Mass Effect Trilogy Combat Examined

You're in for a ride, m8.
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The Mass Effect combat wasn't great but isn't inherently clunky as people make it seem like, the weapons were underpowered and didn't have much distinguishable playstyle effects aside from upgrades, in general the combat wasn't very well structured and could easily break at times.
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Mass Effect 2's combat is plagued with unbalancing between classes (biotics have a generally easy time) specially on hardcore, adding a global cooldown shared by all powers was incredibly bad (and didn't make much sense as biotic and tech powers are fundamentally different), adding an ammo system in place of a better overheating one made the combat feel much more like a generic shooter and didn't even get explained properly or made actual sense, removing upgrades/weapon modifications made the game much less interesting other than having linear upgrades (to be fair, ME1 had the same problem as soon as you got the spectre weapons and predator/colossus armors), the pre-placed cover system was stupid and limiting (all covers were placed by hand and it was stupid to see random boxes in the middle of nowhere and the worst part was how the entire game feels like corridor shooting.
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Mass Effect 3 got the action part right but a little too much, the whole game feels like your average Gears of War/Battlefield shooter, the missions are too scripted: go from point A to B while shooting enemies, do this and that and mission complete, instead of actually having pauses for exploring the scenario, the parts that seemed to be like this were simple corridors. The weapons actually feel different this time and are worth comparing individually, though the lack of mission variety and quantity kind of hurts this factor (unless you count multiple playthroughs and perhaps the multiplayer), the upgrades are back but feel less useful although welcome, the classes are well balanced but can become repetitive (playing as an Infiltrator meant Headshot Simulator 2012), the enemies were incredibly repetitive as well and husk hordes got boring fast (even more when you learned how to deal with individual enemies, after that enemies never tried different tactics aside from coming in larger quantities/tougher enemies in majority. The whole game feels like a scripted ride, no sandbox elements or anything to make playthroughs any different (combat-wise) aside from classes.