You can kind of break Andromeda down into three portions.

Combat. This is overall the strongest part of the game, with satisfying weapons and a good movement system. If somebody picked this system up and dropped it into a game with well designed levels and enemies, I'd play the hell out of it. As it is, combat is held back from greatness by a couple factors.

Two of these are joined at the hip of bad open world design. Because Andromeda is mostly open world (see below), a lot of the fights are open world filler fights; shoot this group of dudes in this prefab building to check off this objective marker. The game is very short on memorable encounters. It's also short on good enemies to shoot; you have boring mushroom aliens, occasional bandits, a depressingly small variety of robots, and like three kinds of generic space monster. None of these are particularly enjoyable to fight, since they don't have a lot of interesting mechanics or AI, and have to present a generic level of challenge in an arbitrary environment. I like the combat in Andromeda, I just can't remember hardly any of it.

The other problem is because Andromeda is an RPG, it has to have your numbers go up, because we're all just rats in a box and seeing +50% damage makes our brains squirt happy juice. To it's credit, Andromeda has a delightful heap of space guns. To it's detriment, these guns come in strict power tiers (Space Gun I < Space Gun II < Space Gun III), and if you're fighting enemies scaled for Space Gun III with II or I, you're in for a bad time. Understand that these are not functionally different Space Guns, III just has bigger numbers than II, so it's just RPG number bloat without any interesting mechanics to interact with. So you kinda need to use the highest tier equipment that you have, which you can either get through the mercies of RNG, or by crafting. Upgrading a weapon usually requires some pretty rare resources, which means that you essentially get locked into particular guns as the game goes on. Even if you want to switch to a new type of gun, upgrading it will make it a lot harder to upgrade your current gun to the next tier.

Next up there's Exploration, which is bleh.
Andromeda is open world(s), in a clear attempt to build on the exploration bits of ME 1. In theory this is fine, heaven knows the uncharted worlds in 1 needed some iteration and maybe actual content. But they were for the most part optional; exploring planets in Andromeda is not. It's also extremely dull. You visit a variety of lifeless wasteland planets (desert, ice, another desert) to grind out fetch quests until a meter gets large enough. Then you make a choice that doesn't matter, and unlock a new pile of fetch quests. Not infrequently the main quest will be indistinguishable from the side quests. If you've played literally any game Ubisoft has produced in the last decade, you've played a more enjoyable version of this. This is because for all of the UbiFormula's myriad failings, it has one great leg up over Bioware's take at the formula: Ubisoft games contain far less

Writing. This is mostly below average, not infrequently awful, and very occasionally rises to the level of 'ok'. But being an RPG there sure is a lot of it. Every time you fall into a pleasantly mindless open world fetch quest groove where you're rumbling around murdering things and claiming their mineral rights so you can upgrade your space shotgun, you'll end up having to listen to somebody yarp on about something or another. Usually about how you need the Space Noun to Space Verb the other Space Noun to prevent the Space Adjective Space Noun from happening. What I'm saying is that it is boring, there's a lot of it, and you have to sit through it. At least in Ghost Recon the terrible writing occupies like 3% of the playtime.

There's also writing that's supposed to be about characters. In theory the Andromeda Initiative is supposed to be made up of the best and the brightest. In practice you rapidly start to suspect the whole thing was a very expensive stealth eugenics project to offload the Milky Way's stupidest and worst. Everybody is terrible at their jobs, the spectrum of personalities ranges from smug tool to smarmy tool, and any traces of likability anybody has are rubbed off from the ME1 characters they're clearly copying. This extends to Ryder, who's dialog options are generally smug tool or smarmy tool, and who's only distinguishing characteristic is having a hotline to a Magic Space Computer in their brain. Naturally, your Magic Space Computer is also annoying, and talks way too much. Again, wouldn't be a problem in a game that didn't spend so much time making you listen to the writing. Halo is basically a game about wandering around shooting things because your Magic Space Computer tells you to; but Cortana just sort of points you in the right direction and lets you rip. SAM never shuts up.


Overall Andromeda is highly mediocre. I know some people say that if it wasn't a Mass Effect game it'd be judged less harshly, but I was never particularly in love with ME in the first place, and I was still disappointed as hell. The boring story, bad writing, unlikable characters - who are all supposed to be likable and so just end up cringe-inducing) and second rate open world game design would be there no matter the IP on the box. It's simply a case of a game not being made all that well.