The game is saddled with heartless, incessant, and tediously flow-breaking loading screens. Some are disguised as elevators. The game is just a jerk when it comes to squandering slices of time. For example, if you have a mission that calls for you to visit the Citadel:<\/p>\n
- \n
- Bring up the galaxy map, set the destination.\n<\/li>\n
- See a short but un-skippable animation of the ship going through the Mass Relay.\n<\/li>\n
- Back to the map screen. Use the map again to direct the ship to dock at the Citadel.\n<\/li>\n
- Loading screen.\n<\/li>\n
- See a short but un-skippable animation of the ship pulling into dock.\n<\/li>\n
- While not a loading “screen” per se, the game pauses for a few seconds while the word “Loading” appears.\n<\/li>\n
- Exit the ship and choose your away party.\n<\/li>\n
- Loading screen.\n<\/li>\n
- Get in a mandatory long-ass elevator ride. (A loading screen, really. A long one.)\n<\/li>\n
- Once out of the elevator, use the “fast” transit system to go to the right part of the station.\n<\/li>\n
- Loading screen.<\/li>\n
- Unless you’re very lucky, you’re going to have to hike for a distance to reach the person you’re looking for.\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
This adds up to a couple of minutes of semi-interactive waiting so you can have a fifteen second conversation.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Combat<\/div>\n
<\/td><\/tr>Thanks Garrus. Thanks so much for that.<\/td><\/tr><\/table>Combat is mostly satisfying, but marred by the enthusiastic retardation of your teammates. They constantly stand in front of you during combat, forcing you to move. Or they’ll take all the cover and leave you to stand in the open like a target dummy. Or, if you<\/em> do find a good bit of cover and they don’t, they will stand right beside you, in the open, and “catch” incoming rockets so you can enjoy the blast radius. On higher difficulties, this is an express route to the game over screen. But even when they’re not in your way, they have cover, and they aren’t trying to bring about total team explodification, they’re still of limited usefulness. The AI on both sides will often shoot even when they don’t have a clear line of sight. I’ve seen teammates facing nose-to-the-wall, drilling the scenery in a vain attempt to hit the guy on the other side. <\/p>\n Combat taunts are repeated with a frequency capable of inciting madness. A firefight against human opponents will provide a chorus of the same two or three (dumb) taunts over and over again, as if the bad guys had a cliché-only version of Tourette’s Syndrome. “You must DIE!” Really? Enthralling. Tell me again. (And again.)<\/p>\n
The weapons are serviceable, aside from the sniper rifle – which is bad enough to ruin Christmas. The weapon only has two zoom modes: Too Close, and Even Closer. Most of the battles happen in confined spaces where the sniper rifle is useless, or at a distance when you’re in a vehicle. If you really want to make enough use of the sniper rifle to justify putting points into it, you’re going to have to keep getting in and out of the vehicle (where you could just nuke the bad guy with the main gun) just so you can fiddle around and line them up for a sniper shot. Looking through the scope, your view bobs around like you’re shooting from atop a rowboat in a storm. While drunk. And being attacked by angry bees. Maybe<\/b> in real life I might have this much trouble holding a rifle still, but I’m not a super commando from space using future weapons. I actually found the constant oscillation to be nauseating. All this, and the weapon overheats ridiculously easy. It’s actually easier and more expedient to snipe with the pistol. The assault rifle can clear an entire room in the space of time it takes to drop a single foe with the sniper rifle. An unbalanced weapon is one thing, but here they have perpetrated the greater sin of making it not any fun to use.<\/p>\n
The rest of the weapons are serviceable enough, although they’re a bit homogeneous. Your starting assault rifle looks and sounds pretty much like the ubergun you’ll have near the end of the game, it’s just (maybe) painted a different color. <\/p>\n
And whoever mapped the “talk to teammate” button to the same button as “run”, and then made both<\/em> actions active during combat: You are a jerk and I hate you too. I got very sick of my teammates screaming at me that they were too busy to talk as I darted around the battlefield looking for cover. There is no reason to talk to teammates during a fight. Why make it possible to try?<\/p>\n
And while we’re at it: A space commando that can run for five seconds before becoming helplessly fatigued? I’m a middle-aged asthmatic and I can do a lot better than that.<\/p>\n
Loading Screens (Again.)<\/div>\nGiven the copious and diverse loading screens, I thought I would return the favor and cover this issue twice. <\/p>\n
Noveria was particularly cruel when it came to elevators, sometimes requiring two or three elevator rides between each step. The initial section in Port Hanshan is a four-stop quest that requires seven<\/em> elevator rides:<\/p>\n
\nOnce you arrive, and go through the normal docking-at-a-planet loading screens and cutscenes:<\/p>\n1. Elevator
\n2. Administrator & assistant
\n3. Elevator
\n4. Lorik Qui’in
\n5. Elevator
\n6. Elevator
\n7. Data from Lorik’s office
\n8. Elevator
\n9. Elevator
\n10. Garage pass from Lorik.
\n11. Elevator
\n12. Exit facility\n<\/p><\/div>\nAlso notable is the absurd and glacial elevator in the middle of your ship, the Normandy. (Imagine replacing all the steps and ladders on a warship with a single shared elevator. While I would not put it past a government to make a blunder like this, it does interfere with the fiction that your ship was built by the best and the brightest.) It’s a pointless time-sink.<\/p>\n
Mako<\/div>\n
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