I'm through the game about one and a half times. It's clearly not up to the standard of ME2, but I think it's pretty competitive with the other two. The combat refinements are almost universally positive, imo, and I've seen almost no bugs at all. I don't know what the deciding factor is between people who experience a buggy mess and people who don't.
Story-wise, they certainly should have been more ambitious. The fact that we've traveled to another galaxy to fight some pretty generic evil aliens isn't terribly impressive storytelling. All of the party members are solid, though none of them fill me with knee-shaking joy or anything. The worst opinion I can muster about this game is that much of it is "solid, but unremarkable." The best is that it still hits some very high points that are absolutely worth experiencing, and it does a good job of setting up future content.
I can't speak to Brad specifically, but I do feel like the internet has given this game a load of shit it doesn't deserve. It seems like as soon as those facial animation videos started popping up, the anonymous internet consensus decided that this was a bad game. Once that decision was made, everyone's opinion was formed with that as the backdrop. It really makes you understand why marketers are so careful most of the time - a single bad showing can create a black hole of negative opinion that eats your game.
If nothing else, I hope that the backlash forces EA to give Andromeda 2 an extra boost in terms of resources and development time.
Moonshadow101's comments