I wrapped this up yesterday, after around 50 hours of gameplay. I liked the first 6 hours and the last 6 hours very much, as the story was honestly engaging and I liked the narrative and the main quest stuff, but I feel like the middle 36 or so hours were a bit of a slog - not much different than a Far Cry for example, where you hit a planet, do all the map points of interest, rinse and repeat. It was fun, but it wore it’s welcome out after 20 or so hours, and I nearly stopped playing.
Now, I didn’t have to 100% every planet, but I know I’ll never play this again and I enjoyed seeing each planet so I wanted to look back and say “I did a little to a medium amount of everything”. I did most companion quests, did all the memory unlocks (and that was a huge pay off, I really enjoyed that), defeated all the architects, and in general did achieve my goals and was level 51 or so when I wrapped up the game.
But man, they didn’t make it easy to want to keep going. Between the clunky and un-fun research system, to save scumming vendors in order to buy the materials all the way to how you never find a cool piece of gear because the items you find are leveled to you, and that means if you can find a cool Assault Rifle Mk V you can just craft it, and craft it with your own augments, so loot is only as useful as the crafting materials you find, the game has a lot of systemic problems. I hated a lot of these systems, I don’t think I’ve enjoyed “crafting” in a bioware game in a really long time, now I think about it.
I didn’t like combat’s limitations on skills, only having 3 at a time unless you swap into different profiles is silly since you can just use the same profile a few times, why make me go through that? Heck, even with a controller set a button that toggles to a second set of 3? I got so sick of Throw, Pull, Lance, Singularity by the end of the game I put it down to Casual mode just so I didn’t have to think about the combat much. I actually ended up having a lot more fun once I did that, which surprised me. One-shotting enemies with my Adept skills made me feel good - which makes me want to strangle whoever thought it was a good idea to level the enemies with the player, which I assume must be happening. I’ve been fighting mostly the same enemies the entire game, and early on it would take 2 or 3 shotgun blasts to kill say, an observer, and at level 51 with a rank VII 1,200 damage shotgun it would take… 2 or 3 shots. Thanks guys, the combat is fairly banal as is, and now leveling up is meaningless too.
I could make a list of UI annoyances, like how many times I accidentally unequipped a weapon when I wanted to confirm load-out because the button layout changed on me just at the wrong time, but those are well known so I’ll leave the minor quibbles alone. Just know there were more of them than their should have been.
Oh, and the constant having to check in on the AVP stuff, just to feel like I was keeping up with the game, was frustrating and uninteresting. And worse yet, trying to collect goodies from the Cyro modules I’d unlocked was annoying because the count downs are only while you play, and not even when you are in a menu, unless you are in the cryo menu).
I would have scored the game a 6.5 until the last half dozen hours or so, which actually ended the game on a great note, with lots of cool call backs coming into play and the ending being quite well done. I’ll bump it up to a 7.5 for this, and lament that with a stronger combat design and more thought put into the actual gameplay systems this could have been a masterpiece.
