I played it to the end, because I kept hoping the story would be as good as the original series. But the story is, at best, mediocre.
There are occasional good things about this game: the buffy-esque dialogue options for Sara Ryder, the ... occasional landscape. Sorry, I got nothing.
There are many bad things about this game.
Let's start with the cohesion of it all. There are some interesting moments where they try to give interesting background to the (only) native Andromedian species, e.g. how different their physiology is to humans, how medicines are not needed because they get energy from sunlight or medicinal lamps. Then step outside to be handed a mission about taking some of their antibiotics to a colony. This lack of cohesive storytelling shows up again and again.
Talking of cohesion, how about consistency of basic game mechanics. I can find a planet MADE OF IRON and find a "huge mineral deposit" there and mine it, once, for 50kg of Iron. Or, in the middle of combat I can just press Y near an iron deposit and maybe pick up 100kg of Iron, right there, without even putting my gun down. And I can carry as much armour, guns and rockets as I like, but if I dare try to equip TWO of them then all of a sudden my carry weight is too high for fast reloads. The inventory / mining game is soooo broken it should just be removed.
Then there is the lack of content. The game plays out across 4 major planets, where you have to defeat local obstacles and make it liveable. Except, it's almost exactly the same game done 4 times. The same enemies (even the beasts!) the same housing structures, the same everything except the colour of the rocks. And not just the same enemies, but the same NPCs. There is one 3d model for each alien gender, maybe 3 or 4 for humans. They are wearing the same armour even if they are lying down wretching in sickbay, even if they are pole dancing a nightclub. In 2017 we expect every character in the game to be unique, catch up Bioware.
There seems to be no meaningful (or believable) environmental reaction to Ryder's decisions. Even if you save the alien's home-world, they still hate you. The 4 worlds still look identical after they have been made fit for colonisation despite the narrative telling us about immediate and dramatic shifts in the climate.
The script writers obviously wanted to do something that the art department couldn't keep up with. Several times there would be a mission where you meet up with somebody to do an activity, only nothing happens... I guess it happens off screen? There is this moment of confusion where you think "am I supposed to follow them, or do something now?" ... nope, mission completed already. Oh and when you have saved all four Arks (colony ships), they don't even show up on the docking port of the Nexus (your HQ), the art department give up after 3.
Combat, and movement in general, is extremely clunky and most importantly not fun. It got to the point where I just tried to run through encounters and only turn round and shoot if the mission demanded it to proceed. Press Y to interact with an object... or about 50/50 chance that it'll interpret it as a large melee lunge and you'll jump through the building and come out the other side.
Let's talk about fun. There are puzzles, they are exceptionally uninteresting. They are basically just Sudoku with alien symbols. You know I can download one of those on my phone for free, Bioware? We expect more from a game on the most advanced gaming hardware ever created. The environmental puzzles are, at best, frustrating. I got so bored / frustrated that I started using online walk-throughs, not because I was stuck but because I didn't want to waste the time figuring out the stupid puzzles that made no sense from a story point of view. I usually love this part of an RPG, contrast to the Fallout or Halflife series.
A litmus test of story telling quality is if a game dares to do a Cannibal story. The best of the best RPGs can pull it off, if you can't then don't try. Add a little pizzazz for goodness sake! Andromeda, you are no New Vegas or Baldur's Gate. I nearly fell asleep.
Did I mention the repetition? It's like 10 script writers were all told to write a bunch of XP farming missions. Some picked "scan rocks", others picked "scan flowers", others pick "scan animals" or "scan buildings" but basically they all decided to go for the same mechanic and add zero story. I kept waiting for it to be the gambit for something interesting.
But maybe we don't want the story writers to mess it up any more than they already have... all the team mates have a backstory with loyalty missions attached but frankly I wanted to kill all of them (except Drack, who was pretty cool). And the romantic options? Time to die of embarrassment, it is basically the sexual harassment dialogue option, I don't know what they hell the writers were thinking. Not fun, not realistic dialogue, not realistic characters, not even likeable characters.
There has been much said about the poor animation. It's as bad as they say. I played as female Ryder, but she walks like a cowboy. Everybody's eyes are all googly. Objects just go through other objects (e.g. guns rested on armour as if it's not there). And that's if you're lucky, sometimes the characters look like they are holding a gun, but there is nothing there. That's when the character frames aren't jittering around, or contorting themselves into an unrealistic position. The exploration game mechanic (visiting planets and scanning them) basically boils down to pressing the X button to skip the animations.
For a game that's supposed to be all about exploration and building worlds, there sure is a lot more shooting things than I would have liked. It's more like a really crappy Halo than a follow on to the original Mass Effect series.
And back to the story. The main reason I was continuing the story to the end was I wanted a conclusion about the Benefactor. It goes nowhere. They don't even talk about it again after it is brought up. That could have been good.