I don't know where exactly to begin when talking about Mass Effect 3. Regardless of where I start this is going to sound like a mixed review, so in the interest of clarity I suppose the best place to start is to dispel that notion right off the bat. I hated this game. It was the most grievous insult to me as a fan of the first tow games that I could imagine it being.
Mass Effect 3 is a game that was improved in all the wrong places, almost like it was designed specifically for people who did not enjoy the first two games. (and it's even a failure in that regard but Ill get to that in a bit.) so in the first two Mass Effect games they used cover based shooting as spacers in between conversational dialog. And it worked, it fit with the context of the story and in the second game it was even quite fun. But honestly they could have broken up the talking parts with Bejeweled and it would have still been equally as relevant. Nobody plays Bioware games for the action sequences. They play because Bioware games are unparalleled at making you feel like you're a part of the world. And all the more important in Mass Effect 3 because you have two games worth of investment in this world (galaxy) you're a part of. There in lies 3 biggest problems in Mass Effect 3. (and actually 4 if you don't mind a momentary digression)
It has been 8 days since the release of Mass Effect 3 and I am still unable to correctly import my Shepard's face, and the kicker is that I can't even recreate it because the face customization tools aren't the same. I've sunk 100 hours or more into this Shepard and she's gone. It makes me wonder how they even got Mass Effect 3 out the door with a glitch like that.
On top of the face thing another aspect of Shepard that doesn't survive the transfer from ME 2 to ME 3 is Shepard's personality. Unless you played straight Paragon or straight Renegade (or you flipped back and forth between the extremes) you can't roll play to your Shepard's personality. The entire conversation mechanic has been reduced to picking between two options. (Thankfully they didn't hit the Dragon Age 2 problem where the dialog options were so polarized that there would never be a scenario where any sane person would switch between the choices) But about 50% of the time I'd run into a situation where I had to stop and go: ?Nope. Shepard wouldn't say either of those thing.? Bioware making all the choices binary seriously defeats replay value. (and to someone like me who has 7 different Shepard profiles that I was expecting to be able to roll play through this game, lack of variety in choices is the most soul crushingly devastating thing about this game.
Secondly the ?cannon?
In ME 2 you work for Cerberus, a splinter cell terrorist organization, and if you choose you can side with them and get all buddy buddy with the Illusive Man and give him a bunch of really cool stuff. Then... at the beginning of Mass Effect 3 you're back with the Alliance and they treat you like a god damn terrorist and they put you under lock and key right up until the reapers rip Earth a new one. My question is ?WHY??
There's a pretty good chance (quite literally 50/50) that the Illusive Man has no reason to be cross with you. Now they play that out as the story progresses but that still doesn't explain why a Renegade Shepard even went back to Earth in the first place. Also remember that big epic decision you got to make at the end of the first game, who takes the council seat. Yeah, that doesn't matter either. So from the get-go they pretty much invalidate all the important choices you made up until that point.
Thirdly the end. I've always been a strong proponent of the: Bioware are excellent script writers, but horrible storytellers mindset. And that's never been more prevalent then at the end of Mass Effect 3. It seems ridiculously simple. What have you been trying to do for the better part of 3 games? Stop the Reapers! The end is practically written for them and they still fumble it harder than I thought humanly possible. This may not be how you feel, but the ending is the most important part of any story, and not having a satisfying one renders everything leading up to that point completely moot. And in the case of Mass Effect 3 it doesn't just have Mass Effect 3's fate riding on the ending, it carries the fate of the first two games with it as well. So Bioware has effectively destroyed two of my favorite games with how they chose to end Mass Effect 3.
All that's not to say they did everything wrong, The writing is still solid gold. (As you should come to expect no less from Bioware) The atmosphere and ambiance are better than ever. There are a bunch of genuinely teer jerking moments in this game, It adds a very effective juxtaposition against the humor in the first two games. It conveys the since that the war is taking it's toll on the galaxy, sucking the levity out of all its inhabitance. The graphics are beautiful. And most surprisingly Mark Meer (The voice of Male Shepard) actually delivers some good voice acting (For a change) All that is small comfort after all the things they do so horrifically wrong though.
When I talked about being improved in all of the wrong places I meant it. Compared to the previous 2 games the combat parts are leaps and bounds above where they started. It's almost like if they released this game under the name ?Gears of War 4? it would be looking at a much better write up. Unfortunately for every step forward the combat takes it takes another one backwards.
The enemy AI is brilliant, they flank you, they use tactics that make you think on your feet. There are different classes of enemies that are differentiated by more than what kind of shield they have on. In some of the fights the cover based combat even gets intense and fun! Imagine that, fun cover based shooting.
But that's all neutralized by the bad points. The Friendly AI is retarded. So every firefight is pretty much just you and two sacks of dead weight getting your asses shot off.
Grenades are back with a vengeance, and the controls are fucking broken. Those two things together make the game unplayable on higher difficulties.
Next we bump up against slightly more minor problems. Like the fact that no matter what class you play you can choose your weapon load out making the vast majority of weapons useless. I didn't touch a pistol, SMG or shotgun for my entire playthrough of the game, and I can't imagine I'll ever use those weapons because my Sniper/AR combo gets me out of any jam. (that's not a direct result of the shitty controls.)
Also hacking is gone. It's gone the way of inventory management and the Mako. Not replaced by anything just gone. You know like they should have done with planet scanning, but alas, we're not that lucky. They actually found a way to make planet scanning suck even harder, which I didn't think was possible. They deserve a fucking medal for that one.
And I suppose I should mention the multyplayer before I put the wraps on this. It actually works rather well. It's team based and has an almost Left 4 Dead esque feel to it. It's basically a rip off of Horde Mode from Gears of War. And you have to spend your reward points on random drops just to ensure maximum frustration. But you can still get some fun out of it. It also ties into the single player in the most Slap-Dash way possible. You spend the game collecting forces to take with you to war but you can only access half of them if you don't play a crap ton of multyplayer right before the final battle. So if you play ME 3 in a marathon you need to break off right before the final mission and do a bunch of multyplayer in order to get the best ending.
This may just be my extreme prejudiced against multyplayer games in general but I feel that if Bioware had taken all that time and money and resources they spend on multyplayer and gave it to the writers to, I duno..., come up with a better ending, or put a neutral dialog option back in the script, or come up with multiple starting points. Mass Effect 3 would be a far better game than it stands right now.
In conclusion, for being chock full of unforgivable missteps this otherwise phenomenal game is just kinda shit.
Mass Effect 3 is a game that was improved in all the wrong places, almost like it was designed specifically for people who did not enjoy the first two games. (and it's even a failure in that regard but Ill get to that in a bit.) so in the first two Mass Effect games they used cover based shooting as spacers in between conversational dialog. And it worked, it fit with the context of the story and in the second game it was even quite fun. But honestly they could have broken up the talking parts with Bejeweled and it would have still been equally as relevant. Nobody plays Bioware games for the action sequences. They play because Bioware games are unparalleled at making you feel like you're a part of the world. And all the more important in Mass Effect 3 because you have two games worth of investment in this world (galaxy) you're a part of. There in lies 3 biggest problems in Mass Effect 3. (and actually 4 if you don't mind a momentary digression)
It has been 8 days since the release of Mass Effect 3 and I am still unable to correctly import my Shepard's face, and the kicker is that I can't even recreate it because the face customization tools aren't the same. I've sunk 100 hours or more into this Shepard and she's gone. It makes me wonder how they even got Mass Effect 3 out the door with a glitch like that.
On top of the face thing another aspect of Shepard that doesn't survive the transfer from ME 2 to ME 3 is Shepard's personality. Unless you played straight Paragon or straight Renegade (or you flipped back and forth between the extremes) you can't roll play to your Shepard's personality. The entire conversation mechanic has been reduced to picking between two options. (Thankfully they didn't hit the Dragon Age 2 problem where the dialog options were so polarized that there would never be a scenario where any sane person would switch between the choices) But about 50% of the time I'd run into a situation where I had to stop and go: ?Nope. Shepard wouldn't say either of those thing.? Bioware making all the choices binary seriously defeats replay value. (and to someone like me who has 7 different Shepard profiles that I was expecting to be able to roll play through this game, lack of variety in choices is the most soul crushingly devastating thing about this game.
Secondly the ?cannon?
In ME 2 you work for Cerberus, a splinter cell terrorist organization, and if you choose you can side with them and get all buddy buddy with the Illusive Man and give him a bunch of really cool stuff. Then... at the beginning of Mass Effect 3 you're back with the Alliance and they treat you like a god damn terrorist and they put you under lock and key right up until the reapers rip Earth a new one. My question is ?WHY??
There's a pretty good chance (quite literally 50/50) that the Illusive Man has no reason to be cross with you. Now they play that out as the story progresses but that still doesn't explain why a Renegade Shepard even went back to Earth in the first place. Also remember that big epic decision you got to make at the end of the first game, who takes the council seat. Yeah, that doesn't matter either. So from the get-go they pretty much invalidate all the important choices you made up until that point.
Thirdly the end. I've always been a strong proponent of the: Bioware are excellent script writers, but horrible storytellers mindset. And that's never been more prevalent then at the end of Mass Effect 3. It seems ridiculously simple. What have you been trying to do for the better part of 3 games? Stop the Reapers! The end is practically written for them and they still fumble it harder than I thought humanly possible. This may not be how you feel, but the ending is the most important part of any story, and not having a satisfying one renders everything leading up to that point completely moot. And in the case of Mass Effect 3 it doesn't just have Mass Effect 3's fate riding on the ending, it carries the fate of the first two games with it as well. So Bioware has effectively destroyed two of my favorite games with how they chose to end Mass Effect 3.
All that's not to say they did everything wrong, The writing is still solid gold. (As you should come to expect no less from Bioware) The atmosphere and ambiance are better than ever. There are a bunch of genuinely teer jerking moments in this game, It adds a very effective juxtaposition against the humor in the first two games. It conveys the since that the war is taking it's toll on the galaxy, sucking the levity out of all its inhabitance. The graphics are beautiful. And most surprisingly Mark Meer (The voice of Male Shepard) actually delivers some good voice acting (For a change) All that is small comfort after all the things they do so horrifically wrong though.
When I talked about being improved in all of the wrong places I meant it. Compared to the previous 2 games the combat parts are leaps and bounds above where they started. It's almost like if they released this game under the name ?Gears of War 4? it would be looking at a much better write up. Unfortunately for every step forward the combat takes it takes another one backwards.
The enemy AI is brilliant, they flank you, they use tactics that make you think on your feet. There are different classes of enemies that are differentiated by more than what kind of shield they have on. In some of the fights the cover based combat even gets intense and fun! Imagine that, fun cover based shooting.
But that's all neutralized by the bad points. The Friendly AI is retarded. So every firefight is pretty much just you and two sacks of dead weight getting your asses shot off.
Grenades are back with a vengeance, and the controls are fucking broken. Those two things together make the game unplayable on higher difficulties.
So let me break this down for you. There are 6 commands on the A button.
Run, hold A
Take cover, press A
Roll, press A
Vault over cover, double tap A
Vault over cover, direction and tap A
Pick up/use, tap A
So let me run through a couple scenarios that will happen to you.
You run up to cover while taking fire. You try to get into cover but roll instead. You get shot to pieces.
You run up to cover while taking fire. You vault over cover instead of taking cover. You get shot to pieces.
You are in cover. Someone lobs a grenade at you. You try to get out of cover and run, you accidentally vault over cover. You get shot to pieces.
You are in cover. Someone lobs a grenade at you. You get out of cover. You try to run away. You accidentally pop right back into the cover you just got out of. You get blown up.
Every one of those things will happen to you.
Run, hold A
Take cover, press A
Roll, press A
Vault over cover, double tap A
Vault over cover, direction and tap A
Pick up/use, tap A
So let me run through a couple scenarios that will happen to you.
You run up to cover while taking fire. You try to get into cover but roll instead. You get shot to pieces.
You run up to cover while taking fire. You vault over cover instead of taking cover. You get shot to pieces.
You are in cover. Someone lobs a grenade at you. You try to get out of cover and run, you accidentally vault over cover. You get shot to pieces.
You are in cover. Someone lobs a grenade at you. You get out of cover. You try to run away. You accidentally pop right back into the cover you just got out of. You get blown up.
Every one of those things will happen to you.
Next we bump up against slightly more minor problems. Like the fact that no matter what class you play you can choose your weapon load out making the vast majority of weapons useless. I didn't touch a pistol, SMG or shotgun for my entire playthrough of the game, and I can't imagine I'll ever use those weapons because my Sniper/AR combo gets me out of any jam. (that's not a direct result of the shitty controls.)
Also hacking is gone. It's gone the way of inventory management and the Mako. Not replaced by anything just gone. You know like they should have done with planet scanning, but alas, we're not that lucky. They actually found a way to make planet scanning suck even harder, which I didn't think was possible. They deserve a fucking medal for that one.
And I suppose I should mention the multyplayer before I put the wraps on this. It actually works rather well. It's team based and has an almost Left 4 Dead esque feel to it. It's basically a rip off of Horde Mode from Gears of War. And you have to spend your reward points on random drops just to ensure maximum frustration. But you can still get some fun out of it. It also ties into the single player in the most Slap-Dash way possible. You spend the game collecting forces to take with you to war but you can only access half of them if you don't play a crap ton of multyplayer right before the final battle. So if you play ME 3 in a marathon you need to break off right before the final mission and do a bunch of multyplayer in order to get the best ending.
This may just be my extreme prejudiced against multyplayer games in general but I feel that if Bioware had taken all that time and money and resources they spend on multyplayer and gave it to the writers to, I duno..., come up with a better ending, or put a neutral dialog option back in the script, or come up with multiple starting points. Mass Effect 3 would be a far better game than it stands right now.
In conclusion, for being chock full of unforgivable missteps this otherwise phenomenal game is just kinda shit.
