MASS EFFECT 3 - REVIEW

It took only a matter of days after ME3's release that I had heard or read through top news websites such as the BBC that Mass Effect's ending was so disappointing that one gamer had even taken it up with the federal trade commission. So before I'd even started I'd heard this news and had been blasted out of the air-lock of the high hopes ship I had happily been aboard. None the less I was determined to see out the ending of this epic trilogy though I didn't play from any save I had made before. I had played ME1&2 on the Xbox 360 though had somehow lost my save from the first game meaning I've only played each Mass Effect game without any of my previous choices or decisions brought across except for the gaps you fill in through a few questions at the start of the game. I wish I had experienced more of the cross-over between each game as just ticking boxes about which character died and which lived based on the decisions I'd made before made my first steps in to the game feel a bit specious. Though despite of this, after a short introduction to the Reapers opening the game with an all out attack on Earth, once back on the Normandy and jumping between systems and nebulas, I was back in the full swing of the Mass Effect Universe and loving it all over again. The introduction is quite quick and chaotic and Shepherd must leave on the Normandy to seek help to fight against the Reapers that are now tearing apart Earth like an over-excited child unwrapping a Wii. Though soon after this you realise you have fix every races' problems in order for them to join you in the fight against the Reapers. Though these are huge inter-galactic problems, problems that built the ME universe and gave depth and history to each race and their relationship with other races that Shepherd must completely fix while Earth is genocided by the Reapers.

The characters, mostly female at first bar one muscle head, are presented to the player as if they'd entered a burlesque house. Each giving that sly undertone as if your Shepherd had slept with them or will do though I must have skipped that question at the beginning or accidentally ticked 'all of the above'. It's then later that you're introduced to other characters such as Garrus and Tali though I missed out on almost all the characters I had gained in the second game. No doubt because I didn't carry my save across but also because once I'd completed the main missions, the annoyingly sparse journal that holds little to no idea as to what to do for an objective or where the damn planet it's based on is, gave me little interest in continuing. I simply got frustrated by the lack of detail in the side missions, how I received them, how I had to then just go to systems and try and find the objective by scanning planets and hoping you found something before the Reapers come to chase you out system. Going back to the characters, I feel it's not just those who are on your side but those against you that really make the game interesting. The ones you can fight along side with are all essentially just 'good guys' (or girls). They all support you and have some unique spot on Normandy to be there for you when you want to talk to them to eventually get in to their pants. It's the other characters that I liked, especially the Cerberus leader, the Illusive man because he's so ... Illusive. Even in the second game when you work for him he's fickle and unreliable yet has a crude air of class about him. In ME3 you soon have to face Cerberus, for reasons you will discover, and on one of the first missions have to chase a Cerberus android babe through a science facility on Mars before she can get away with confidential material. To me, this is real Sci-Fi role-playing fun at it's best. It's a shame that later on the missions just simmer down to taking on waves of Reapers which have just a single tactic depending on what kind of Reaper it is. It's also these rogue, mysterious characters that are intriguing to learn about and to come up against, much more engaging than those aboard the Normandy - especially Anderson, though not on the Normandy but still a chum of Shepherd, Anderson is you staple, by the book soldier soldier with nothing interesting to say except that he was born in London, twice.

Coming from console to PC I noticed how fluid the combat is on PC. Though this may have been improved over the first two games as they were on console, I found the combat something I really really enjoyed and didn't hate like I did in the first game. Assign commands was simple and easy to work together to combine skills to take down foes. I was hoping, maybe even at the end, just to be able to have a few more squad mates at once more than just two - just to make it that little bit more exciting and hectic. Though not being granted this I didn't mind as the game still delivered despite some of the missions / area maps being a bit dull or repetitive.

I didn't hate the ending, I certainly feel it needed all the anger over it, there are much worse endings out there, look at Borderlands - that wasn't a vault just a huge v***** that you have to kill and then start the game again. C'mon, now that had a bad ending but I guess it's peoples commitment to 'role-playing' and wanting to see the outcome of a character and other characters they've progressed over three games. It's when you realise this journey that a player has made that you understand why one would want a more clear conclusion.
Though without giving too much away, seeing the Reapers go down, particularly in city they were in, was much like War of the Worlds and I began to wonder if the Reapers catching the flu was the reason for the outrage.

8/10