mohit9206 said:
So i wanted to ask if inspite of the terrible ending should i play ME3 ? Is it as good in terms of story and gameplay as ME2 was ? I never played ME3 after reading about the ending stuff but now i feel like giving it a shot.So is it worth playing ?
No, it was all round terrible.
Ok, that's a bit of an overstatement, but there is a very true rhetoric that has appeared across the internet that the ending wouldn't have got so much attention were it not the straw that broke the camels back. And it makes sense. We've had terrible endings before. To amazing games. That a lot of people loved dearly. What makes ME3 different? The fact that it had a buttload of potential, but wasted it at every turn, with the ending being something openly obvious for everyone to take it out on.
For one we'll start off with dialogue. Did you enjoy being able to choose what Shepard said? No more, at least 70% of Shepard's lines are said automatically, with no input from the player. Quite often they will not reflect what the player is thinking, and are a blatant attempt from Bioware to form their own character out of the character you created in ME1. In ME3 you don't play your Shepard, you play Bioware's Shepard. You may be lucky and they intersect, you may not.
Next, the plot. Surely you've heard about the Deus Ex Machina by now. If not, here it comes, and I hardly count it as spoilers as its revealed in the first non-tutorial mission in the game, and is so blatantly obvious with its role in the plot its not funny. So, you find this thing called the Crucible. If you manage to build it, it'll destroy all the Reapers in one shot. You have to travel the galaxy saving the other races to convince them to build it, so you can activate it and just destroy the Reapers in one shot. Yes, that is the plot in a nutshell. Hear about an instant win button, have nothing to do with it for the rest of the game whilst you help out the other races, then use it to instantly win. The extended cut added a scenario where you didn't win by popular demand, but make no mistake that nothing you do in the game affects your chances of victory. You will win, no matter what. Just the cost of that victory is changed - though that's something that is barely touched on.
Characters... What can I say? Liara is Bioware's favourite, in case that hadn't been obvious from earlier. The others were... Ok. I think Bioware tried to go a bit too into fanservice with them, and they came out less interesting for it, but they're not bad. Except Kai Leng the literal space ninja. Yes, there is a ninja working for Cerberus. Who is utter shite. But who lives through cutscene magic every time you run into him, except the last. He is honestly just something out of a Sunday Morning kids anime, shoved into the Mass Effect universe. He is terrible.
Did you like Moral ambiguity with Cerberus in ME2? Well, no more. They were terrible, terrible bad guys all along. No really guis. They were just evil. They couldn't have ever been more grey and truly having humanity's best interests at heart. They're just Sunday Morning kids show villains.
There were some redeeming points in the plot. Some of the character's deaths were a bit touching, but outside of that... No. Also, don't expect your choices to matter in the slightest. They matter less than in ME2. Major choices get the treatment minor choices got in ME2, and minor choices are mostly non-existent outside of maybe a few extra war assets.
The game is also ridiculously linear. No selection of the order you want to do the missions in, this is the order they are going to happen in, and that's final. Sidequests are practically non-existent, with a couple on the main worlds, and the rest of them consisting of basically planet scanning with Reapers chasing you. Doesn't sound like fun? That's right, 'cause its not. You also get half these sidequests by standing next to people who are talking, eavesdropping on them, and then a mission magically appears in your journal - which is useless as it gives you no indication of where to go.
Now, if there's one thing I'll give ME3 its that the shooting mechanics are improved over ME2 by a long shot. No more having to sit behind a wall the whole game, popping up to shoot, you can actually move around, and sometimes have to. Enemies sometimes have distinct strengths and weaknesses, and will generally attack in a different fashion to each other. This means a lot of the missions have some challenge to them, unless you're a highly levelled Vanguard. Then nothing is a challenge as you are actually a god among men. A lot of people claim that the final mission was brutal, players playing as a Vanguard I've almost unanimously heard say it was a cakewalk, 'cause you have Charge on a 1 second cooldown, restoring shields, whilst using Nova to detonate shields for damage on a separate cooldown to charge [More like ME1, not ME2s shared cooldown. Well, kinda. Every class has its main set of abilities on a shared cooldown, including the old signature moves, but the new signature move is on a separate cooldown]. The only thing you have to be wary of is accidentally charging into a Reaper beam.
The game is also heavily set-piece focused. You can guarantee that plenty of times each mission there'll be something big exploding, or falling with you sliding down it, and to me that becomes tiresome. Maybe not for you.
All round I hated the game. Its combat is all I'd play it for, and the multiplayer exists for that. I guess you kinda should play it to complete Shepard's story, but IMO you're better off head-cannoning it, and going for LL instead.
