The main reason isn't exactly intricate or interesting to describe - the game is just boring. The level design is straight amateurish, there's nothing interesting to explore (ever) or look at (vast majority of the time). The combat is a cover shooter with bullet sponges and no grenades, which means you pretty much never have to change covers and can never force opponents to do so. You just enter a room, hide behind the closest cover and stay there until everyone in sight is dead. You get 2-3 abilities that are mostly autoaimed damage bursts and CC and hardly make the combat more interesting, you can juggle weapons depending on the type of opponents and their shields, but overall it just lacks any sort of dynamism, excitement or strategic thinking. I sometimes died because I incorrectly guessed enemy behaviour and focused wrong opponent (one that would remain far in the distance instead of one that closed the distance and walked into my face), or was too impatient and left the cover when I shouldn't have. Can't call that interesting difficulty, just tiring.
I'm not a fan of the writing either. It seems to be split 50/50 between infodumps and moral dilemmas. There's no interesting character interactions or engaging dialogue, just bland exposition and ethical musings that are more interesting inside player's head than what's actually presented in the game. Part of the problem is that protagonist has to be sort-of bland because they are just a placeholder for player's decisions, but that just means you should put more work in making other characters interesting. Instead they don't interact each other, they rarely offer any feedback (just a boring quip every now and then) and once the player is done with their loyalty mission, they often don't have anything else to talk about. And characters other than our teammates are even more boring and one-dimensional.
Perhaps one saving grace is the game's last mission which works contextually with ideas of preparing for unknown and suicide mission, although the actual gameplay doesn't seem much different from some previous missions which was a real buzzkill to me (deaths feel more like accidents than sacrifices or player failures). Regardless, if you have prepared well, keep your cool and make correct decisions, everyone will survive. But every mistake will cost you. Now if only I wasn't completely detached from the story and characters at this point....
For smaller cons, I hate how the game's idea of variety is dumb hacking minigames every 5 steps. Also, the sidequest design is awfully lazy - often comes down to "go to area in quest description and talk to the only available NPC". Sometimes the quests will give you actual details about who you're supposed to talk with, other times game actually does expect you to just talk to random NPCs until you find one which has the dialogue line related to the quest. One time I was tasked with solving a mystery and finding out someone's identity and after each clue the game allowed me to choose who I think the mystery-man is. However I was told from the start that there are 5 clues total and the game doesn't even offer you the correct answer until you find all the clues (i.e. walk around the area and hack every interactable terminal), which makes the solution obvious and means that seemingly being able to figure it out earlier is just a red herring. Also the game is buggy as fuck - awkward animations with lots of clipping, ghosting backgrounds in cutscenes, getting blocked on areas, camera getting stuck after a dialogue forcing me to restart and so on.
Quite frankly for such an acclaimed game there's just nothing to talk about. It's an average-at-best sci-fi story with boring gameplay and multiple flaws. I regret the time put into it and I doubt I'm ever touching another BioWare game.
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