Forces you to create a 2k account to play online, even if you don't plan on doing so. Then forces you to link the 2k account to your console account. This adds so much impediment to gaming when you should be able to download/insert disc and start playing.

The game itself has bad controls. The shot meter goes too fast to ever get a Perfect shot by anything other than luck. The same control is for both player movement and shot aiming so good luck if you want to aim in the opposite direction. Finding out when the control switch over is frustrating, having your player double back early or send a shot straight for your opponent to finish.

Pulling this randomly out of my giant zip file of snes roms, I had no idea this was an unreleased game. In the countless amount of SNES tie in games, it just feels like this game was released and someone out there bought it, but no, it was cancelled before it could release. Playing it, it certainly feels as finished as you expect any game of its caliber to be. There's no trick going on, nothing out of the ordinary, you can perfectly envision a child tolerating this game after getting it from their uncle. But it only exists in this form, a random SNES rom floating among countless smw rom hacks, demoscenes long forgotten, untranslated dungeon crawlers, and hentai slideshows. Far from any sort of target audience, plopped into an emulator by a dipshit making jokes with his friends over discord at 1 AM. Barbie was never meant to be here, and yet this is where destiny has taken here. A Barbie girl, but no Barbie world, Aqua is left in shambles.

I tried so, so hard to like this game. I wanted to enjoy it so bad. Not least of all because I'd spent $60 on it. But good god, it's so boring.
The controls are clunky and confusing, the mechanics are incredibly unintuitive, and the gameplay loop... the gameplay loop. It's like an annoying walking simulator, but to try and make that interesting and engaging, they made walking hard.
It really feels like Hideo Kojima wanted to make a movie and just... thought gameplay wouldn't matter. Character exposition is so long and feels hard to get invested in because they're constantly throwing a thousand different bits of terminology at you that you don't really even understand. You could talk a bit about how some of the storytelling is pretty contrived and on the nose with the whole Bridges Bridges Bridges of it all, but I wouldn't really care about that. My issue is that the game was so boring and difficult to play that I couldn't even get into the narrative like I wanted to. It really just felt like an endless slog with no reward.
I did enjoy the moments during long journeys where music would start to play. The soundtrack was excellent and the visuals were gorgeous, as were the concepts. I just wish it had been even a tiny bit fun to play.

The best thing I can say about Mass Effect Andromeda is that it's playable.

To press deeper, this game represents the absolute worst of the modern video game industry. In BioWare's infinite wisdom, they decided to strip away everything they built in the original trilogy, sacrificing its tight, streamlined gameplay experience for open-world AAA garbage. Andromeda is like a bad future timeline that split off from the first Mass Effect, where instead of what we got in 2 they chose to double down on the boring, monotonous planetary exploration of 1. This is open-world design in its most tedious and least interesting form, and on top of that, hey let's pile on other features that everyone loves, like endless resource collecting, crafting mods and consumable powerups, equipment rarity, pointless 2% percentage upgrades to your powers, and a ton of side content that never amounts to anything more than bottom of the barrel fetch quests. Thus, a memorable action-RPG transforms into a goddamn loot shooter.

Anything you loved about the core experience of the Mass Effect trilogy is practically gone, and the vestiges that remain only serve to remind you how inferior the product is in comparison. Mass Effect was all about hanging out with your cool squadmates in space, getting to know them and becoming invested in their stories, and being presented with difficult decisions that challenge your morals and understanding of the story. Here, your crew are all merely different flavors of bland. I did not care to learn about any of them. I cannot think of a single choice presented that I felt I needed to consider for more than a second. And while I had my issues with the morality system of the original games, replacing it with four personality types that do absolutely nothing to color your character or their experience was a piss-poor alternative.

There seems to be a push to redefine this game as being "overhated" or somehow not as bad as originally characterized, but let me tell you, the massive technical disaster Mass Effect Andromeda was at launch only served to hide that this thing was absolutely rotten to the core. Even with the (slightly) cleaned-up presentation, there's almost nothing redeeming about it. Like many open-world games, it throws a lot at you, keeping you on that grind, where there's always something to do and you never have to stop and ponder about how little thought was put into any of this. It's like fast food, where you can keep shoving it into your mouth, never getting full but never feeling fulfilled.

Congrats to BioWare on developing the Arby's of video games.