Mass Effect: Andromeda is a great project by BioWare, and it is a stunning experience. Amazing narrative and plot, a true feeling of exploration and a very dynamic combat system. Even though its animations may not be the best, this game offers hours and hours of action and entertainment.

Mass Effect: Andromeda is an enormous game that will keep the player engaged for tons of hours of gameplay. The combat system is probably the best thing about the entire project: it's fast and rewarding. Sadly it has a bunch of flaws starting from the animation department to the big landscapes full of secondary, boring quests. And above all it lacks the epic tone of the previous installments.

Enough of the classic Mass Effect, with enough new mechanics to keep the game fresh. [Hollingworth; Issue#261, p.55]

Mass Effect: Andromeda manages to feel both overloaded with content and spread too thin. There are great battles to be won, puzzles to solve, and satisfying social interactions, but they're hidden behind layers of presentation problems and tedious travel times.

Seven out of ten, barely. In the genre of narrative sandbox are now many better fresh games and I have no choice but to ask – has BioWare lost good writers, or does it hope that the players will simply be satisfied with a silly story and uninteresting characters, accompanied by a good combat system? For me, both options are quite sad.

Andromeda is robust and delivers effectively on the key elements it advertises, and then goes above and beyond regarding play style tailoring and experienceable customization. That said, the characters look more at home in the Sims 3 era, and the dialog fails to be more than lackluster - cringe-worthy at times. Nevertheless, while Mass Effect: Andromeda proves a quality example of its genres, diehard fans of the Mass Effect universe and its original story should wait until BioWare patches the technical bugs, and the price point lowers.

BioWare has often shown more willingness than most triple-A developers to respond to community criticisms and they’re already pushing patches to rectify Andromeda’s many issues, so I’m not pronouncing the Mass Effect series dead just yet. But speaking as someone who owns multiple pieces of N7 apparel and has read the Mass Effect books – the freaking books – I hate Andromeda. Maybe this is karmic balance for all of the recent big-name releases that have actually lived up to my expectations, but it’s been a long time since a game left me feeling as deflated as this one.