The Gaming Den

Death gets the ability to split into three pieces--a giant reaper statue, and two images of himself. You can switch which image you control, and use the statue to weigh down switches. I was stumped for more than thirty minutes because I had to get a bomb plant over a gap. Then it occurred to me that I could, in fact, grab the plant and then throw it to the -other- image across the gap. Who caught it like it was no thang. So yeah. You will eventually have to solve puzzles by playing catch with yourself.

Okay, so the worst part is that the Geth role in the first game as the ground troop Reaper surrogates is now filled by Cerberus. You know, the terrorist organization you spent ME2 helping. Why, yes, the main plot of ME 2 was between a complete waste of time and actively counterproductive.

Also, Cerberus contains Kai Leng, who is a perfect storm of things to hate until you have a stroke. Firstly, his character design looks like he got kicked out of a bad anime for looking too stupid. He's got opaque goggles over his eyes, looks kind of bishonen, and has exactly the same ponytail as my Femshep. Also, he uses a fucking katana. Not an omniblade that looks like a katana, an actual katana. Or at least a japanese sword that is referred to as a katana by the fans. Regardless. Then he inflicts cutscene stupidity. In his first appearence, he is preparing to attack the Salarian councilor when Shepard emerges through a shattered window pointing her gun at Leng. Then they spend like 30 seconds exchanging banter before Shepard shoots- wait no, that would have made too much sense and hurt the author's beloved before his time. No, Kai Leng attacks the councilor, who is saved by Thane or Kirhae at the cost of their life or just dies. Kai Leng then escapes, Shepard attempts to fly to the council, then Kai Leng jumps onto the car, disables the engine with his fucking katana, and jumps onto a Cerberus shuttle. Then Shepard sends him falling down an elevator shaft, but nope, he's fine. Oh, this entire sequence happened during the Cerberus invasion of the Citadel, because all the stupid pooled into one portion of the plot.

Next time, you get to his actual bossfight, where he is a combat-taunt heavy jackass, kneels in the open and becomes invincible to regenerate his shields, and calls on a gunship for fire support. And the bossfight is actually not very hard and completely undermines his supposed badassary. But what puts the absolute goddamn cherry on top is that he proceeds to win in a cutscene and hand you the most devestating defeat in the story since the fall of Earth.

I hated him so much even killing him during his second bossfight wasn't satisfying

Moving on from the hate-singularity that is Kai Leng, Cerberus in general has arbitrarily gotten themselves a goddamn army and a fleet capable of facing the Alliance 5th fleet and holding out for several hours. This does not make any fucking sense. Okay, so they get their personnel by Indoctrination, although it really begs the question of why the Reapers funnel their indoctrinated cannon-fodder into Cerberus, and also why they don't seem to have any non-husk cannon fodder from other races.

You spend most of the game gathering forces to construct the Prothean Death Star Crucible and to help it retake Earth. For some reason, it is considered utterly unreasonable that the other alien races would rather hold their homeworlds against Reaper invasion than go out on a limb trying to save yours. After all, the Turians are only fighting the Reapers to a bloody standstill as their world burns.

The Reapers, inexplicably, opt to not try to seize the Citadel as quickly as possible, instead opting to go tens of thousands of light-years out of their way to bypass its central location in the Mass Relay network and attack literally everywhere else first. Even though the plan that's carried them through every cycle involved using it to selectively shut down Mass Relays to slice up organic empires by cutting off their only long-range FTL. Until the end of the game, where it turns out the reason they were staying away wasn't because they were afraid of the Destiny Ascension's ludicrously huge and now potentially refitted to Sovereign-class specifications main gun nailing them as they emerged from the Mass Relays or anything, because once it turns out it's a crucial component of the Crucible's capacity to blow up every Reaper in the galaxy (which actually made perfect sense; if your objective is to kill every X in the galaxy in one shot then using the central control system of the FTL network to do it is entirely reasonable) the Reapers proceed to steal it and fly it all the way to Earth in something like two hours. So, I guess they were just lazy?

Also, once they finally get off their mechanized asses and steal it, they don't shut down the Charon relay. Though according to random internet people, that's because the Crucible can override the Citadel's control of relays. That only raises more questions!

Also, the ending is goddamn terrible. I didn't bother downloading the Extended Cut DLC, so I only saw the original Destroy ending myself, but basically it retroactively ruined the best part of the game, Rannoch, because it killed the Geth, and I'd already killed the Quarians because this was the second time they'd tried to exterminate the Geth and I had to pick one sentient race to be exterminated. But now I had to choose between exterminating the Geth or deciding, "Everyone who talked about controlling the Reapers turned out to be Indoctrinated, but obviously I can believe the creator and master of the Reapers when he tells me it'll work this time because I am definitely not Indoctrinated!"

Oh, and the mysterious, enigmatic Reaper motivation? As a commentor on a blog put it, "we have to kill you so you don't die." Seriously, they exist to keep organics from being exterminated by synthetics. I am not fucking joking.