I am quite a bit further in to Mass Effect: Andromeda, and I am still having a great time. Much better than the reviews and people who played the early trial would have led me to believe, so what caused this discrepancy? I think it is the way reviewers have to play games, and the part of the game the trial members were locked in too.
In order to review Mass Effect: Andromeda before the embargo lifted, reviewers would have had to play the game for like eight hours a day or more just to see most of the content, and then because they need to review everything, they would have had to play all the crappy filler missions too. That means they would have had to sit through every poorly written dialog tree, and encounter every bug the game has to offer for a full work day. That wouldn’t be great. I am surprised under those circumstances the reviews are as good as they are.
Meanwhile the user reviews on Metacritic are even worse, but when you read them, they all pretty much come from people who only played the ten hour one planet trial. Again, the trial forced players to play only the worst part of the game. Eos doesn’t even get good until the second time you visit it. EA should have just skipped the trial, or allowed people to get as far as they could in ten hours, so they could have gotten to the good parts. Locking people in to the worst part of the game did not help sell the game.
Listen, Mass Effect: Andromeda is a flawed game, but still a very fun one provided you can play the good parts and skip everything else, and there are plenty of good parts. The people that gave the game its review numbers were not allowed to do that. We as gamers are, so while your results may very, I think Mass Effect: Andromeda is worth playing, but I am not saying the reviewers were wrong. They were just forced to play the worst this game has to offer.