I've been playing this game for the last few weeks and am about halfway through the SP. Some thoughts:
The open world gameplay works well and is reminiscent of the Bethesda games, and the combat is more fun and less cover-oriented than the old ME games. The game becomes tedious outside combat though, especially with the lack of a speedup command that the Unreal engine had. The large number of "find 20 of this" side quests also contribute to this, although I have been ignoring many of them. You can't control the squadmate powers anymore, so they fade into the background during fights and I stopped caring much about up-skilling them. All the good equipment can only be obtained by crafting with augmentations, but it's difficult to figure out where to get certain materials and enough of all three types of research points. The game gives you a lot of room to experiment with crafting and it's easy to build overpowered items.
There are some mods people have made that are almost essential (Shut Up Sam, Shorter Landing Animations and a few others). Unfortunately there is no way to improve the horrible save system. Quicksave has been removed and Bioware arbitrarily decides you are not allowed to save in certain missions or areas, which is atrocious in an open world game like this. I like keeping savegames at key moments over the course of a game, and am copying the autosave files manually to do it. I didn't notice any obvious problems with the faces or animations, but I heard that was fixed in a patch.
I like the whole "exploring the unknown" instead of "saving the galaxy" vibe of the story, but the main quest moves slowly and has never really picked up my interest. The dialogue is just...boring. It's not exactly bad but very generic, and it's rare to hear anyone say something that you would remember a minute later, particularly from Ryder. Nobody seems to have a personality except for a few of your squadmates. This is a big step down from the old games, when I would often reload savegames to see what the other conversation choices were. I prefer the new logical/emotional/etc. options though instead of paragon/renegade, which often became binary and artificial. The Milky Way races seem watered down and are basically just humans, more so than in the old games. The krogans, salarians, etc. don't really behave in character, and I think they could have replaced them all with humans and the story would be identical. The new angara feel more like the old races did in the previous games, and have a well developed backstory. The kett are less interesting and have weak motivations, and their leader is like a comic book villain.
On the whole I still like it so far, despite all the issues. I'm finding that just exploring the environments and universe (like datapads and emails) is more interesting than the dialogue and many of the actual quests.
