Theo wrote on Aug 22, 2017, 08:43:
never played this was it really that bad? meta critic seems to be OK (criticreviews, not the public, i distrust the public as they are not paid to offer a balanced view).

It's not bad, it's just nowhere near as good as the previous ME games. (Ignoring the shitty animation issues)

There are several story missions which are excellent, and some of the companion "loyalty" missions are good as well, but everything in between is literally just mind-numbing filler shit. Imagine an Ubisoft game, only a thousand times worse.

The story itself is pretty forgettable (even if the missions are pretty good) and carries none of the gravitas or suspense of the earlier games. It throws exactly one curveball at you, the rest is utterly predictable.

And then the biggest mortal sin of an ME game, most of your companions are just terrible. Liam, Cora and Jhaal can go straight in the trash. Drack is just Wrex (he's cool, but he's just Wrex), whatsherface is bland Garrus, and at least Peebee is somewhat original. If you ignore the fact that she literally looks like every other female Asari in the game. They have exactly one model for every female Asari. I guess we shipped 10000uplets to the Andromeda Galaxy or something.

The combat is excellent, but it just can't carry the game. Once you've got some powers going and you find a working combo, you're just going to repeat that throughout the game, and since you can only carry three powers at once (technically you can carry 12, since you have four sets of three, but switching between the sets means every power goes onto a cooldown, so why bother?), it very quickly becomes rote. I played a Vanguard, very quickly became nigh-immortal, and then it was just slogging through absolutely endless hordes of mooks. (most battles were over in ~ 10 seconds, but it still got boring quickly.)

The mp is good, though. A lot of fun, imo, but whether you'd agree depends on whether you like horde mode.

All in all, I'd say that if you pick it up for 20 bucks or so, and just do the main story and companion missions, and ignore literally everything else, you'll get your money's worth out of it.

This comment was edited on Aug 22, 2017, 09:40.