start to come into their own, and some callbacks to the trilogy are intriguing. The climax is satisfying too, in my opinion.
The open worlds are super boring to explore. There's a lot of visual worldbuilding but because the premise itself collapses under a lack of anything all that interesting it's hard to actually care about what's going on. You never feel alone or like you're exploring uncharted terrain. The planets feel already lived in and the galaxy very small. There's very little memorable about them, other than visual splendour here and there.
The combat is free and open which some people love and gives a good first impression, but to accommodate that the encounters themselves are basically like Destiny or an MMO where enemies are huge bullet sponges. The cover system is dogshit, the AI is shittier, so while it's got this open, freeform approach to the combat the actual action is super loose, squishy, and completely unsatisfying to me. There's a clunky, clumsiness to the whole thing. Driving feels really good.
I dunno. I forced myself to beat it on principle that it's Mass Effect and I
needed to finish it. I fucking hated it at first, it took me three attempts over a couple of years, but once I found a groove and dropped the difficult to make combat easier to comb through and forget I wound up enjoying it
enough. I think it's a wholly unoriginal and uninspired take on what should have been a rich, interesting premise. It somehow takes a totally new galaxy, a new frontier of mysteries, and an engine capable of rendering large open spaces and a great sense of scale, and makes it feel claustrophobic, lived in, already mined of surprises it could have had, while repackaging tropes from the trilogy (hello ancient precursor race that left behind advanced technology). It really struggles to form and anchor a strong identity of its own, and combined with production issues (technical and artistic faults) it just never settles on anything all that good.
So yeah. It's a very hard recommendation because you might walk away going "oh that wasn't great but I enjoyed it enough". Or you might feel "my expectations were already set low and I'm still disappointed".
I would classify it as a time waster that's fun while you play it but then forget afterwards.
This is true. When I finally got my groove on and was pushing through it was during a period where nothing else grabbed my attention. It was an easy way to wind down from work; come home, churn out some Mass Effect, catch ya later.
