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---A Preface---
Let me preface everything by saying that I am fully aware that reviewing this game further would be belaboring the point. Still, after all the time and love I spent upon the game, I feel that I owe it to myself to write this.
---Review---
Gameplay (5/5):
Firstly, ME3 is a great game. It is very fun, and it'll be incredibly hard for you to put down. Very few, if any, of the negative reviews on here owe their criticism to the gameplay itself. In fact, in my opinion it is ME3's most redeeming quality.
Here's my breakdown:
Graphically (5/5), ME3 is top-notch. Now, I may not be the harshest critic here; I mean, I can't tell the difference between a DVD and a Blu-Ray disk (which I suspect is mainly the price). I suppose that if you're someone who demands perfect, unyielding graphics without tearing, etc. then you might be able to find some complaints. Personally though, the only thing that bothered me was that my custom FemShep's imported face looked absolutely bizarre despite being...well, hot...in ME2 and ME1. No matter how much reconstruction I did on it, I only got it to about 80% of what it was before. However, this was a very minor complaint for me.
In terms of combat (4.5/5), the game again shines. It has more of an ME2 feel than an ME1 feel, but it is also somehow distinctly different. It's subtle, but there are certain things that have improved, or at least changed. Playing as an adept (as I did in 2 and 1), I noticed that the balancing of the powers is distinctly different. "Shockwave" in ME2 was my most powerful/effective ability. In ME3, it's essentially worthless unless your enemy is right in front of your face (as with a husk). Rather, an adept's most powerful ability is a type of biotic grenade. I cannot speak to other classes as much, because I prefer a biotic-heavy style of play.
One thing that was really nice about ME3 was the ease with which any class can use heavier weapons, like the sniper rifle (a personal favorite of mine, even though I am an adept). There are also many new enemy types, some of which are quite challenging. The banshees I found to be absolutely terrifying.
Missions (5/5) were fantastic. There was always a sense of urgency, and a sense of purpose. Everything you do is an act of great importance, and the game does a great job of making you feel that. At least until the last hour or so.
Music (10/5): the score to this game is absolutely incredible. The music to ME2 was amazing, and the music to ME1 was pretty damn good too, but the music in ME3 is perfect. I can't even describe why suffice it to say, this game has a very emotional storyline, and every background piece highlights the heart of that scene, in a way I could only describe as reminiscent of chiaroscuro in art. Now, I don't cry very easily. Or, at least, it takes a lot more than a generic RomCom to do me in. But here, the music always put me right over the top.
Characters (10/5): as we all know, the essence of Mass Effect isn't the combat, or the music...it's the characters. I mean, who doesn't love them? ME3 throws in quite a few new ones, and some of them are pretty cool. Some of them are annoying *glares at the slutty newswoman in the cargo hold*...but the main characters return in force. Many of the ME2 characters don't get quite as much love as one might hope, but they do get some airtime. If you romanced any of them, though, the odds are that your romance experience will not be very enjoyable in its conclusion.
Replayability(3/5), on the other hand, suffers a lot from the story (more on that later). Still, going through it again for the gameplay alone would be quite rewarding. Planet scanning has largely disappeared, but it has spawned an almost equally annoying series of scanning missions. These mainly involve salvaging things that may be useful for the war effort...but the Reapers (ever the logical little buggers) quickly destroy 90% of the fuel depots. This makes it much harder to jump from system to system within a given cluster. Furthermore, when you get there, you only get about three pings before Reapers jump down your throat and try to kill you (they chase your ship on the Galaxy Map). This makes it hard to find everything without an online guide.
And now, let's turn to that long-decayed and very dead horse...the story and the ending.
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General Story (5/5):
At the beginning of the game, you have to abandon Earth. It was somehow hard to do that, even though it's a linear game (in this regard). You really feel the pain and the destruction on Earth, and even though it's necessary a retreat to advance, so to speak you feel guilty as a player. You'll meet up with the Virmire survivor (I saved Kaidan)and a couple new characters in an Alliance-retrofitted (which basically means uglier) Normandy to fly off and reunite the galaxy.
Before you do that though, you stop at Mars and meet up with Liara. And hey, guess what? It's Deus Ex Machina time! Miraculously, there's a schematic for a devastating new weapon found in the Prothean archives in the Alliance base there. It's called the Crucible. Now I know what you're thinking...does this mean that you're going to force the Reapers to perform chemistry experiments? No. At this point, we think that it means that we have a Reaper vaporizer.
Now, despite my criticisms of this device, I was expecting something similar long before I played ME3. It's simply a necessity with an enemy like the Reapers. I also like the "full circle" aspect of it Mars was really where ME begins, and with this discovery it's where it "ends" in some senses. In fact, this contrived device is infinitely more forgivable in our initial understanding of it. I would have given ME3 twelve stars if its perceived function had been accurate.
Unfortunately for all of us, it wasn't. But you don't find that out until later.
In the meantime, you fly about the galaxy gathering your forces. I won't go into detail here, because maybe you still don't know and my warning for spoilers wasn't enough to dissuade you from reading this. What I will say is that you wade through huge subplots and explore many fundamentally 'human' themes. Several characters lose their lives in this process, or maybe just one or two if you've been a diligent little player up until now. As I said, every mission during this time is amazing, and powerfully evocative. Thessia and Rannoch in particular gave me chills. You will almost certainly cry.
And through all of that, you get to see how your crew evolves. Yes, in terms of ability, because it is an RPG...but also psychologically. Joker, a personal favorite of mine, is a prime example of this, but he is far from the only one. Every character displays more depth than I've ever seen in a supporting character (I mean, of course they do it's Mass Effect!). The amazing voice acting really reinforces this.
Your romance, if you have pursued one (and why wouldn't you have?) will also come to a close, one way or another. I've read in other places that the only truly satisfying romance is Liara. Apparently, you never get to see Tali's face, no matter what, which I thought would have been the coolest and most natural side benefit of that romance.
I cannot speak to this, but I can speak to a romance with Kaidan: if you've done certain things in the past, or in the alternative are prepared to work very hard at your relationship with him, you can take the romance further. (Also, if you're a male Shepard, you can now initiate an M/M romance with him.) Personally, I felt that it led to what I was expecting, but it was somehow more vanilla than I anticipated. I guess it was done realistically, but not quite as...subtly, or perhaps tastefully, as I would have liked. It was, somehow, disappointing. I guess it just lacked a certain je ne sais quoi. Nonetheless, I really did feel the romance, and it was still very emotional.
Now, as for the ending...
What on Earth was Bioware thinking?
That will be your reaction, almost exactly. It will likely begin with, "Um, what?" and then progress slowly to complete, mind-numbing disappointment. Why? It turns out that the Crucible has a much different purpose than what we expected, or at least a much-expanded one.
And it just plain sucks.
But that's just the proximate cause of my (our) disappointment. As Sheldon would say, the higher-level distal cause is that Bioware treats the ending more like art than game. In some ways, I think that that's a cool idea. The problem is that art is subjective. A tower of sponges to some is amazingly meaningful. To me, a tower of sponges is probably just a tower of sponges. And with a game-as-art theory, you should accommodate the duality of those concepts. That is, you shouldn't just make it art for the sake of art and forget that it is also a game, and therefore must be logical. Failing that, sensical.
As it is, you get to choose the color of your doom, and that's about it. Personally, it doesn't bother me that much that you only get three choices, despite the promise of fluidity of choice upon which ME is predicated. It doesn't bother me that there isn't a boss fight, only an encounter with the Honorable Marauder Shields. What does bother me is that (perhaps indeed for deference to art) the ending does not make sense. At all.
I will not dissect every point here; the reasons why it is entirely illogical are so numerous that I couldn't bear to itemize them for the sake of my love for ME. What bothers me most is that it contradicts the themes it expresses in the same game. I mean, what was all of that stuff with the Geth and the Quarians about if that damnable God Child does the (pseudo-)philosophical equivalent of laughing at you for it?
I don't know. I really don't. I desperately clung to the notion of Indoctrination Theory for a while...but then Bioware crushed that hope when it didn't release the real ending. All they did release was the Extended Cut, which
patched a few logical holes and makes the ending somewhat more bearable.
But not that much more bearable.
I'm sorry to say this, Bioware. I truly loved ME; it will remain for me one of the most evocative, transcendent games I have ever played. Yet, I cannot honestly say that you did well by it. Of course, I will not scream, or send you obnoxious letters. That won't change anything. All I ask is that, next time, you never let yourself forget what the game is really about.
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Be warned, this review contains some spoilers so read at your own risk. This is also a bit long winded; I apologize but, as a fan, I invested quite a bit of time in the series. Time for me to give back what they took from me.My Real Rating: 4.5/5 until the last hour or so, at which it becomes 2/5
Game reviews can often be subjective so this review is coming from someone primarily with an RPG background who, in terms of game play, enjoyed the first game better than the second. The second wasn't terrible in terms of story but it was much less of an RPG and more of a shooter. The first thing I noticed about Mass Effect 3 is that BioWare gave us a game that gives us the best of both worlds and should be recognized for that. There are also some things here and there that I either loved or hated but these were not things that impacted the overall experience so I exclude them.
Some Observations
=================
1. Some people complain about graphics but that isn't as much as an issue for me. I am a hard line gamer who still pulls out the classics from the 80s and 90s and can generally forgive not-as-good graphics for a good story or game that is simply fun to play. Mass Effect 3 is, for the most part, both. That being said, the graphics weren't terrible and I feel that this is really a non-issue.
2. The re-design of the Normandy is great! I love the lounge (reminds me of a line from Mass Effect 2 when Shepard told Jacob that the next Normandy gets a lounge). Nice touch.
3. The writing was generally good. There were some places where I felt it was lacking but I'm saving my anger to discuss the ending. Also, character development is good, especially across the three titles; this is insanely difficult to accomplish in a game trilogy so kudos for that. There were several points in the game where a scene elicited an emotional reaction from me. In the last hour, that emotion was sheer terror that all this character development had been for nothing (see below).
4. As I mentioned, many of the RPG elements that were taken out of the second title were brought back but vastly improved. One such feature was weapon modding. While it didn't bother me like it did some people, I must still admit that modding in the first game could become rather tedious, especially for someone who feels the need to collect everything (not a good idea in the first game).
In this game, for example, suppose you mod a series of weapons with, say, a Rifle Scope I. If you pick up or purchase a Rifle Scope II, all weapons with the earlier mod are automatically updated as well as your inventory.
From the start, you can choose to upgrade weapons you are using to better weapons right away. Moreover, weapons are no longer constrained to a particular class (i,e, infiltrator, soldier, vanguard, etc) so you can enter a combat situation with the weapons that are best suited to the task. There are some weight limits that you should observe when carrying weapons that depend on class, however.
Overall, the game play is fantastic.
5. Halleluiah, planet scanning is gone! It has returned in some form but one does not need to spend large chunks of time collecting resources to upgrade weapons and ship components. Planet scanning is mainly used to collect war assets in Reaper controlled territory but even this can still get a bit tedious at times.
6. I am not a huge fan of multiplayer games, cooperative or not, so I do not feel like I am in a position to adequately critique it.
Comments on the Story
=====================
The story was great. I was on the edge of my seat digging it, that is, until the last hour minutes or so when, in my view, the totality of the trilogy came crashing to the ground. There is a huge, heated debate about the ending of the game where both sides are calling names like rather ill-behaved children. I do not intend to call names here as games, like movies, are very subjective. However, I do have some thoughts about the ending and the story. If you don't share these thoughts, great. But don't be pompous, acting like your opinion is the only one out there. And, beware of spoilers.
//[Work Hard and Still Get the Shaft]//
The first thing that really annoyed me was that I played through every mission/side quest and got most (but admittedly not all) of the war assets from the various worlds using the planet scanner (this also got tedious at times but was nowhere as bad as the scanning in ME2). The way I understand the galactic readiness rating (GRT) is as follows: it is basically a multiplier that takes your raw military strength and is used to produce an effective military strength (EMS). If you spend more time in the multiplayer (which I did not) you can, in principle, spend less time on side quests and vice-versa. Good idea, I thought, as it gives players some leeway on how to proceed.
However, when I went into the final battle, I feel that the EMS rating was rather misleading. Mine was roughly at about 3200 or so with a default GRT of 50%. The green bar was completely filled. However, my ending sucked (I'll get to this in a minute). In fact, the first time I played through, I was so shocked that I re-loaded the Citadel mission to see if I missed something. Nope, as I feared.
Now, my initial reaction was knee-jerk. I was furious that EA/BioWare made a game where, as I perceived at the time, a decent ending could not be achieved without multiplayer. I have since then been corrected. A decent ending, where Shepard presumably lives (there is still some ambiguity here), can be achieved with an EMS of 4000 or better (at least, according to sites like IGN). However, my complaint is that the game misled me about this as my EMS bar was completely filled going into the last mission. Even if you can get the good ending without playing multiplayer, much of your readiness rating depends on previous choices from earlier titles. Also, admittedly, there is a box that told me that my chances against the Reapers was even but I didn't think much of it because in Mass Effect 2, they still called it a "suicide mission" even if you made all the necessary preparations.
I should note that the supposed "good" ending includes a very brief cut scene where Shepard is still alive but appears to be in bad shape; I don't have much of an incentive to work hard to get my EMS up for a 20 second cut scene that leaves some ambiguity about Shepard's ultimate fate.
//[Past Decisions?]//
I didn't feel that all of my decisions really mattered. My feeling is that your decisions mattered mainly insofar as a character might briefly appear in the game and promise to help you but you may not ever encounter that character again in the game and a positive number would be tallied, in your favor, to your military strength. So, basically, I feel like I made decisions not to see further development of a character who was willing to fight and, possibly die, along side me but rather, to see a sum magically increase by a few hundred points.
A good example is the Rachni Queen. She appears if you save her and you are again given an option to save or let her die as she has been taken over by Reaper tech. If you let her live, she appears in a list under the war assets and that is that.
The collector base, for example, does play a role in what choices you have in the ending but I didn't really feel like my decision to destroy it made much of an impact throughout the game. This was, at least I thought, a huge decision and all it does it determine which three crappy choices will cause you to "win" if you even "win" at all. That is, the crappy choices are permuted depending on your choice to destroy or not destroy the collector base.
You also see Major Kirrahe who promises to fight by your side no matter which way the political tide turns. What is frustrating is that I expected a full scale, epic battle where all sorts of people I have rallied were fighting by my side. Literally. I don't think that this was a wrong or misleading assumption. But this isn't what I got. Perhaps my expectations here were far too high.
I understand that making a game that is custom tailored to the player is a difficult, technical task but this is how they marketed the game. I remember feeling that my ME1 decisions, with the exception of Wrex, didn't really have an impact on ME2 except for a few casual encounters with Conrad or an Asari communicating on behalf of the Rachni Queen. I really felt like I would feel the heavy weight of my major decisions from ALL three titles. Instead, there were many times when it felt like "Oh yeah, I remember doing that." The only decisions that seemed to carry sufficient weight were ones that I made in this particular game.
//[Total Annihilation/Gooification of Humanity Isn't So Bad So Long As it is Justified by a Child]//
The ending didn't make much sense to me. In fact, I felt like more alcohol would assist me in understanding it. So, to save organics from the hands of super advanced synthetics or AIs we have to brutally destroy entire species with a race of ultra-sophisticated synthetic-organic hybrids? Okay, perhaps "destroy" is a bad word; more like, gooify you and collect you as a museum exhibit of what once was. So, instead of being destroyed in the usual "the machines have revolted" sense, we will be brutally harvested by super advanced machines. Yeah.... that is a great....uh.... solution? Chaos is not necessarily a bad thing; it is found in nature. This was hard to stomach.
In Mass Effect 2, we discovered that the collectors were really Protheans who were re-purposed and it was generally agreed by Shepard and crew that this was a fate far worse than extinction. Why the change of heart? Because the presumably non-caporial being on the Citadel took the form of a child instead of Harbinger, with his guttural, bad guy-ish sounding voice? This child basically told Shepard what Harbinger told Shepard on Virmire and at various spots in Mass Effect 2. Shepard certainly didn't buy what Harbinger told him in the previous games but now it is okay because a child says it?
Seriously, I would rather fight a loosing battle against machines Terminator 2 style than have my friends and family turned into some goo where they loose all personality but their genetic structure is preserved. Because, you know, as I play, develop relationships, and think long term, my main concern should be.... preserving my bodily fluids? It almost has a Dr. Strangelove tone to it... I'm just imagining Shepard droning on about his precious bodily fluids.
Seriously, this sucked beyond measure. And by beyond measure, I mean it was serious, knee deep, disappointing, suckage. Dying at the hands of the collectors in ME2 was, in my opinion, a far more satisfying ending to the series. Fewer loose ends to tie up (which were not tied up in ME3).
//[But You Can Still "Stop" The Reapers]//
If, by stop, you mean one of three things: you control the reapers, which is very disappointing because it gives the Illusive Man credibility, you combine synthetics and organics which is equally disappointing and, frankly weird as hell, or, as some game sites misreport, you destroy all synthetics, including the Reapers (some game sites report that you just destroy the Reapers). And, unless you worked really hard, Admiral Anderson will die as will Shepard.
Then, in a sudden chance of pace, Joker apparently stops assisting the space attack to go and pick up Ashley, James, and Liara from the ground battle so that when they crash land on some Eden-like planet, there will be enough people to make babies (Note: some things may be different depending on who you saved in ME1, who your squadmates were for the last mission, etc but the idea is the same).
So let's recap: you either die or, if not, you take a breath of air badly wounded with absolutely no character resolution, you have absolutely no clue what happened to the other characters you have grown to love, and it is very likely that your spouse-to-be (or, at the least, I hoped) will have the task of making babies to repopulate humanity with little to no facial expression that seems to express the slightest bit of concern as to your fate.
I wanted to see total Reaper carnage (as opposed to total AI/synthetic carnage) and maybe a wedding or possibly a scene where you walk away with your friends in the sunset leaving behind a pile of dead reapers (yes, I know, I am a hopeless romantic). Instead, I got no character resolution and a random scene of Joker crashing on a planet that seemed to have little to do with anything.
Some people might contend I am making too much out of nothing. Possibly. But I wouldn't tolerate this kind of ending in a movie trilogy so why should I tolerate it in a game that is supposed to be story driven?
The suckage is complete and I'm not it sure can be undone. This alone does not make me want to go back and re-play the game. In fact, I would be content to stop playing before the battle of Earth and leave it be or die in ME2. I'm not even sure I can play the other titles knowing what ending lies ahead. The game and the trilogy was great but the ending completely ruined everything for me at this point.
Bottom Line
===========
Gameplay is good and refined. Ending sucks and ruins the trilogy. Even if the ending is bad (I would have preferred a bittersweet ending as mentioned earlier), character resolution is still a part of story telling!
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Not a bad game on its own, it just failed to deliver on the grand vision promised us at the beginning. Minus one star for not living up to its potential, and minus another star for the cop out ending.The big finish to the Mass Effect trilogy just fizzled out when it should have shone brightly. Since story is so important in a game like this, I'll start with that. From the first cut scene to the last, the story pacing felt off to me. All the story elements felt rushed, out of place, or focused on the wrong thing. I basically threw up my hands at the narrative and went along with it by the time I had gotten to the last 10% or so of the game. Some big things happened "off screen" when they shouldn't have (from a dramatic point of view) or other things that got played up during the dialogue go essentially unexplained in the end. It felt like the writers were going for the twist ending here, unfortunately they tried a little too hard, giving it an anticlimactic feeling than firm resolution.
As for gameplay, the AI was improved over the other two games, and that's about it. If you've played the first two games or any other action game built with UE3 tech, you know what to expect: duck-and-cover, shoot-shoot, move on to the next area. Rinse, lather, repeat. It seems they took out all of the puzzles and mini-games, and I found I missed those more than I thought I would. They offered a nice break from the monotony of the duck-and-cover shooter system and the sometimes hokey dialogue.
I've never been a fan of the Mass Effect user interface, and it seems that every attempt made to streamline it buried some important menu or function in a non-intuitive place. The layout of the shops is a joke: while it may make thematic sense to have a weapon and armor shop in the shuttle bay, a research center in the crew area, power upgrades in the med bay, etc, it feels out of place. The rest of the game has already been streamlined, from the side quests to the exploration maps to the combat, why not do away with that cumbersome interface? I find it funny that Shepard can run the galaxy from one terminal but still has to walk down to a bay to get a weapon upgrade. And on a personal note to the developer: whoever set 'B' as the confirmation button should stop having "brilliant" ideas. I've been hitting 'A' to confirm things in menus for over a decade now, thanks.
The biggest problem in this finale is that it doesn't provide real closure to the series. Without spoiling too much, I found the overall message that Bioware sent to fans to be the most disappointing aspect, and I'm not referring to the clever revenue stream with the online pass, DLC and IOS game (I find that trend more disturbing, actually). Bioware promised a sweeping epic where the choices you made matter. In Mass Effect 3, those choices do matter but only as technicalities, like mere variables that have more effect on the dialogue trees than the game itself. I expected better.
Honest reviews on Mass Effect 3 - Xbox 360
Spoilers are coming.From a purely game mechanics perspective I felt that this is the best of the Mass Effect games. Sure the journal and quest tracking system for minor quests was unusable, but the increased variety of weapons and modifications available adding something that was lost in the transition from 1 to 2. The main plot was extremely strong for the most part. It was a bit more linear then in 2 but it had to be given what they were trying to do this time.
However now to address the elephant in the room. The final 10 minutes of game. Now I was fine with the game until right after I went up the beam to the citadel. Sure it was odd that the Citadel had been taken over entirely off screen but I can't get everything. Heck I even was ok with the assumption that my squad mates at the time, EDI and Liara, had died in the Reaper blast. The Anderson/Illusive man stuff was strong if incredibly full of plot holes. The star child crap though was ridiculous. I already suspended my disbelief enough to allow the use of a McGuffin as the driver of the main plot, but now you use a literal deus ex machina that's spouts off crap that we directly refute during the course of the game (EDI, and saving the Geth/Quarians).
Then what happens is the worst game of "Let's Make A Deal" I've ever seen since the same dam thing is behind every door. Then the weird ending where my whole squad turned tail and ran inexplicably with at least one of the people who were fighting with me on earth. Also without mass effect drives I realized A)Quarian fleet likely to starve B)Krogans likely to die out due to loss of Wrex and it is now impossible to import food C)my apparently cowardly crew is likely going to die of starvation and or exposure at some point on some deserted planet in the middle of nowhere.
Somehow Bioware you snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. You basically ruined all replay value for this game and its predecessors. Awesome job.
P.S. I have a terrible sinking feeling this was done on purpose so you could at a later date sell us a less bad ending and epilogues. You probably weren't expecting such a visceral reaction from the vast majority of fans so nice job.
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Imagine you have been in a wonderful relationship with a dream guy/girl. He's everything you wanted and finally proposes. It's a dream come true. You finally believe in true love. You make plans for the wedding. The flowers, the dress, you can just see everything in your mind! It's going to be wonderful.Then on the big day he leaves you at the altar, dumps you with a post it note with a nonsensical reason "because cranberries". You plead for answers but none are given other than "because I had to".
Sure it might have been the best guy ever but that doesn't justify anything.
This is Mass Effect.
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