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.
