4. The Human Reaper (Mass Effect 2)
The Terminator, as it's often called, is the one single most identifiable disappointment in Mass Effect 2, possibly even in the franchise if you're in the camp that's gotten over the third game's ending. The suicide mission preceding the final showdown with the 'human Reaper' is an all out, balls to the wall awesomefest, requiring you to carefully select the best of your elite team for multiple unique jobs. Choose badly and they'll die. It's a brilliant mission that has deep, long-running consequences for the Mass Effect universe. And it's all brought to a somewhat crushing halt when the final boss is unveiled to be a reaper supposedly modelled in the shape of a human. As captivating as the game was, and as engrossed as I was in the suicide mission, I clearly recall the feeling of mild disappointment at the revelation of the game's final big bad. Simply put, it wasn't challenging enough, and it was more than a little goofy. One gets the impression that BioWare were striving to give players the chills by showing the extent of the Collector's grim brutality by turning genuine humans into liquid sludge and constructing a huge Reaper exoskeleton in our own form, but it came across as borderline laughable. We don't fear humans, or even humans twisted beyond recognition in a mockery of our true form we fear the unknown. In Mass Effect 3's most recent DLC, Leviathan, I had a moment of genuine discomfort and fear when submerging down beneath a planet's sea, all the way down to the ocean floor and was confronted by a monstrous organism that somewhat resembled a crustacean met with a jellyfish. This was one of the beings the Reapers had been built by and modelled on. It made me feel hugely more uncomfortable than the baby Reaper ever could have hoped to, and I never even had to fight it.