I've been making a concerted effort to actually finish this while I've got a bit of time off.

The pre release moaning was all about the animation and frequently bad dialogue, which are often present admittedly, but what actually kills it (or gets close to doing so anyway) is the sheer amount of grind involved. It seems the motto used when developing it wasn't 'how can we make this fun?', it was 'how can we make this longer?'. Case in point, I've just done a side mission that involved roaming the corridors of the new citadel replacement thing to scan 4 objects (which include going through 3 or 4 loading screens), then had to hop onto my space ship (loading screen) to travel around 4 solar systems to scan things (about 8 loading screens disguised as cut scenes) only to end up needing to go onto one of the major planets, where the objective marker was in the middle of nowhere necessitating a few minutes of dull driving, and the payoff was about a minute of gunfighting and a 30 second cutscene with a moral choice I'm fairly sure wont come up again.

Appropriately enough being the beginning of a new trilogy, it's basically a spiritual successor of the first game considering it's 80% driving around planets to uninteresting sidemissions.

It's a real shame because I actually like the new squad mates and main quests, and just occasionally you'll run into a character or situation that's just as good as anything from the original three games. Just a shame they buried it all in a mountain of tedious shit. There's also a lot of story/galaxy based problems, but I suppose I'll wait until I've finished it before I rant about them.