I've been going through ME1 Legendary on Insanity, and to my great surprise it's easily the most I've ever enjoyed this game! For the first time I feel like I actually have to pay attention to enemy abilities, which enemies to target with which skills, how companions level up, weapon upgrades and so on. Even money has to be considered to some degree, though I'm still drowning in weapons and junk to sell off. It's still incredibly easy though. It seems like all Insanity does is make certain enemies instakills, which doesn't really pose an extra challenge, you just need to be a bit more careful with approaching enemies. I'm only about halfway through though, so we'll see if that changes.
I've also finally picked up on why this game never felt that special to me, and one of the biggest reasons is how small it actually is, or more specifically how small the environments are. It comes to a head on Noveria, where you come into the lab where survivors are fending off the rachni. You need to get to the laboratory, but the way is closed. There's multiple ways of going about it, but the environment is so small and so samey that it's possible to miss the availability of choices entirely by accident. You can just randomly click on one thing, have a brief combat encounter and then find out that you just entered the lab without even getting to talk to all the NPCs first. It just feels weird, like if Lord of the Rings was presented as a one-room play: the presentation simply does not match the implied scale of the events. Part of it has to be hardware limitations of the time, but I do wonder if there was still some DNA left over from KOTOR, and Bioware weren't quite yet comfortable with making truly expansive environments.
