Review: Mass Effect 3

Pros: Exciting combat, engaging characters, epic and original story line.

Cons: Confusing and unfulfilling ending, overly simplified exploration system.

Final Judgement:  If you’ve played the previous titles, you don’t need my two cents to decide to play this game.  Even with the ending, Mass Effect 3 is still one of the best games I’ve played.

http://masseffect.com

Available For: PS3, Xbox, PC

Holy Fuck, look out god damn it, its Mass Effect 3! Where or where do I even begin with this title? To pretend that I wasn’t stupid excited to get my mits on this game would be like saying Captain Picard enjoys his tea lukewarm. It’s rare that I get this excited about the release of a title. Oh sure, I look forward to the release of lots of games… X-Com, Bio Shock:Infinite, Halo 4 just to name a few that are coming up. But when Mass Effect 3 showed up at my door three days before its estimated delivery date... I may have pee’d a little. Mass Effect has always been exactly what I look for in a good video game. A great story with well thought out memorable characters that you actually find yourself giving a damn about. A game that tells truly epic space opera that we really haven’t had seen since Battlestar Galactica. Add to that a level of character customization that not only lets you play a hero that looks like you but lets you play anything from a complete fucking bad ass tearing through the universe to a  granola munching kumbaya singing nice guy… or ya know, anything in between.

As I said... or anything in between, seriously what is Shepard doing here?

And so here we come to it, the final chapter in what some are calling “The Reaper War” Saga.  In the lead-up to this title Bio Ware played up the idea that those players who carried forward their characters through the first two games would be able to see the total sum of their decisions in the final show down with the Reapers.  The accumulation of their consequences or actions the mass of the effect on their… oh I get it now, clever. While Bio Ware does a superb job on this third game they fall short in the final fifteen or so minutes of the game. Sorry I should rephrase, it doesn’t just “fall short” it falls face first through a plate glass window in to a pit full of vinegar salt and barb wire.  However, let’s look past this minor faux pas for the moment as thinking about it too much makes me grow despondent and I start staring longingly out the window and singing Usher.  So I’ll come back to it at the end of the review after I’ve thought about all the good times I had.

"We had some good times running around the galaxy didn't we EDI?"
"We Sure did Jeffy, we suuuuure did."

For those new to this series the big thing you need to know about Mass is that there is a continuous story line between the games, a story line that is by in large determined by your decisions as the player. What this means is that two peoples play through of the Mass Effect trilogy will look grossly different depending on how they chose to play the game.  The continuous story line makes for a richer gaming experience then you normally find in story driven games and I would say it’s the Tao of Mass Effect.  Without it you basically have Gears of War with less steroids and characters that didn’t get personality cues from an Ed Hardy commercial.  If you haven’t played the previous two titles do yourself a huge favor, go download or pick up the previous two and play them through sequentially, importing your character. If you don’t you can still enjoy Mass Effect 3 for what it is but you will miss out on all the extra content and tailored encounters that the game affords you for playing the trilogy cover to cover.

Extra content, like sexing up your helmeted alien friend here.

Now, for those of you who have played the previous two titles, there isn’t a lot that has changed from the Mass Effect 2 as far as gameplay is concerned.  The combat system from Mass Effect 2 was one of the best things the developers  did for the series and luckily they continued the same style through to Mass Effects 3.  The primary action and story of the game unfold through third peron, cover based shooting missions, in these missions you select two squad mates from your team to accompany you, which again adds some uniqueness as each squad mate has their own unique reactions to events and conversations that they will have with Shepard and with each other as the mission unfolds adding to the replay value of the game. The other half of the game is an non-linear free roaming type game where you explore the galaxy, your ship and the Citadel (a giant space station which serves as the galactic capital). The combat scenes in each mission are exciting and well-paced.  It’s clear that Bio Ware has improved in the level design with levels and enemy encounters feeling more creative and varied.  The exploration segments however feel more simplified and dumbed down. There is now only one place for you to visit between missions, where in previous titles you could visit four or five areas.

The galactic exploration has also been dumbed down, allowing the player to simply fly around solar systems sending out radar pings and then being told if they found something or not. Now I know the exploration bit is something that by now I’m sure Bio Ware just feels it can’t win on. After all in Mass Effect 1 there was the totally awkward and time consuming vehicle segments in which you drove your six wheeled moon truck around what felt like a million planets trying to find… I dunno, your lost pocket change or some shit. This was considered one of the worst parts of the original Mass Effect.  In Mass Effect 2 they got rid of the moon truck and instead went with planetary scanning bits in which you had to systematically wave your scanning reticule over the surface of what felt like a million more planets in order to collect enough stuff that your crew didn’t die at the end of the game. This was also time consuming and considered the worst part of the second game. So I feel like in the third one Bio Ware just threw up their hands and said “Ok fuck it! Fine no more exploring! Just fly in circles and press a button, we’ll tell you when you get something! Happy?” To which my response is… well, no. Ok yeah, it was time consuming but at the same time it really made the galaxy feel like a galaxy. Now the galaxy feels unfinished and small.  There has to be a medium between painfully boring and stupidly simple, unfortunately I don’t know what that would be so I’ll just move on.

Ahh good times with the ol' Mako moon truck... Stupid truck.

The two biggest advents in Mass Effect 3 from the previous titles is the inclusion of Multi-player and voice commands via the Kinect system. Coincidentally these are also the two things that I was the most skeptical about in the lead up to the games release.

Multiplayer is a co-op game in which you and three other players team up using several different character classes and customizable models. There are five mulit-player maps which are introduced to you throughout the single player campaign. The missions are essentially twenty or so minute matches where you and your allies take on ten waves of enemies that progressively get more challenging. Interspersed throughout the ten waves are moments when you receive special mission objectives that you must complete within a time limit, such as killing off “targets of opportunity” or hacking a console (king of the hill style). Mass Effect 3 gives you an incentive to participate in Multi-player as every mission you complete adds to your “Galactic Readiness Rating” which is a measuring stick for how well your alliance will do against the Reapers in the final show down at the end of the Single Player Campaign. The multi-player was surprisingly fun, though I found participating in any of the missions above the “Bronze” challenge rating punishingly difficult. Even though it was repetitive the matches were often butt clenchingly pitched and exciting, particularly at the end of the tenth wave where you have to hold an area for extraction while your team gets totally mobbed by a seemingly endless horde of bogies. I really enjoyed the multiplayer aspect and it complemented the Single player game well.

YO JOE!

The Kinect commands were also an interesting addition.  The Kinect provided you with the ability to command your squad in combat by telling a squad member what to do for example “Tali, sabotage” or “Squad attack my target” you could also switch weapons and abilities by just saying the type of gun or ability you wanted to use instead of having to pause the action to bring up the ring menu. Out of combat  you can also use the Kinect to quick save, interact with devices and carry on conversations by saying the prompt for what you want Shepard to say next. I didn’t find voice command as useful in these sections as there was no real rush for me to issue a command. As well I found it awkward to be physically saying to a tv screen displaying an image of a person that doesn’t exist “Its good to see you again”  as opposed to just clicking on that selection on the conversation wheel and letting Shepard do the talking. The only real issue with the voice command was that  sometimes when characters were talking it would trigger the Kinect accidentally. There were a few times that a character would be talking to me while I was standing near a computer and they would say something that the Kinect registered as “Use” or “Examine” and suddenly I was purchasing a vacation home on Illium instead of paying attention to what floating jelly-fish man was trying to tell me. Ok on to the story line and in particular the ending… deep breath, Redcoat… you can do this…

Three games and I still can't tell which end their face is.

So… If this game is about fifty hours long, then the first forty-nine and a half hours of it are absolutely amazing. There are moments with incredibly well voice acted and masterfully directed dramatic sequences that had me on the edge of my seat. The introduction to the game, when the Reapersarrived on Earth and laid waste to Vancouver gave me goose bumps. As well one of the main villains in the story Kai Leng, is the type of villain that you just love to hate. He’s the type of douche bag that gets you invested in the game in that way that just makes you wanna keep playing so you can have a chance to really stick it to him.

Ahhh I wanna punch him right in his future goggle eye cover thingies.

All that being said however, the ending to this game was crushing, not because of the way it went down but because it was such a jarring departure from the rest of the trilogy. Minor spoilers ahead…

The game drummed into your head from the minute you started the first title that your decisions would have far reaching consequences and that there would be lasting repercussions to your actions. For the most part this held true, however, in the last scene of the game a decision is put to you where you faced with one of three decisions. A Decision that is available to you no matter what other decisions you made in the rest of the game. You may have saved the Krogan, you may have brokered peace between two bitter enemies, you may have saved a race from extinction because you felt they deserved a second chance, hell you may have helped an AI understand the human condition, but in the end, none of that mattered as all those choices go out the window for three equally unappealing outcomes. Door number one, door number two or door number three… make your choice. Oh and no matter which one you choose, it’s the end of galactic civilization as we know it.  

Now am I just upset because I wanted a happy ending where I got to live as the champion of the universe with my Quarian Girlfriend sipping mai-tai’s while people lavish me with adoration for saving all of creation? Sure that’d be nice, but it’s not required. I’m upset because it felt like all of my work, all the time I had invested into the trilogy didn’t matter. It felt like Bio Ware just didn’t try with the ending.  Like they had really good intentions but then just ran out of ideas or ways to make everything work together and  instead just banged out three similar endings to give the illusion of choice. It felt empty.

Now to the Mass Effect team, I appreciate what you did with this series, and you deserves definite props and plenty of applause for what you created. I would recommend this series to anyone in a heartbeat and still consider it one of my favorite games of all time, I just really wanted an ending that made me feel like I had beaten the odds and saved the universe.

In closing, I’m going to share a few links. Some have come up with well-articulated lists of reasons why the ending is a load of bullocks to which I will place a link to here.

Others have looked for deeper meaning in the ending and come up with a rather interesting theory which I will put here. If they’re right then boys and girls at Bio Ware are some of the craftiest mother fuckers who ever lived, but I think that this theory would just be coming a little bit too much out of left field for it to be true.  

Some people are so upset about it that they’ve started a group to lobby Bio Ware and EA to rewrite the ending and even raised afrightening amount of money for charity to support their cause. To that effect Dr. Ray Muzyka, the co-founder of Bio Ware has released this statement. Very interesting and makes for a very interesting commentary on the relationship between game designers and their consumers.

I’m interested to see what Bio Ware plans to do and will be watching this story closely, stay tuned to my twitter account and the review for updates.