Despite my great affection for the Mass Effect games, or perhaps exactly because of that, I could not help but feel a little let down by the first impression I got from this final chapter in the trilogy.
Problems with awkward animations, flat voice work, bad lip syncing and a universe that felt a lot smaller than in the previous two games made me really concerned that BioWare had managed to do a "Dragon Age 2" on Mass Effect 3.
For those of you that are unfamiliar with Dragon Age 2, you can replace "do a Dragon Age 2" with "completely fuck up a great franchise".
Presentation has always been a fairly big part of Mass Effect.
The Mass Effect games have played heavily on providing the player with a very cinematic experience, so when I was met with bad animations and dull voice performance that was a major issue for me.
Luckily the quality of the voice overs, the lip syncing and, to some extent, the look of the animations all improve a lot once you get deeper into the game.
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| "Sweet, I can see my house from here !...Oh crap!" |
The plot of Mass Effect 3 sees the invasion of the advanced sentient being nom-nom-nom'ing Reapers, who have arrived to rid the galaxy of all advanced life, a routine that happens every 50.000 years or so and is generally what most of aforementioned advanced life would consider "a bit of a downer".
As you take control of commander Shepard it's your job to travel across the Reaper infested galaxy and recruit the various civilizations into joining into a combined force that will be strong enough to take on the Reapers.
Being a story about large scale politics and saving all advanced life in the galaxy, Mass Effect 3 focuses much less on the intimate personal stories that were such a big part of Mass Effect 2, though you'll meet plenty of familiar faces from both of the first two games.
And as is the trademark of the Mass Effect series, the familiar faces that you run into will react differently to you depending on how you handled them in the previous games. Provided you didn't get them killed, in which case you'll be meeting new and unfamiliar faces, which again affects the way that things are going to play out.
The whole system of seeing how things you did in Mass Effect 1 and 2 ends up affecting the final chapter in the series is extremely cool, and I think that BioWare has done a great job overall of making these choices feel meaningful. You could perhaps criticize that at some point it goes a little over board, like BioWare just felt that if you were not meeting a person from ME1 or 2, or getting a reference from an event from those games, every 10 minutes then that would just be horrible. There were definitely cases where a callback to the previous games happened, where I just could not for the life of me remember the person or incident that was being referred to (but then again I do tend to drink a lot and bang my head into things, so maybe that's just my bad memory there).
As for the actual gameplay...Well, it continues to be Mass Effect.
The game is around 50% 3rd person cover based shooter and 50% exploring the galaxy and talking to people, which feels as an alright balance, though combat tends to drag on for too long every once in a while.
Combat is slightly improved from Mass Effect 2, but it's still inferior to something like Gears of War 3. It's entertaining enough, but without all the story going on around you it would definitely end up feeling quite shallow.
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| Reaper favorite activities include: Long travels through space, watching beautiful sunsets and wiping out all advanced civilizations in the galaxy |
Side missions are not as interesting as they were in Mass Effect 2, with more of them being just a few arena combat style battles and then a couple of lines of dialogue. But if you want to maximize your "galactic readiness", which measures how likely it is that you'll be successful in the final fight against the Reapers, then you'll be forced to play through all of them anyway.
I know that the ending of Mass Effect 3 has been the heated subject of controversy.
Without spoiling anything I'll just say that I can understand why the ending may not go over well with a lot of people. I didn't much like it myself, but at the same time I think that it manages to provide fairly decent closure and wraps up the story of the trilogy, which I feel is the more important success criteria for me.
Ultimately Mass Effect 3 is a game for people that have played one or both of the previous Mass Effect games.
If you've never played ME1 or ME2 then Mass Effect 3 would be a pretty horrible place to start. There are way too many references to stuff that you're just going to have no idea about, not to mention that a lot of emotional scenes will feel completely flat if you haven't already built up a connection with the Mass Effect characters over the course of the previous games.
If you *have* played ME1 and ME2, then you need to play ME3 and see the ending to the Shepard story.
It is perhaps not the magnificent explosion of awesome that we had hoped for, but it is a perfectly decent game and managed to fill me with a sense of satisfaction and a sense of "alright, that was that then. Cool".
Probably not what you wanted to hear, but if you try to go into Mass Effect 3 without sky high expectations of playing the greatest game in this console generation, then you should be able to easily find 30-40 hours of high quality sci-fi gaming fun. And that ain't bad at all.
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