User blog comment:Diyartifact/Shepard's adversaries/@comment-3228423-20120404115742/@comment-3325589-20120408234152

I'm with Markurion on the relative difficulty levels of ME2 and 3. Any time in ME2 you're not fighting husks/scions or certain bosses, you can pretty much just hunker down behind cover, shoot things, wait to regenerate, rinse, lather, repeat. Enemies will attempt to flank you somewhat, but it's not hard to kill them before they get into really dangerous positions. Enemies in ME3 are actually good at flushing you out of cover, both because of grenades, and because there are substantially more enemies that close to melee range.

Also, Grissom Academy was a serious design mistake. Even if you do it at the last possible moment, the wide open area with the Atlas and the centurion/guardian/engineer hordes is still probably the hardest fight in the first half of the game. The only one I'd put on the same difficulty tier is the final fight on Menae, and at least there you get a blackstar, even if you have to dash through enemy territory to get it. Grissom Academy enemies are OP like whoa-pee.