Gaming Mass Effect 3 review

Ending was awful, make all these choices and majority get completely ignored :c

 

OMG the cover system was responsible for the majority of my deaths.

 

Not thrilled by it not being on Steam. Although I have an Origin account (for 2 games I bought cheap), I don't like Origin much. It is going to need to get a lot better before it becomes my games manager of choice.

ME was great. Loved it so much I played it through 3 times in succession.
ME2 wasn't as good: bigger story, bigger game, bigger characters, but the combat felt even clunkier than ME, scan and probing all those planets for minerals was by far more tiresome than exploring with the buggy in ME, the ship upgrade system felt useless and I ended the game with the same armour that I started with (what kind of an RPG-lite is that?). I did enjoy it, but I played it through once and I haven't gotten around to playing the DLC I purchased for it (inconveniently it had to be through the Bioware website and not Steam. If it wasn't ME I wouldn't have bothered...).

Something that has always bothered me about the ME games is their sterility. Even the dirty bits are too clean. The good guys and the bad guys are clean and ordered and stiff and uncomplicated. There is nothing subtle or grubby about the ME universe, unlike real life for instance. Maybe the future will be as clean as a ME game, but real life will always be grubby. And full of stink. Nothing ever stinks in ME.

I'll pick up ME3 6-12 months from now when it is cheaper and the never-ending diarrhoea stream of DLC has being released. That is how enthused I am about ME3.

100 hours over 3 games would sound brilliant if I hadn't just plunged 304 hours of my life into a single playthrough of Skyrim (thanks go out to Steam for keeping track of how many hours I waste), which I haven't yet finished (I still have the Dark Brotherhood and Companions missions to complete, and I haven't taken a side yet in the civil war).
Skyrim puts everything into perspective! If only it's main story was better...

 

Ending of the game was atrocious and also killed all the replay value for me as a) had to do all the side quests anyway for the GAW thing, no replay there) and b) the endings are all terribad and boil down to 1 of 2/3 identical endings, +/- destruction of earth.
Edit:
Come to think of it, it killed the replay value of the entire franchise. If Bioware are going to end a series like that, I'll just avoid their games in the future so I don't end up with a million metric tons of steaming disappoint, especially after being so emotionally invested in both my character and squadmates.

Several things from ME2 were completely ignored as well (think ME2 Haestrom).

Everything other than the ending was great(except dream seq), I had actual tearing up in some parts, which rivals the cheering at the gates of Denerim in Dragon Age Origins. Music was perfect and the environments were very well thought out.

But...my god the ending was crap, it was going to be my 2012 GOTY choice until the last 5 mins.

 

This review was strange. Lots of criticism and then a conclusion which ignored that, said it's awesome, then slapped a 90% on it.

My own thoughts about it are that the MP is surprisingly fun, and excellent training for the SP (tactics for taking down particular semi-boss units apply to both, thus limiting painful checkpoint-itis in the SP).

The dialogue options and 'dilemmas' are mostly the same bollocks doubleplusgood/doubleplusbad from the previous games, but the writing and voice acting seems much more fluent.

Combat is meh - allied AI is ****ing terrible, getting stuck in previous rooms; combat is also mostly a 'clear this room' type with no particularly interesting scenarios (that I have encountered so far). Powers are quite nice, I think the weapon weight/power cooldown relationship is really clever: it shows up immediately who is a noob in the MP, carrying their sniper rifle+assault rifle and thus a serious power cooldown penalty.

The RPG side of the combat in the SP is particularly unbalanced. I play vanguard and a few cheap shottie upgrades early on, combined with biotic charge's shield regen makes for a fairly unstoppable Shepard.

Overall I'm enjoying it quite a lot. The 'galactic readiness' mechanic is crude, but in a way that's quite nice - a lot of the appeal of games is the artificiality of their mechanics, hence the +2 dex and min/maxing that defined early RPGs. Story is quite nice, pretty effective coverage of a galaxy extinction event.

 

Mass Effect 1: One of the best games I ever played
Mass Effect 2: Couldn't finish it - too much consolification, scanning planets, no stats
Mass Effect 3: Continues this trend?

No thanks.

 

On second thought....

 

Requires Origin, not interested.

 

ME1>ME2>ME3.

And I the only one that thought pushing into cover was a way better system then needing to push a button to do so? I dunno why so many people say the combat was better in ME2 and 3.

 

How about forming your own opinion, rather than let someone else's score dictate how you think?

 

Well "my" opinion, after looking at the information available from places like this one, and playing the demo ... is that I'm glad I didnt have the extra cash to even think about a pre-purchase .. buying it when it's dropped in price is the only way I'll be getting it

 

SPOILER warning.

The game is like a new age interactive book/movie type thing. Feeling every emotion as you play through main and side quests.
The only thing to regret this time is the ending. If BioWare doesn't release a patch/update/DLC to correct the last 10 minutes of the game, it will be the poorest ending in regard to story line. Main idea of ME is that your choices have impact in the end. This time, your choices mean nothing.

 

Dude use the spoiler tags to hide your post!

 

I liked the first game too. The second one, not at all. The third one I wont even try.

 

I'm about 22 hours in myself, and I've not yet completed the game, so am unable to make a complete judgement, but I can say I'm loving it so far, I love the entire fiction that Bioware came up with in the Mass Effect Universe, I've read all the books and comics too, I really hope ME3 isn't the end of the franchise from a gaming perspective.

Oh and Clint Mansell did an awesome job on the Music.

 

why the hype what's so great abit this title?

 

Most of the soundtrack is done by the people who did the music from #2 and it's DLC [just minus Jack Wall], or they've reused the music from the first 2, Mansell did very little music wise from what I can see.

 

I don't have issues with the endings, except

Spoiler

the fact that they don't explain what happened to all the races after your choice at the end and according to the choices you made in the games.

 

I agree with faugusztin

Spoiler

but i suspect they will release some DLC or a book etc to explain. At least i hope they will. At the end, all the races are stuck on earth with no way back to their homeworlds. I'd be interested to see how that turns out

 

Most of the big hyped games have nothing special about them. They are only big because it's companies like EA, they just throw zillions at whatever game they want to be huge, and it becomes huge. It doesn't have anything to do with the game itself, it's just all about what EA wants. And if they spent a lot of money making a game and want a big return with lots of sales, then they just throw a few extra million at it, have it hyped all over every magazine and every gaming website for 18 months BEFORE release, talking about how awesome it's going to be.... and then at release the throw another few million around and make sure that it gets 10/10 reviews all over the place (*cough cough Skyrim*), and you can't even go on the web without seeing ads of the game too, and the game just ends up being massive because the juggernaut of hype convinces all the millions of casual-ish gamers to buy it.

It's only the more serious gamers who already have plenty of good games to choose from, that are more discerning about stuff like this. Dragon Age 2 for example, I wouldn't even use it to wipe my bum, and I am far more happy to re-install Temple of Elemental Evil and play through that again instead. But the average gamer has never even heard of that game, and they need these big over hyped games to tide them over until the next big over hyped game. There is one every months, and I think the average joe gamer just goes from one to the next. CoD99 for a few months, then Skyrim for a few months, then Mass Effect 3 for a few months, then whatever else. There is nothing in between, just 'blockbuster' after blockbuster.