Mass Effect 3 Review - An adequate farewell

If you read my initial impressions about Mass Effect 3, then you already know that I was not completely overjoyed with my first few hours of playing the game.
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.

"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 Mass Effect philosophical corner: Was the Genophage okay?

While I'm chewing my way through Mass Effect 3, which has both its ups and downs, I've run into several interesting moral dilemmas that I've started to think about.
I've decided to make of couple of ultra nerdy posts, where I want to talk about issues in the Mass Effect universe their surrounding issues.

The first Mass Effect subject that I'd like to discuss is the Genophage.
The Genophage is a biological weapon that was developed by the Salarians during the Krogan Rebellion wars, which was a decades long war between the Krogan and the Council races. The Krogan Rebellion was a result of massive Krogan expansion, which eventually started to transgress onto other Council races planets. The rebellion was looking to end up in the Krogans' favor until the Genophage was deployed and started to thin their ranks.

Krogans: They like killing stuff

The Genophage affects the entire Krogan species and leaves most of the Krogan females infertile, resulting in the slow and steady decline of the population of the species due to extremely low birth rates.

First of all let's start off by establishing that deploying a biological weapon against an entire species that is designed to produce infertility is clearly a horrible thing to do.
The Genophage is effectively a weapon that attacks the Krogan population regardless of whether they are men, women or children and no matter if they are a soldier or a civilian.
So the arguments for accepting the use of this weapon would have to extraordinarily strong!

I think that the arguments for using the Genophage against the Krogans can be boiled down to three:


1) The Krogans were moved out of their "natural environment" and were not yet at a point where they were ready to start traveling between the stars. 

The Krogans were originally not a space faring species.
They lived on their native world of Tuchanka where they spent their time fighting among themselves. Indeed their infighting was so fierce that they turned the planet into a radioactive wasteland by deploying nuclear weapons.

The Krogans did not posses advanced space technology, on account of Krogan scientists being too busy finding new ways of blowing their fellows into small pieces. But this all changed when the Salarians helped the Krogans off Tuchanka and gave them access to advanced technology.

Mass Effect 3 Impressions - A mixed bag of massed effects

I've spent the last few days trying to save the galaxy from the Reapers in Mass Effect 3, clocking up about 20 hours of dialogue wheeling and Cerberus blasting.
I'm still a little ambivalent about my feelings of Mass Effect 3, but from a shaky start I'm now really warming up to the game and find myself itching to get back in the thick of Reaper busting.

As you may know from my previous article about the things that I was looking forward to seeing in Mass Effect 3, I'm a huge Mass Effect fan. The Mass Effect games are some of the very few RPG's where I actually go out of my way to clear all side content instead of just barreling straight through the main story.
I really love the fiction of the universe and the characters feel excellently realized, in no small part due to the great voice acting and cinematic camera work during dialogue.

Shoot Brutes in the face for maximum chance of sending them into a murderous rage

Naturally I was therefore extremely excited to finally getting to play the final installment in the ME trilogy.
The demo, which I've previously given my impressions on, reminded me about how much I love these games, so as soon as I got my hands on the game I wasted no time importing my Shepard and getting down to business.

But after the first couple of hours with ME3 I started to get more than a little worried about BioWare's efforts.
Much of the first hours of the game was spent listening to voice work that felt flat and badly timed, with lines often being delivered without any sense of appropriate emotional intonation and responses sometimes coming after several seconds of awkward silence.
Furthermore it seemed that whoever was in charge of lip syncing the game is a heavy drinker or a tragic stroke victim, with dialogue several times coming out of characters' mouths in ways that made it look like they were in some kind of redubbed B-movie.

Finally, while the initial part of ME3 does a good job of setting the scene and showing you some cool looking set pieces, I felt that I was being lead down straight corridors with no room to explore or choose my own approach.

"Oh Mass Effect 3!" I cried to no one in particular "What have they done to you?! You were supposed to be a seductive Asari, beautiful and perfect, but you look more like a scarred up Krogan".

Mass Effect 3 Launch Trailer features more Reapers doing their reaping thing

Mass Effect 3 is launching next week and, in an attempt to drive us into a Krogan-like state of Mass Effect fueled frenzy, BioWare has just put up the launch trailer for the game.

Oh yes, I'm ready for another ride with the good Commander!



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Why the "Geth" from Mass Effect are awesome

*Warning, contains Mass Effect 1 and 2 spoilers*

It's no secret that I'm a huge fan of the Geth from Mass Effect.

In fact I'm such a big fan that learning more about them and their development is high on my list of things I'm excited about in Mass Effect 3.

But what is it that fascinates so much about the Geth?
Surely, they're just another two-dimensional machine race that cliche-like turned on their makers and now want nothing more than destruction of life, galaxy supremacy and voting right for toasters? (remember to vote "no" on proposition #1253B!)

"Is that a flashlight on your head or are you just happy to see me?"

Or, as I have seen one ME fan describing them; "baby Reapers".

Ah, but that is exactly what the Geth are not!

5 things I can't wait to see in Mass Effect 3

I am a huge fan of the Mass Effect series.

I played the first game on Xbox and then again on PC (because I wanted to play the sequel on PC and had to get a save set up).
I have completed all side quests in Mass Effect 2 and played through all the DLC (Lair of the Shadow Broker FTW).

In short, I like me some Mass Effect!

So close, yet so far away..

So it's no surprise that I am hugely excited about Mass Effect 3.
Sadly it got pushed out from it's expected 2011 release window and into 2012, but oh well, more time to play The Old Republic I guess.

The Mass Effect universe is incredibly deep and there are so many things that I am looking forward to learning more about in the final chapter of the trilogy.

Here are the 5 things that I am giddy with excitement to see in Mass Effect 3: