I hated how big the planet Elaaden was. Big and empty, took forever to go anywhere.

I think Elaaden may actually be may favorite planet. I love tearing off across the dunes in the Nomad. I usually prioritize getting all of the forward stations ready as soon as I'm dropped onto a planet, so I can fast-travel whenever I need to, but on Elaaden I'll usually drive if it's not more than two or three stations away.

Kadara, on the other hand, bugs the hell out of me. 95% of the content is in the slums, but every time I need to go to the slums, I have to load into Kadara Port, turn around to the console that would normally take me back to my ship, tell the game to take me to the slums instead, then wait to load into the slums area. Can I please just get another landing site at the Outpost once I've got that set up? That would be great.

I liked Jaal and Drack. Some of the character models seemed to suffer from uncanny valley more than others, like Addison and Cora.

I still can't decide if the lip-sync bugs because it's poorly done, or if it's so much closer to life-like than other games, that I'm it to be perfect and so I'm noticing every tiny thing that's off. The non-human characters don't bother me at all.

Peebee and Drak (sounds like a bad cop show) are my go-to team, though Peebee may see less game time if there's less Remnant stuff in the later game.

Mission tracking: Ugh. I really didn't like the way that was handled. I prefer a skyrim-type solution, where you can turn as many quest markers on or off as you want. Menu/UI was problematic--really hard to tell what things you haven't read, because as you scroll down a list, it marks them as 'read' as soon as your cursor goes to the next item in the list that was off-screen.

Fully agreed on all points. Most frustrating is that while you can only have one active mission at a time, some missions only seem to work if they're the active mission. At the very least, you can't tell that the random NPC standing twenty feet away when you turn in one mission, is the one you need to talk to to turn in the mission you finished forever ago, but forgot about because it's buried in the "Additional Tasks" page instead of the "Nexus" page.

The controls are wonky--you can never be sure your character will actually grab the edge of a ledge you're trying to climb up. In previous MEs you felt solid, heavy, almost cludgy, and in MEA you're light, floaty, and drifty. Less predictable.

I think I like the feel of my more nimble Pathfinder character over my tanky Spectre, but I've definitely been hosed by not grabbing a ledge that I definitely should have grabbed.

I've been playing the Multiplayer a decent amount, and they're making it way easier by making the player characters much stronger. (At launch even Bronze was super hard.) I think the shooting game in ME3 was more stable, predictable, and rewarding, but there are some good tradeoffs. Character mobility makes a massive difference in play, which changes the paradigm from mid- to long-term strategic play to more immediate jump in, damage, jump out.

I've only done the Apex missions with a strike team, so I still need to check out multiplayer. Not sure I'll ever actually get around to it, though. I'm mostly just in it for the campaign.

-Disciple