and I very quickly remembered why I started to hate it so much. It's not the ridiculous story or the monotonous game-play. I actually don't mind those. I can skip the story bits and sometimes I find it nice to play a game that requires no thought beyond "go break everything that isn't you" and for the most part the game is fun enough. But then I got to the levels comprised mainly of the stupid fat things that throw explosives. They weren't too bad at first, since there would be one or two and it added a bit to the enemy variety; then the game started throwing them out en mass. Then the game started to put them in hard to reach places; and unlike every other enemy in the game, you can't reflect their attack back at them. So I have to deal with an AoE, auto-knockdown, HIGHEST DAMAGE IN THE GAME ATTACK, by playing a 3D-platformer in a game that isn't set up for any kind of platforming anything and I end up dying to a bomb. And when I described the game as "break everything that isn't you" I meant that very literally. There are some levels that literally require you to kill everything to move on. I have beat the game on HARD, but there are extra stages that I can't beat on NORMAL because I either end up dead to a bomb, or dead to the boss because I have no life left because of BOMBS!

It's a shame too, because the bomb throwers are the only flaw in the game that I just can't look past. I can forgive the story. Not every game wants to be Mass Effect. Some games just want to be good, arcade style fun, where it's just you and a million enemies. I can forgive the monotony of the game-play because there's enough superficial fluff (character accessories, etc) that put just enough visual variety that it doesn't seem as monotonous as it probably is. Most of the enemy's work (all but ONE! ) and the bosses are all a blast to fight because I had to actually learn when they gave me openings, and how to exploit those openings. It was a blast to fight some of the bosses again and start to relearn their patterns and get good at fighting them again. And then I died to a bomb