wastaz said:
My main problem with ME1 was the atrocious Mako. I love that game, but every time it makes me go into the Mako I want to throw my controller out of the window and kill small furry woodland creatures (won't anyone think of the small woodland creatures?!)
KILL THE MAKO!
The mako was my only real qualm with the first mass effect, as well.
Not so much the exploration with it, mind. That was time needlessly time consuming, but not actively annoying. Any time you were forced to do combat with the mako, though? Yeah, to hell with the mako. >.< Forget hitting a target while in motion, and you'd best be sitting in juuuust the right distance if you want your chain gun to do anything. Couple the need to sit still and eat fire to hit your enemy with a shield that takes all of thirty seconds for the enemy to destroy, and around 5 minutes of inactivity to restore, and you have all the ingredients for a godawful experience.
Half an hour of my time on any mission that involved mako combat could be explained as follows:
-drive up to the sweetspot so that my gun can hit one of the missile turrets,
-knock down its shields with the machine gun, then finish it with the grenade launcher.
-By now my shield is gone and I'm taking damage! Retreat behind the nearest rock
-get up from console, make a sandwich, check on the weather, eat sandwich, return, shield is alllllmost done charging, let it finish
-get into the sweet spot of the next turret
-repeat all above steps until mako combat is done, ponder if the remainder of the game will be worth it, realize it totally is, and continue.
As to the genre shift... I'm a long time fan of RPGs and have never been much for action games, though the last console generation warmed me up to the latter considerably with gems like Uncharted or TLoU. Thus, ME2's change of pace didn't bug me too much. The narrative focus changed, but as a result of this change the characters felt more integral to the plot, and I found myself more attached to them and their struggles, so I felt it was a change I could get behind.
ME3 dialed up the "Humanity, fuck yeah!" themes a bit more than I would have cared for, and the ending was an anticlimax, but it had enough of the strengths from its predecessors to make it worth playing... though to date it's the only game in the series I haven't replayed.