Okay, so no spoilers. Though I have so much to say about this game! Forgive me if I'm too long-winded :O
I finished the game twice through, once with each twin, now on a new game + with the male. It was meh for me, 5 out of 10. I love the universe, I've become a pretty diehard fan, and I'd say there was
a lot of disappointment for me, personally. I'll go into detail (no spoilers of course) about why:
1) the game is 90% side missions, and a large number of those side missions involve back and forth exchanges between planets and loading screens. To investigate this mystery I have to go to the Nexus, then this galaxy chasing a shuttle, then this, that, this, and that galaxy. Then I have to land on this planet, go to all 4 corners of the map to find out it's just a red herring and the real issue is back on the Nexus. A lot of the missions are tedious chain-yanking, IMO. I'd rather have more substantial story and narrative. I'm a pathfinder, and pathfinding is important. When Ryder gets to the Nexus and the human ark is the only power for it? Those are life and death stakes, just like the reapers. Succeed or die. But the game shrugs those off as no big deal, and so does the player as a result. Addison just sounds like a thorn in your side, not like she has realistic concerns. Addison rails on you all game about getting more outposts and surviving, but it never really feel like there's any stake in the game. The game doesn't take many things seriously, the side quests aren't serious (broadly speaking-- a few good ones are), and Ryder is usually not serious. The latter isn't necessarily a problem, but even logical Ryder was less serious than I expected him/her to be at times. S/he and his/her squadmates sometimes stumble when they should be standing tall, so to speak.
As much as I empathize with the guy who needs my help stopping power shortages on the Nexus... it's his job. Why is he making me help him? These rather unimportant side missions seem like the devs wanted to pack the game with filler. It's like going back and watching the originally Dragon Ball Z and seeing 5 episodes of trees blowing in the wind before getting to the fight. This was the reason I stopped playing DA:I-- I got lost in side missions and it really bugged me. The trend of late in many games seems to be sandboxy, like this game is, but, perhaps it's the genre fiction reader/writer in me, I want a plot first. ME1 and 2 had that-- stopping the geth was urgent. We had to stop them.
2) The main plot is not only short, it's... meh. The Kett are more or less a reincarnation of an old enemy from earlier in the series. By the time you finish the game, you'll probably know what enemy I'm talking about. I feel like the parallels are quite obvious. It's like Opty said-- trite cliches abound at times.
3) Some of the dialogue is pure cringe-worthy. There are times when Ryder or another person says something, and I react like Kallo in a certain famous clip of fem Ryder showing interest in Suvi: "Kill. Me. Now."
4) I was super excited about the multiplayer, actually. ME3 was great and had fantastic replayability. I know it's still early, but from all the DLC packs and everything they learned from ME3, this game feels like several steps backwards. Biotics (RIP Warp) and even most tech power combos seem to do no damage. The Vanquisher sniper is god-tier, with a fire-rate and damage combo that outdoes every weapon, from the Black Widow to the Valkyrie, without much of a contest. Bring a team of Infiltrators and Vanquishers onto the hardest difficulty and you're still done in 10-12 minutes. It's grindier than before, with more to unlock, but the same crappy RNG-card system. Most of the snipers and pistols are great, but the shotguns and assault rifles are beyond awful. All those homing plasma weapons are almost unusable. The balance is terrible.
5) Crafting is kind of cool, but it seemed to turn the game into a kind of DA:I in space. I could have done without it/seen the effort put in elsewhere.
However, I did two playthroughs here, now working on a third, so I must have liked the game enough to do that, right? Indeed, and I think a lot of that has to do with the squadmates. At least for me, personally. Every player has their favorites personality-wise, but I think even trying to look at the depth of each one specifically with an objective eye, you can find that the characters are all at least relatable, if not necessarily likable for certain players. There are no Jacobs on the Tempest (sorry Jacob fans, but most of us can agree... he was that bad.)
Most players talk about "oh man, ME 2 was great" and after playing it some 8x through... I agree with you. But I'm also painfully aware of its flaws. This game gave us, collectively, some of the weakest characters in the series, though they were alongside some of the best. Mordin, Garrus, Tali, and Legion stood side by side with Jacob and Samara. And Grunt for me-- again, personal feeling. I didn't like him, though I know plenty of people did. There was a sense of "good weapon, bad weapon" for each class. Tempest, or Shuriken. Without DLC, that was your only choice. Very limited.
Anyway, on my opinion of ME:A sqadmates...
Cora
She's there. Kind of attractive, I suppose, and okay to talk to, when she isn't talking about the tentacleheads. She, like almost every squadmate, has a sort of idée fixe, and hers is especially irritating to me, personally, which is her asari fangirling. She does this even though she was basically dishonorably discharged from her huntress squad. She shows no mixed emotion 99% of the time, it's all, "the asari are amazing!" and no thought of "maybe they screwed me?" She doesn't seem to reason with that. It's a very flat "I LOVE THE ASARI OMG." Her loyalty mission was painful at times b/c of this. She doesn't shut up about the asari. Ever.
Liam
Liam I like. I was torn b/t romancing him and Peebee on my Sara Ryder playthrough, though I went with Peebee in the end. Liam is an idealist who always tries so hard to do good, and always expects things to be better than they are. Honestly, I saw a lot of my IRL self in his character. If I were in a squad like Ryder's, I would most certainly be the one trying too hard to make everyone happy and wind up screwing something up b/c I failed to properly plan
He doesn't have any one thing he always talks about, and I think he's an all around character with developed and realistic flaws, speaking from my writerly side.
Vetra
I will open up by being blunt: Vetra is bae. I loved her, and she was an easy choice for my Scott Ryder romance. Granted, I am admittedly a little biased towards turians, but I just like her personality and thought she was developed fairly well. That said, I think she got neglected somewhat. Her idée fixe is clearly her sister, whose name she cannot stop saying. Sid, Sid, Sid. It was like she had never heard of pronouns when referring to her sister, who she always referred to... when she wasn't talking about her father. One or the other, she's very much about her family, or lack thereof. This, I imagine, might make some people see her as whiny, always talking about the past and not being able to shake it off. That said, it's somewhat realistic. People struggle with that, and it made sense for her character, to a point. She also seemed like a stereotypical smuggler, but I didn't have much idea as to what an unstereotypical smuggler would be like. I couldn't put my finger on it, but I did think she had some cliches around her that dulled her character a bit. All in all, I think she had a lot of positives, but also quite a few negatives in terms of characterization.
Her romance was... interesting. At first she was almost unresponsive, then at one point just has this out-of-character, melodramatic moment. No spoilers, but I quirked a brow when it happened. Then Peebee and Cora get full on sex scenes, I didn't want to romance Jaal and saw him nude against my will, but wow, one kiss from the turian and how quickly that screen went black, on more than one occasion. A little bit more with the romance couldn't have hurt. There was also quite a bit of that holding-both-hands-and-staring-at-each-other animation that Bioware has used the hell out of, and I'm getting really tired of seeing it.
Drack
Old man with a bunch of war stories and generally more talkative and interesting than most other krogan. He's got his granddaughter, Kesh, and shows he's still got that krogan drive for violence, but has much more character behind him. If I hadn't played the Citadel DLC in ME3, I'd probably like him a little better than Wrex.
Peebee
I came into the game expecting to hate her, and she became probably my favorite character. She's got a very unique attitude, and while her loyalty mission comes late in the game and feels oddly like a Dora the Explorer-grade tutorial mission where she gives directions to do everything, throughout the rest of the game she has some of the best lines, IMO.
Jaal: Peebee, when the asari exclaim "goddess," who are they talking about?
Peebee: Me. Obviously.
I romanced her with my female Ryder. The romance on the whole was definitely of higher quality, and seemed to be given much more thought than, say, Vetra's. The sex scene was pretty steamy, even a bit unnecessarily so. Which brings me to one other point about the romances: I would have been more okay with all of Vetra's fade to blacks and some lackluster bedroom scenes if the romance had actually been felt outside of that area. E.g. there is a point when Ryder gets knocked down hard in the story, near the end, where you'd really expect a romanced squadmate, or even good friends like your crew, to be making sure s/he's okay and able to get up. Instead, both are more or less indifferent to Ryder's injury. That's another spot where, to me, that "bad writing" reared its head the strongest. I think back to the beam run from ME3, where if you run down with Garrus and a romanced Liara for example, Garrus would have to hold Liara back while she told Shep how much she loved him/her. Or the moment on the Geth ship in ME3 when Shep and a romanced Tali have that double-entendre exchange about sleeping quarters that becomes a running gag that started with the first game. It doesn't need to be something from three games ago. Just a nod or wink here or there from a romanced squadmate in this game could have the same effect. If there was a moment like the beam run in this game, it seems like the squad wouldn't care very much. (Again, this feeds back into the game not taking itself seriously.) It was like the romances were generally very constricted to the specific interaction scenes and the romantic "surprises," but not in places where it would have been very natural to see some sort of reaction from the romanced squadmate.
Jaal
He's there, too. Kind of dull. I don't find the angara particularly interesting. I'd have been more interested to get the Batarian or Volus squadmate I've always wanted. I also have to see Jaal naked early in the game, which just seemed terribly awkward and again, out of character. Brand new alien on the ship not wearing anything in the presence of all these folks he doesn't know?
There are moments where Jaal is kind of cool and his characterization seems decent. I still like talking to him, but he's nothing really special. That said, his not knowing what Milky Way things are, and his general cultural confusion, make for some humorous dialogue exchanges (see above).
I like Gil, Kallo, and Suvi as buds, and Lexi seems okay too. All in all, I like this crew better than any one crew I've had in the past.
Whew. I think that'll do it for how I felt about the game.Hope I didn't spoil anything much. I'm kind of assuming Jaal is not very new to anyone at this point.