Review: Mass Effect 3

BioWare’s back for the third installment of the Mass Effect franchise. Players who’ve been there from the start have grown attached to their own particular Commander Shepards, and with them, they’ll be fighting to stop impending doom at the hands of the nefarious galaxy-culling Reapers. With each Mass Effect title comes more and more complexity; did your Mass Effect 2 end-game save have your entire support team still alive? You’d be luckier than most. What it all boils down to is that your Mass Effect 3 experiences will be just a teeny bit different than everyone else’s. Here’s mine.

It’s clear that Bioware have put an enormous amount of effort into developing the story and various plot points to go out with a bang in this final installment of the franchise. The Reapers are back and threaten to bring an end to life once and for all. You get sucked into the storyline right from the very start, and once you get going, being able to stop is a lot easier said than done. I don’t feel like Bioware have tried to do much to distinguish ME2 from ME3 and that works really well; this title flows directly on from the end of ME2 both smoothly and believably.

There is a lot of emphasis placed on developing the story without leaving any gaps or questions. The decisions made in the previous games do have an effect on how the game pans out, with your decisions in-game obviously having a big impact as well. This creates the feel that you aren’t just playing a generic video game, but are in fact contributing to creating a story unique to your Shepard. The story is really good at bringing up emotions in you that you would not expect from a video game. I feel that the people who have brought their Shepard through each game will get more out of the story than those new to the franchise, however even on its own ME3 is an amazing game to be enjoyed by all.

You don’t really realize how invested you have become in the various characters’ lives and well-being until you are put in situations that really pull at your heartstrings. The outstanding voice acting and the amazing script that goes along with it help this. It’s the smaller plots within the story that give Mass Effect 3 its stand-alone brilliance; the themes of the game are alliance and unity, drawing all the galactic forces together to fight a common enemy.

The ability to have homosexual relationships in games is not a new development, but in ME3 it isn’t just something that has been thrown in there. A few gay characters have their own stories to tell, which I feel is very brave and progressive of Bioware, particularly in this day and age where themes of equality are so relevant. Even if you’re not interested in having a homosexual relationship, just go and spend some time with your shuttle pilot; his personal story arc is one that shouldn’t be missed.

I wish the scanning functionality in ME2 was left alone, but the new version of planet-scanning does keep the core mechanic without making the exercise consuming and tedious. With so many missions on offer, you also get a bit tired of running around – at times, the maps seem padded out just because. My biggest complaint about the game is definitely the control scheme. When sprinting, or trying to revive a team member, you’ll often find yourself going in and out of cover when you didn’t want to be. Other times, you’ll roll from one side of cover to the other and back again, when all you really wanted to do was leap forward.

The online multiplayer is quite enjoyable. When I was writing notes for my review, I actually underlined “fun” three times and then later circled it. Basically, you’ll fight waves of enemies in a team of four at most. Special tasks appear at waves 3, 6 and 10. The 11^th wave is an extraction exercise – more importantly, it allows you to try a different map to the whole ordeal doesn’t get stale.

The multiplayer mode is very fast paced, which is a welcome change if you have played the campaign for too long a period. Multiplayer also proves to be great practice for the single-player campaign, making it all the more rewarding to play. Understandably, the enemies become harder and more numerous with each wave, but eventually it can turn into a bit of a mess especially on Gold (ie, the highest difficulty) maps. Even if you end up making a fool of yourself, the mode does help with your “Galactic Readiness” in the single-player mode.

As with all forms of online multiplayer, it is more fun if you are playing with people you know. Most of the time the players are pretty good, but as always there are the players who admittedly are very good…but also very selfish.

I won’t get into the ending of the game too much, but since I started out saying that Mass Effect 3 gives you a unique experience unlike anyone else’s, the ending really falls flat of that overall mission. Sure, there are 16 endings that you can experience, but they’re basically minute variations on the same theme. The worst part of it all is the little blurb that basically asks you to keep spending your cash on DLC. It’s a bit weak, and definitely impacts the game’s review score.

Overall, Mass Effect 3 is an experience not to be missed. I’d like to thank Bioware for releasing a sequel that does not disappoint. They really should be congratulated on how well they have developed such an amazing franchise and kept the quality so consistently high; the fact that there is anger over the game’s ending is a testament to how involved gamers are in the franchise.