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".
Luckily things started to improve after I got past the first six or seven hours.
After being forced through a narrow path for the opening part of the game you eventually start picking up side missions and get to roam around the Citadel and talk to random strangers.
The voice work seems to really pick up and the lip syncing issues seem to get better.
I don't know if the made the first part of the game last and had to rush to get it done, if they sourced it out to 3rd world programmers that had previously only worked on Facebook games or if they play tested it with highly intoxicated testers that gave it two thumbs up without realizing that they had just been staring at the menu screen for three hours.
In any case, it's a real shame that Mass Effect 3 seems to put its worst foot forward in this manner and I just hope it doesn't scare away too many people, since there's a great game underneath the first hours of "meeeeeeh".
The game itself is pretty much Mass Effect 2 in terms of mechanics and gameplay, which is probably going to be a good thing for most people (it sure is for me).
There's a lot of shooting to be done, and while the combat is perfectly serviceable, I really come to the Mass Effect games for the narrative.
 |
| No matter if you prefer biotics or guns there are lots of ways of making things go boom in Mass Effect 3 |
Perhaps this is why I thought that the combat dragged on a bit too long in some places.
There are a lot of "arena" type fights in ME3, where you'll enter an area and notice the stacks of ammo and conveniently placed cover, giving you just enough time to think "so I guess we'll have a fight here" before enemy troops starting pouring in.
A lot of these fights seem to go on far too long for my tastes. It's not particularly hard to kill all of the enemies. It's a matter of sitting in cover and peppering the incoming Husks/Cerberus baddies with equal amounts of bullets and biotics (the good old B&B combo!). But after doing that for a couple of minutes you really just want to move on, instead of having kill wave after wave of cannon fodder.
Obviously the big thing about ME3 is the story that concludes the telling of the galaxy harvesting Reapers and also getting to see all your old friends from ME1 and ME2 again.
I won't spoil any of the story here, but let me just say that plenty of familiar faces show up and do their part to contribute to your great adventure.
If you were worried that BioWare would not be able to make a good RPG after the very underwhelming "Dragon Age 2", then I can alleviate your fears.
There are definitely some issues with points of Mass Effect 3, notably the beginning of the game, which made me think back to Dragon Age 2, with cold sweats breaking out as a result, but after dumping 20 hours into the game it's clear that ME3 is a solid entry in the Mass Effect series, though I am not quite ready to say if it comes up short against ME2 or not.
Now, I need to go raise a Reaper fighting army...
Subscribe in a reader
No comments:
Post a Comment