Hating it. This isn't mass effect. Scanning is boring and tedious. Combat is "OK" but wouldn't call it amazing. Thought I wouldn't care about the animations, but turns out, they're pretty fucking immersion breaking. Love when I walk up to talk to an NPC, and they walk away at the same time, leaving me to talk to an empty screen with their voice from a distance. Also love when I die due to an enemy getting glitched in the environment and because of the horrible checkpoints, losing about 15-20 minutes of progress.
The Ryders don't feel like heroes, or heroic in any sense. They're entitled brats who get titles literally handed to them, without any sort of qualification.
The multi was mildly redeeming but I think it was because I played with friends.
I'd like to add that I'm generally not a harsh critic of games. I don't shit on everything that's popular and go against the grain. This was a very eye-opening situation, where I could swear this game was going to be magnificent, and a true return of the franchise I loved, but I just can't seem to enjoy it.
I have to say with the trial I felt similarly, that it was an accumulation of little things that were kind of ruining it for me. I felt like the atmosphere of ME was captured from what I played, and Eos felt closer to what many would've liked to see from ME1 planets. It was just good to have ME again.
But yeah, little things. The physical scanner was annoying to bring up with the delay, having it only cover that small boxed area, and not knowing when the heck I was near something that could be scanned. I don't mean I want a cheese mode indicator, but literally I'm in an area pulling it up and doing a 360 and often finding nothing, leading me to not even want to scan another similar area where they may have been something to scan. I think the main issue here is with having become used to how snappy the focus is in Horizon. It's much easier to click in a thumbstick versus what really felt like an awkward reach to the D-pad (360 controller). Additionally in Horizon the focus is much snappier to go in and out of, it covers the entire screen, and you KNOW when you'll need to use it and will not be randomly pulling it up in every area you go into.
Combat didn't resonate with me for a few reasons. Combat encounters in 2 and 3 felt like more thought was put into balancing them with not just the enemies but design of the battle field. I know conditions aren't always going to be ideal in real life so perhaps it's better this way, but when the only way for me to win an encounter is to hang way back and kite enemies because there is no cover and flying bullet sponge robots quickly circle me, this is poor and not well thought out combat design IMO. It feels more like some random shooter than Mass Effect, which I am not looking for in ME. (This is one cherry picked encounter from the trial that irritated me to no end with 6-7 deaths before success, so maybe it's generally better). Only having three powers active and not being able to use squad mates really killed it for me because in the previous games as an adept I could carefully coordinate squad power usage to drain shields. Also not having that tactical pause is killer because there is no more pausing and calling out positions/commands for squad mates and I feel like I'm scrambling to do it in real time, and it didn't really feel like there was time for that with difficulty on hardcore and insanity.
You mentioned checkpoints and lack of saving on some missions, like the opening mission of the game. There was one encounter coming out of a facility that I died in like three times, and reloading took me way back to another location from which I had to walk to the facility, and then had to go through the facility again. I experienced something like that in the trilogy maybe two to three times.
I've had weird glitches an NPC sliding/teleporting into me and getting me stuck. I've been unable to open the scanner, unable to walk and being stuck in run mode. I had an enemy floating in the air that would not shoot back or move at all. And then my favorite, I've had the Avenger take on some properties of the Mattock. The Avenger would keep the automatic fire property of constantly draining bullets, but would only make an audible Mattock firing sound and only do damage when pulling the trigger in burst mode, while still draining rubber 0 damage dealing bullets.
NPCs can at times be immersion breaking like you said with poor character models, though generally I tend to not be bothered by it. Some of the more egregiously weird facial expressions give me a good laugh, and it's probably in a more amusing and endearing way than an irritating way. Some of the dialog is really meh. And while I haven't experienced it I could see what you mentioned with NPCs walking away from you when you speak to them and then hearing their voice from a distance being annoying (to be fair I feel like this happens in other open world games?).
I get that these things will either be forgivable, a non-issue or just non-existent (glitches) for many (maybe most?) people and that this will feel through and through like a Mass Effect game. I'm looking at a lot of things beyond the theme and top layer of Mass Effect elements that really throw me off, and they just take away from it as a game in general. Still, I'm so tempted to jump into this before I even finish Horizon. I really hope to get through the game and completely change my mind on some of these opinions, or just realize that they aren't as big an issue as I'm thinking they are now.