Mass Effect Andromeda
With so many games adopting sandbox qualities, figuring out just what parts of a game to actually experience becomes a skill in itself. In the ideal case the core gameplay is so good that even completing mundane tasks is rewarding for a very long time, but it is starting to seem like there is an increasingly long tail of content where developer resources are diminishing as the potential players do. Horizon balanced this very well with a good number of side content that was done before you got tired of outsmarting robot dinosaurs. Mass Effect Andromeda has a little too many things going on for its own good.
Mass Effect has always been light on the main story and heavy on the optional content, but it feels like the line between the high-tier content intended for everyone to play through and the things specifically for the completionists is getting blurred. It is still fundamentally a roleplaying game and it will pester you to do favors for everyone you meet – as most of the smaller sidequests involve hopping back and forth between planets and occasionally shooting some cannon fodder, it becomes boring pretty quickly.
Still, Mass Effect is helpful enough to sort the quests you receive roughly into categories of production quality so you can skip out on the less enticing content, and like the previous games it is light enough on punishment that you are encouraged to live with your decisions rather than load an earlier save and try to optimize your route. And the main quest manages to feel like a fresh direction for Mass Effect that goes to really interesting places.
There’s a really great game in there, but there’s also a lot of decent to mediocre game on top of it. Which is a weird thing to complain about, I guess, that the core game is so good that you wish the clearly labeled filler parts were just as enjoyable.