User blog comment:The Milkman/Mass Effect in Retrospect/@comment-132009-20130418073938

No mention of how utterly useless the Collectors were to the overall story? They felt like they didn't have any reason to be worried if they were just taking people away "for some reason".

I actually liked ME3 because of it's more linear focus. It's probably personal preference, but whenever a game gives me the ability to visit five different places at once, with a seemingly random "can't skip this" mission somewhere in between, it feels like there's no direction to the progression of the story. Similarly with ME1, doesn't it feel a shame that after the first Citadel visit, you can literally look at the Galaxy Map and go "Do those three, then an extra, and then the final mission!". In fact after the Citadel the rest of ME1 can be boiled down to "6 hours in the Mako and 5 hours of story".

I felt like the major reason why I liked the Hammerhead over the Mako was that it could move so much faster. The Mako was boring because it took an age to get anywhere, and for me how fast something goes can determine how interesting the vehicle is when driving it.

Overall though I felt like very few of your choices in any of the game had any significant impact on anything throughout all three games. The backstory for Shepard hardly influences his or her character. Most of the squad in the second game are replaced with suspiciously similar characters in the third. You're still going to do the same exact things for the same exact reasons, and the only thing that varies is the window dressing like Shepard's attitude and the characters you bring with you. Hardly "your decisions have profound consequences".

For example, if Jack is missing, it should be a lot harder to take back Grissom Academy, you would probably have to take a completely different route through the school. But no, she's just replaced with an exceptional student and you go the same route anyway. Same with leaving Liara until last in ME1; what's the point of her going loopy if she's going to show no effects of it after that point?