Pretty much my opinion as well. Unfortunately, the 2nd half of Death's End was a loss.

I liked that the books made me think about the Dark Forest Hypothesis. I think that it is flawed. My primary evidence is that we would see "Dark Forest" type of situations in Nature. We don't. Animals instead appear to have measured responses to finding unknown creatures. It does not appear that Natural Selection favors those that use a Dark Forest strategy. Since this is true on the Earth, we can extrapolate this result to the universe.

I recently started reading the first book. It took a bit to get going but I think it's great! I'm about 3/4 of the way through. Got sidetracked during the holidays but I'm back at it now. Great sci fi. Some of the purest I've read in some time.

I remember hearing about it and then put it on my to read list but of course it got lost in all the books and so little time scenario.

It looked pretty good. I have it on hold from the library.