Review: Mass Effect 3

After five years of waiting the Reapers have finally arrived and humanity faces extinction. Now only you, as Commander Shepard are the last hope of the entire galaxy. This game was nothing short of being the most intense and emotional joy ride I've experienced in a long time. The game was flawless in all it's aspects. Mass Effect 3 is truly a contender for game of the year.


The Good
-Rich character and weapon customization
-Intense and fast-paced combat
-Amazing story, dialogue and character development
-Choices you made in previous games will have a big impact in this one
-Big choices will have to be made
-Multiplayer is very fun and engaging
-Beautiful graphics and brilliant original score
The Bad
-Some minor glitches
-Long loading times
-Finding resources is still not that fun
The Ugly
-The ending left us with questions and made all our choices irrelevant

Story

Mass Effect has always had a strong story element, and this game is the strongest of them all. After the events of Mass Effect 2's Arrival, Commander Shepard has been relieved of duty and grounded. However, the Alliance has been finding massive signals approaching Earth, so they go to Shepard for his advice. And he/she has only one answer, the Reapers. At that moment, gigantic 2-story tall machines rained down the sky and began to decimate everything in their path. The Reapers have finally arrived. Now the first human spectre must travel across the entire galaxy to recruit every alien race and gather whatever you can to take Earth back from the Reapers.

What made this story so great was the emotional impact it had throughout the whole game. With the reapers slowly taking the galaxy by control, I was always on the edge of my seat always expecting the worse to happen. There were so many amazing moments throughout this game, there were parts where I laughed hysterically, parts that had a load of suspense and even parts where I actually cried, and if you loved the story of Mass Effect as much as I do, chances are you will cry too.

The struggle has taken a major toll on Shepard's morale

While in the first two games your paragon and renegade levels would always effect how you would handle a situation and could open new dialogue options, this time it is different. Now Shepard has a reputation system, where talking to citizens, aiding others in need, doing side quests will give him a higher reputation, unlocking paragon and renegade dialogue options that could help you solve impossible situations. Your paragon and renegade levels now only affect your appearance. And the choices you do have to make will be massive. In the other games big choices would usually either doing something or not doing it and the difference will be minor. Now entire races and even worlds depend on your decisions, but no pressure.

My biggest problem with this game would definitely be the ending. If you haven't heard already, there is a huge controversy over the ending. I'm not going to spoil anything for you but the only thing that bugged me about it was that the ending scene of the game seem a little too farfetched, even for Mass Effect and that how the ending was set up, made all the choices from all three games worth absolutely nothing, despite the fact Casey Hudson said himself that our choices will matter in the end. Despite this big snafu the game showed an exemplary example of amazing story telling, character development and dialogue.

Story: A+

Graphics

While Mass Effect 3 still has the artistic direction of Mass Effect 2, Bioware upped the ante by giving the game a rougher, grittier look while also making some of the most beautiful environments I have ever seen in a video game. From start to finish the game gives you a plethora of unique environments each being beautiful up close and far away. When you start the game on Earth, you can see once glamorous city being decimated right in front of you and even miles away as the Reapers landed right above you. It was a terrifying sight but I was still awe struck at amazing detail of the world around me.

We're gonna need a bigger gun...

The amazing imagery spread across the entire galaxy from the massive dust storm on Mars, the tropical cliffs of Sur'Kesh, the Desert Lands of Rannoch and even seeing the ancient ruins of Tuchanka, revealing that the Krogan were a once civilized and cultured race. I wish I could go into more detail but that would take just way too long so I'll just show you. (These are all screenshots from the game not concept art.)

The Salarian home world, Sur'Kesh

A Geth base on Rannoch, the Quarian home world

Mars and it's massive dust storm

Luckily all these amazing worlds didn't sacrifice the character models. All characters and npc's are brilliantly designed as well as the weapons and, which all look very unique and can be customized to look even cooler. Another cool bonus is that most armor pieces keeps Shepard's iconic N7 stripe on his/her right arm, well played Bioware.

Dressed for Success. And killing reapers.

Graphics: A+

Sound

Mass Effect 3 has one of the best scores I've ever heard. There are pieces that truly captures an intense emotional moment and ones that still retain its futuristic sound reminiscent from the first one. In the beginning of the game when you leave Earth and witness a small boy running for his life, you hear a soft piano that fills you with grief but also with hope, and is then overpowered by a blast of brass horns that resemble the terrifying call of a reaper, a true musical masterpiece. However, the game does reuses music used in the older games for instance the Citadel still uses the same soundtrack for the presidium in Mass Effect 1, but it's still good music.

Sound effects have received a major upgrade. The guns from the previous two were way too flimsy and sounded more like laser shooters than actual rifles. Now weapons sound and feel like real guns. When using the predator pistol it had an actual punch to it and sounded like a real handgun rather than some futuristic pea-shooter.

Sometimes "pew pew pew" doesn't cut it.

Weapons weren't the only one with improved effects, Shepard and his squadmates' abilities now sound as deadly as the are in action. In the previous games you could mix biotic attacks together to cause even more damage and mayhem. Now when you mix them, for example using pull on an enemy and have Liara finish them off with warp, the explosion is massive and will blast through your speakers. And that's not just with biotics, mixing tech and combat abilities will also create amazing sounds like shattering a frozen enemy with another ability will cause a giant cryo explosion that sounds like you blew up an iceberg with a rocket launcher.

Voice acting is brilliantly well done. Mass Effect brings promises with a huge star cast and returning characters including Martin Sheen (Illusive Man), Seth Green (Joker) and newcomers like Freddie Prinze Jr. (James Vega). Everyone brings their best performance in this game, and a great time to do so to enhance the intense feeling of loss, sacrifice and suspense as the game's running theme. Except for the voice actor for the little kid, he was pretty awful.

Sound: A+

Gameplay:

One thing I've noticed about a lot of other Mass Effect fans is that they complain about how Bioware made ME2 more like Gears of War than an actual RPG. But I'm also pretty sure most of those people were the PC users who never played Gears of War like I did and just went by watching videos. First I want to point out that Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3 play NOTHING like Gears, they have a cover combat system and that's all they have in common. And second, Mass Effect was and always has been called and ACTION RPG, meaning it's supposed to have action based combat gameplay while still also having character customization, player choices and open world system like an RPG. This is what my interpretation of what the Mass Effect series is about, and it's MY opinion.

Mass Effect has been a constant evolving hybrid of both action shooter and RPG. The first one lacked action and had too many items that made organizing my inventory a chore. ME2 trimmed all that fat and got rid of useless features like omni-gel and exploring boring, lifeless planets, but took away too much of its RPG elements and not to mention scanning planets was annoying. Mass Effect 3 has a perfect blend of action and RPG, with easy but well detailed skill and weapon customization.

Things can get really tense with 20 story reaper trying to blast you to pieces.

Pacing of the combat is much faster but still has a strong practical approach. Combat, tech and biotic abilities can now be chained together rather than just one and can create multiple and deadly combos. And enemies come in three groups, Cerberus, Geth and Reapers. Each group comes with a different tactic and has a variety of enemies and they can get pretty overwhelming since their a.i. system allows to adapt as the battle changes.

You can survive a Husk's attack but other enemies can instantly kill you no matter what.

The skill tree is very similar to Mass Effect 2's but adds a whole new twist. You can fully upgrade all your abilities but by the fourth level increase you get to make a choice on how you want to upgrade it. Say you're a Vanguard class and is fully upgrading your signature Charge ability, by the fourth upgrade you can either increase its damage and force or can hit an extra 2 enemies within 2 meters of impact, then you can choose whether to temporarily increase your weapon damage after a charge or power damage, then the final upgrade gives you the choice for a 25% chance charge wont cause a cool-down or have 100% of your shields restored after one (great for chaining up with the nova attack), you can mix hundreds of skills between and your squad and can even reset them if you aren't happy with your current settings (for a price of course)

A treat to my fellow Vanguards, Shockwave is finally useful now.

Weapons can now be upgraded and customized like in the first game but in a different way. Weapons have different stats and functionality. You can put on two weapons attachments that can increase it stats like damage or accuracy and can purchase an upgrade for your weapons in your armory. Another note is that each class can carry any and as many weapons they want but each weapon has a carry weight. Weapons like Assault Rifles and Sniper Rifles will weigh more and will increase the time of you abilities cool-down period, soldier classes will have a higher carry weight and can use more and stronger weapons while adepts and engineers should stick to one or two smaller weapons for full effectiveness of their skills.


A new system in ME3 is collecting war assets. By completing missions, talking to others, doing fetch quests and playing multiplayer, Shepard will gain assets to help him fight the reapers to take back Earth. However you can also lose assets as easy as you can gain it, some choices you make will have a negative effect on your military strength later on. However these assents can't be everything, you also have an effective military strength that will ultimately decide the fate of Earth. The EMS (effective military strength) is determined by the galactic readiness, which is achieved by playing multilayer. However you don't need to play multiplayer to achieve the perfect ending, but it will require a lot more exploring in the galaxy.

I was first appalled with the inclusion of multiplayer but after careful investigation and actually playing it, I must say I am extremely impressed. Mass Effect 3 uses a four player class-based co-op where you fight through 11 waves of enemies. Teamwork will be needed to survive especially as enemies get more aggressive each wave. Skill and weapon customization is just like the one in single-player except you MP character will only have 3 skills to use. During one of these waves there's a chance you will be assigned with a certain task like unlocking several terminals throughout the map or killing high valued targets, these objectives are simple but failing to do them will cause you to instantly fail the mission, and most of these will require you to stick together.

Each alien race will have certain classes (except human) that they can use and each have different skills and special abilities. The only problem is that alien races have to be unlocked by purchasing packs that you can get by earning credits from playing multiplayer, whats worse is that finding these races will appear at random. But you'll probably enjoying yourself too much to notice. (You do get a random free race to use when you start though)

Still waiting to unlock a Drell...

Gameplay: A+

Replay

Mass Effect 3 will last you a while. Breezing through the story will take about 20 hours, add an extra ten or fifteen if you are going to take the extra time doing extra missions, building relationships and helping others. And even if you imported your ME2 save, you won't hit the level cap or purchase every upgrade weapon, mod or armor on your first playthrough. And if you're like me you might have multiple save files with different Shepard with different actions, choices, personality and romances so no two stories will be the same. And mutliplayer is made that you will be enjoying it for a while and come back for even more. (Your galactic readiness lowers by one percent every time you start up the game, to make it worth coming back to). Bioware has done a good job of making sure you continue to play afterwards even after beating the game, something that has plagues the first two Mass Effects.

Replay: A+

I'm glad to say that this game gets a perfect score from me, after several of my most anticipated games utterly disappointed me, I'm happy that this one did not. It played perfectly, sounded perfectly and is a true mix of amazing big budget gameplay while having a beautiful and independent art direction. Mass Effect 3 shines in all aspects what makes a good video game. If you loved the first two games, you'll love this one. And if you never picked up the first two Mass Effect games, while this one is more welcoming to newcomers, I definitely recommend playing the first two. Mass Effect 3 is a guarantee to get 2012's game of the year, without a doubt.

Gaming perfection.

Mass Effect 3: A+