My first impressions. I'm a long time ME fan, with ME1 being one of my favorite games of all time.
- It starts very slowly. It's pretty different than any other Mass Effect game in how it starts. I didn't mind it at all, in fact I like how different it feels in this regard, but can totally see why some would find it a bit off-putting as it doesn't feel immediately as epic. In fact the tutorial, until the very end, it pretty subdued on the narrative front. Even moreso than Eden Prime in ME1. It's Mass Effect, so an alien race isn't /that/ strange, and it also isn't space zombies.
- If the level of exploration that was present on the tutorial planet is there on the others, I'm going to be extremely happy. There were two different places well off the main tutorial path that I found, which weren't only interesting, but since I did they were brought up by my Ryder in a cutscene conversation later on. Really cool.
- I know that some people immediately look at the scanning and equate it to the pulse from DA:I, but it's really well contextualized here and actually fits. Admittedly, I'm the kind of person that is obsessed with finishing my Hyrule Compendium in BotW and scanned everything in Metroid Prime. I love getting the small bits of world building, and here you also get resources for doing it, so win/win.
- Combat feels great. I'm not going to say its the best in the series yet, as I haven't put anywhere near enough time in to say that with confidence. I am very optimistic based on what I've played so far.
- Jump jets are awesome.
- There is totally some jank going on here, most of it being bugs. Had one enemy A-pose on me in the combats I've had, and there were some enemy transports where the exit animation was there was no animation. In fact, it looked to me like the distance stuff is just bugged. The more awkward stuff is actually in the cutscenes, where I haven't had any weird animation bugs which we've seen elsewhere, but there are some strange choices for camera cuts. Nothing game ruining, but just weird.
