14 DAY TRIAL // While playing Mass Effect 3, I sometimes felt that the size of the challenge facing the player (saving the galaxy from the Reapers), the resources he could command (depending on choices: whole fleets, races and unique assets) and the enemies he faced (the Reapers and their various indoctrinated allies) were not aligned in any meaningful way.
There are just too many moments when BioWare tramples over their own rules (even if we take the ending off the table) and where the abilities and the power of the various engaged forces shifts in uncomfortable ways to suit the needs of the narrative.
Reapers are described as pretty much impossible to take out and in the first two games they only suffered two casualties, yet Shepard manages to kill one of them using an enormous worm (as one character describes the mother of all Thresher Maws) and another by just targeting his weak spot for space-bound attacks.
It’s too easy and feels entirely unsatisfying, even though the moments themselves are pretty awesome and the writers clearly wanted them to remain in the memory of gamers.
The Salarians, for example, are well known for their information gathering and their STG teams are even better at coverting ops than the other races, but they inexplicably fail to spot the fact that troops from Cerberus are ready to assault one of their most secret and well-protected locations. At the same time, Commander Shepard is locating an asset that will help take down the threat posed by the Reapers.
Another thing that massively annoyed me was the final space battle custscene, which shows varied allied forces engaging the Reapers at very close range, which contradicts everything that the Codex has been teaching players about the vast distances that a dreadnought attacks from and the real complexities of fleet-to-fleet battles.