I don't know... I never got into andromeda. Maybe I should?
The game has a really bad reputation that it honestly doesn't deserve. It is the weakest game in the series for a lot of reasons, but it only fails to measure up to the trilogy. By itself its a decent game. Visually, it's amazing even by today's standards. Gameplay wise, it's combat is good although weapon balance isn't great with most weapons being made irrelevant by a few top performers.
It also suffers from the same problem that nearly every open world game I've ever played suffers from and that's pacing. The way the game is laid out naturally destroys any sense of urgency in the main plotline as you work through tons of side content on a given world in order to try and achieve colony viability. This is also necessary for the good ending, but doing anything other than moving through the main plot missions can get tiresome and you go so long without advancing the plot that you eventually lose sight of it.
The general design of open world games tends to create that problem though. The game's pacing issues are due to this and the sheer volume of content. The game by itself is about as long as the entire Mass Effect trilogy taking around 100 hours to complete. In contrast, without skipping cutscenes completing ME1 takes around 20 hours, ME2 around 40 hours and about the same for ME3, if not slightly over that. So right around 100 to 110 for the whole trilogy and you can easily take that long in ME:A.
I think it's worth playing if you are a die hard Mass Effect fan. There are plenty of call backs to the earlier games and fleshing out of some aspects of the trilogies underlying history. That being said, its not as good as the trilogy for one very simple reason: Neither of your two protagonist options in Andromeda hold a candle to Shepard. The Ryder siblings have much more bland personalities and their actions aren't as memorable or polarizing as Shepard's were.
With Shepard, you can remember renegade and paragon choices and dialog because they are bold. Shepard takes action and it feels like you have agency and even choice even though its generally an illusion or at the very least, those choices sometimes don't really matter in the larger narrative. With the Ryder siblings, your choices feel even more superficial with it being hard to recall what you chose in subsequent playthroughs. While BioWare seems to give you more dialog options (4 or 5 instead of 2 or 3), those choices really all feel the same and more obviously have little impact on the overall game.
It does have an auto dialog system where certain dialog changes based on your choices (assuming your were consistent) but the fact is that this really only works if you stick with a single approach to all conversations or the vast majority of them. The game has a number of really good underlying systems that are let down narratively. However, the game's scope is much bigger than that of the trilogy at times with amazing set pieces and great sequences. Boss fights are fun and interesting but end up being repeated too often. Though the final fight is actually really good. The end run through Meridian is more like what ME3's Priority Earth mission should have been, with forces you've recruited actually joining in the fight and helping you. The scale of that mission needs to be seen to be appreciated.
The game also gets knocked for its supporting characters, but this is really not fair either. You shouldn't judge the ME:A squadmates by that of squadmates in the trilogy that had three games to be developed. Judging the new ones against ME1, you'd find that BioWare actually did a better job with them in Andromeda with most of them being more developed and having more interesting loyalty missions than you'd see in ME1 or even in later games in most cases.
In particular, Liam's loyalty mission ranks up there with the best in the trilogy, showcasing things that weren't even possible in the trilogy. Andromeda is a great game in its own right, but it's marred by a difficult launch, some pacing issues and people's over zealous attachment to the locations, characters and protagonist of the trilogy. All of this stuff hurt the game, which if judged fairly, would actually stack up well in certain respects.
It's unfair, but it is what it is. Most of the memes and reaction videos the game is infamous for were based on a pre-launch build that was far less polished which was the "early access" we got prior to the game's official launch. This was only a few days before launch, but tons of crap changed in the release version and more was changed within six months of the games release. I'd go out on a limb and say its the best of them from a technical perspective with far fewer animation issues and glitches than the trilogy has despite being known for quite the reverse.
The biggest shame is that the game will probably never get a sequel and much of its story will go unresolved. Even people that thought the game was "meh" generally agree that it did the right kind of world building and set the stage for a great trilogy. It had potential but unfortunately, it will never be realized.
