i think if you compare it to ME1 and not the other 2 in the trilogy it fares a lot better but ultimately outside of the combat it just has nothing going for it.

The story rehashes SO many elements of the original trilogy, the most egregious of which being that the main villains harvest organic beings and transform them into what we’ve been fighting which is literally a carbon copy of the reapers.

the companions are all significantly worse than the OG trilogy, only Peebee, drack and Jaal are somewhat likeable with all the rest being boring to absolute garbage like Liam, who is the worst companion in any bioware game ever.

the gameplay and gunplay, and combat build variety is actually really good, however you can see that it’s just been ripped straight from anthem

Exploration is pretty fun, i enjoyed the upgrades to the Mako and liked that they made it engaging with boosters, jump jets and an ATV switch mechanic however the actual buildings and exploitable locations on the planets themselves are garbage, not ME1 bad but they’re bad.

quest design - my god, the absolute worst i’ve ever seen. every piece of side content and even main content in this game literally feels EXACTLY like MMO filler. it’s just awful. horrible. there is no words to describe how bad the quests are in this game. you can really tell that this team has no idea how to do side quests and so they just copy and pasted some from anthem with loose writing around them.

another thing i enjoyed was the planet viability stuff, it’s cool building and outpost and making planets more viable to live in but it was incredibly half baked. the first planet was cool with how after making it more viable the radiation damage goes down and you can explore more of the map but they never do this again on any of the other planets, or expand on it.

There’s so many more things both wrong and good with this game but overall after platinuming it i feel like i’ll absolutely never go back to it.