Collectors Edition Boxart
The Mass Effect series is very near and dear to me. At the time of this writing my steam profile has me clocked at nearly 150 hours of game time between 1 & 2 alone, I don’t know what the threshold for ‘fanboy’ status is, but if I’m not there yet, I’m perhaps getting there? I tell you this because expecting me to be entirely unbiased here would completely unreasonable, and you’d be fooling yourself if you thought I might be. I’ll say this upfront though, my fandom works for and against Mass Effect 3. I’m going to assume you’ve played Mass Effect 1 and/or 2 and if not, you have nothing to see here. Honestly, if you haven’t this game is not yet for you, go play those 2 (or at least Mass Effect 2 with the Genesis DLC) and come back; don’t worry I’ll wait…
The combat remains mostly unchanged, decent 3rd person cover based action with stop and command squad play (if you’re into that sort of thing). The control are the same, but for an adept (my Mass Effect class of choice) the game play is quite different. Gone are the days of hiding in the back and curving biotics around cover to control the crowds for some divide and conquer. Even if you’re more interested in the strategic aspect of combat in this game you’re going to be required to get around the battlefield, because of the way the enemy spawn points are handled, the some areas seem less like linear dungeons where you move from checkpoint to checkpoint, and more like arenas, so while you move into an area and you push forward, it is likely that you will get flanked at some point. In addition there are smoke grenades that will break your line of sight so you will often have to move around those. I’m sure other classes won’t notice this as much, but it did enhance the experience in my playthrough, and certainly worth noting here.
It doesn’t feel as tight as it did in ME2 however. I often found myself sticking to cover I didn’t intend to a lot of the time, or I’d be navigating around cover and the camera would swing in weird ways. Now normally I would defend this type of thing as being ok if it happened once in a while, this was different to me for some reason, I found most of the time it really took me out of the experience. This is probably the first of the unrealistic fanboy expectations I had for the game.
There have also been improvements across the board in customization, weapon mods are back, and they introduced a clever encumbrance system that penalizes your power recharge time based on the weight of the weapons you carry. They also give you more/earlier choices in your character abilities, that makes (at least to me) Mass Effect 3 feel a little more like an RPG than its predecessor. To the same end, some of the dialogue options felt like they carried a lot of weight, so much so that even after loading in a pure renegade save I found myself opting for paragon choices in fear of losing support for my cause. I’m lead to believe that this would not be the case if I had not gone the diplomatic route but I didn’t want to risk it on my first playthrough because I wanted to be as true to my Shepard as I could be. I think RPG fans are going to approve of these changes a lot.
While it’s not perfect mechanically it is certainly competent, and Mass Effect has never really been about the gameplay. The story has always been the driving force of this series, particularly considering how everyone feels like they have their own Shepard and that the experience is truly their own and no one else’s Shepard is like theirs. I’m sure that Bioware has some awesome stats that show that half of the Shepards out there are exactly the same, but the way that they have at least given you the impression that this is not the case is truly commendable. All of the expected production qualities are here, great cutscenes, great voice work (for the most part). I feel like I came into this with some realistic expectations for the story; Shepard would have to reconcile the universe to take back earth, and it wouldn’t be all that different from recruiting a crew in ME2. I wasn’t entirely wrong about that, but it certainly wasn’t what I expected, the truth of it is they wrapped most of the species up in one story arch, that spanned maybe 15 or so missions, and to be honest that was one of the two segments of the game that I found really engaging and really up to the standards that Bioware had set for themselves with the recruitment/loyalty missions in ME2 and DLC. It seemed to me that many of the missions were much much shorter on the arena style maps, as opposed to linear “dungeons” that have plot lines that uncover as you progress.
‘War assets’ are essentially how you prepare for the final battle, and depending on how many quests you complete, your ‘war assets meter’ on your ‘war map’ increases and this will gauge how prepared you are to take on the reapers. The sad part is that most of these quests are based on scanning planets similar to mining in ME2, with some changes, and then taking the thing you found back to some random person on the Citadel to gain their support. I’m certain that scanning planets and running around the Citadel consumed more of my time in Mass Effect 3 than in combat scenarios, and cutscenes which to me is the biggest disappointment about this game. At least in ME2 you explored cities on a few different planets for your side quests, it is literally entirely on the Citadel in Mass Effect 3. It honestly felt like in the midst of saving his planet Shepard was an errand boy much of the time. There are select few side quests that take place in a some of the smaller arena style locations mentioned above but quite frankly, not nearly enough. My latest run through of Mass Effect 2 with all the DLC was clocked in at around 25hrs, I believe I did everything from what I recall. ME3 is about on par with that.
You will often run into former companions and sometimes knock out a mission for them, and that stuff can be interesting, so they can explain what they’ve been doing for the three years since the end of ME2 and why or why they won’t be joining you for the final showdown. It’s nice that they’re in here, after playing ME2 you certainly feel a relationship with these characters but I’m sure many will believe that they weren’t used enough based on how much time they invested in recruiting them in the first place. In my mind it would make very little sense to go through the motions of recruiting them all again, however your options do feel quite a bit limited when selecting your team for missions compared to ME2 because of the significantly smaller selection of squad members.
I need to say that this game has multiplayer, and that it is good, and fun in my opinion. 4 player wave based combat for experience points and credits with a nice upgrade/unlock system that can be bolstered by in-game currency or micro-transaction. I’m breezing over this but it honestly is good, worth checking out, and will add good longevity to the game for those who would be motivated to level all the classes, or to play with friends.
Unlike the rest of the internet I’m not so much opposed to the ending but I’ll get into that in a totally spoiler post at some point, suffice to say I understand why they went the way they did, I think it was appropriate, maybe it could have been better but I’m not about to be up in arms about it. I had a good enough time with Mass Effect 3, I really did, but even after trying to throttle my expectations I was still let down. While I found the context around the main story line more dire, in most cases it was a lot less interesting than ME2. This is probably the most pointless review I’ll ever write because anyone who played the others couldn’t possibly pass on this, and anyone who didn’t play the others quite honestly has no business playing this game yet.
