Mass Effect 3

Yeah, there was no way I was going to put this under the ‘An Hour of’ banner, as there was no way in Hell that I was only going to play this game for an hour. It has since been nearly two months since the game was released, in which I have now gone through the single player campaign twice, and the multiplayer and the recent Resurgence DLC many times, in order to truly understand the game’s mechanics. I warn you now, there are spoilers in this.

For those who don’t know what the Mass Effect franchise is, for some reason, it’s a sci-fi game set in the not-too-distant future, where humanity has discovered interstellar travel through the discovery of an ancient civilisation, the protheans which vanished 50000 prior, which had highly advanced technology, namely devices called mass relays, which are transportation devices which can send a ship or ships from one end of the galaxy to the other. In doing so humanity has come into contact with many alien species, such as turians, salarians, asari, geth, quarian, krogan and drell. In the games you control a human called (Insert name here) Shepard. Yeah you can give him whatever first name you want, no-one will say it. We also know that the many species are governed by a council, initially consisting of a councillor representing the turians, asari and salarians, and that they can employ a high ranking agent called a Spectre, who can effectively do whatever they want in order to preserve the peace.

In the first game one Spectre, named Saren, goes rogue in order to bring back a race called Reapers (A name given by the Protheans), a race of sentient machines whose only desire is to wipe out organic life every so often. Saren enlists the geth race to help, whilst also utilising a ship called Sovereign, which turns out to be one of the Reapers. Shepard is tasked to stop him, enlisting allies during the course of the game.

In the second game Shepard is killed off at the beginning and his ship, the Normandy destroyed, by a race known only as the Collectors. The Collectors turn out to be the old Prothean race, having been converted by the Reapers and now serve to kidnap entire human colonies on Reaper orders. Shepard is resurrected by pro-human group Cerberus (Think Nazis), lead by the Illusive Man, and they work together to fight the Collectors. A piece of DLC which bridges the second and third games involves Shepard going to a batarian (An alien race which has a violent history with humanity) system and, in my case reluctantly, destroys the star system to prevent the Reapers arrival, wiping out 300000 batarians in the process. I really didn’t want to wipe out a star system, since it’s committing mass murder on a grand scale, only to delay the inevitable.

The third games finds Shepard awaiting trial on Earth for his atrocity when the Reapers invade. Shepard is reinstated in order to gather an alliance of all the other species, but that’s easier said than done, as the Reapers have invaded the other species home planets as well, the krogan don’t like the salarians or turians, the batarians have effectively been driven to extinction, and the quarians have decided this is the best time to reignite their war with the geth (The geth were created by the quarians, but the quarians tried to destroy them when the geth started to gain sentience. The geth would then drive the quarians from their home system (and planet) during the Morning War). Oh, and Cerberus has betrayed you. Jerks.

Now to actually talk about the game. It’s fantastic. What else could I say? The graphics are beautiful, the story is fascinating, the gameplay is brilliant, and the characters are interesting. Well, most of them.

We might as well start with the characters. Most of them are returnees; we have Ashley Williams/Kaidan Alenko (Whoever survived), Liara T’Soni (asari), Garrus Vakarian (turian), Tali’Zorah vas Normandy (quarian) and EDI (the Normandy’s Artificial Intelligence) who is operating a synthetic body. We also have two new squad members, James Vega and Javik, a Prothean.

Yes, we actually have a living Prothean on our squad, as his stasis tube was the last one with power, whilst all the others were switched off. Javik proved to be a very interesting character, especially with his interactions with Liara, as before ME3, everyone expected the Protheans to be this noble race, to be somewhat perfect, as Liara puts it to “have all the answers”. Javik proves to be...not quite what people expected. It turns out the Protheans were effectively dictators, forcing other races to join their empire or face certain death. Javik himself proves to be cruelly truthful, though his surprise at how the races from his cycle have evolved truly astound him. Of course all of this was due to the war with the Reapers in his cycle. When he was born the Reapers had already claimed the Citadel (Which became somewhat a myth to his people), and his first memories were of his home planet burning. He states later that having spent his entire life in war, he cannot foresee how he will live in peace. He proves to be one of the funniest characters as well, mainly through his unintentional insults like “Impressive. The asari have learned how to write”.

James meanwhile, he’s my least favourite of the characters. Not that he isn’t good, he’s okay and I do like Freddy Prince Jr (The voice actor). But as a character, he’s just not that interesting, he just seems to be your standard stereotypical jarhead. Then again he does have some good aspects to his character, his guilt over saving intel to use against the Collectors instead of a colony was a good addition (Which proved to have probably been the wrong decision as Shepard managed to defeat the Collectors with the intel), but apart from that there wasn’t really anything fascinating to say about him. Would I have preferred an old squad member from the other two games like Wrex or Legion (Or Conrad Verner, I actually thought at one point that Conrad would join the crew)? Sure, but James isn’t that bad a character, it’s just we have a more emotional attachment to the other characters.

 

Even supporting characters proved to be brilliant. Joker is still his usual funny self, Steve Cortez was a great emotional character, and Samantha Traynor, oh lord Samantha Traynor. I actually love Traynor, and all because of her voice, I absolutely love her voice. Alex Wilton Regan did an excellent job voicing Traynor.

The only exception would be Diane Allers, who is voiced by and modelled on IGN host Jessica Chobot. Now, I’m sure she’s a very nice lady, but she was an awful voice actress. On top of that, Diane Allers looks nothing like Jessica Chobot. Well, okay they have the same hair. But apart from that her face just doesn’t look right, especially when she’s interviewing Shepard and she turns to face the camera; she looks bloody possessed there.

For the other characters they are their usual awesome selves. Well, Kaidan is probably, I prefer picking Kaidan over Ashley personally. However, if you romance one character in the first game and another character in the second game,  there wasn’t really much of a confliction. I’ve only played the game twice, I’ll say that, with my male Shepard having only romanced Ashley. We then go over to my FemShep, who in the first game romanced Liara, and in the second game romanced Garrus.

It was part of a storyline you see. In the first game FemShep was all goody-two-shoes, and related to Liara the most as a result of it. When Shepard was brought back via the Lazarus Project in ME2, I decided that, since FemShep was woken early, that there would be something wrong with her; namely she went from goody-two-shoes to a complete bitch. Interacting (And eventually romancing) with Garrus, however, allowed her to regain her old personality. So I went into ME3 wondering what would happen.

Liara asks me if I’ll continue seeing Garrus, I say no. Garrus asks me if I’m going to continue seeing him, I say yes. You see, I was expecting some sort of middle ground for the time being, like “I don’t know. I, I’ve got to think about this”, but no, we only get a simple yes/no answer option. Then I was expecting a big argument to occur between the three, resulting in romancing one, or neither one, and a bad feeling remaining for the rest of the game. This does not happen. FemShep and Garrus go to the top of the Presidium on the Citadel, kiss, and that’s that. Liara gives me the cold shoulder for one line of dialogue, then acts like the Liara in my non-romanced game.

Ah well, let’s talk about the plot! There’s good things and there’s bad things about it. Let’s start with the bad. In the first two games, we are given multiple story missions and optional side missions, which we can do in any order at any time. Unless you have several left when you get the Reaper IFF in ME2, but you know what I mean. Meanwhile in ME3 we get main story missions, N7 side missions (Six in total), a couple of side missions and what is effectively treasure hunt objectives. So there is a significant drop in the number of missions we can do outside the Citadel.

And we don’t really have control over what missions to do. Sure we can decide when to do certain missions at a certain time, like you can rescue Primarch Victus’ son before taking on the Reaper on Tuchanka, or you can do the Tuchanka missions before going to find Aralakh Company, but you do run the risk of missions expiring. Which was what happened when I went back to the Citadel after Tuchanka, with the aim of completing some objectives I hadn’t done yet, only to find that Cerberus had invaded. Jerks.

But that’s not to say that the missions themselves are bad, they’re great. They’re full of action, such as Kalros vs Reaper, have hints of humour, feel of desperation and have some of the most emotional scenes in them. There’s the conclusion of the mission of Thessia where you see the Reapers arrive in force to conquer the planet, there’s the mission on Tuchanka where you have to stop Cerberus setting off a bomb and Primarch Victus’ son sacrifices himself to stop it, there’s Legion sacrificing himself to give the geth full sentience, and there’s Mordin sacrificing himself to cure the genophage.

Actually I need to give Mordin’s sacrifice a special nod. This is without doubt, the most spectacular, the best and most emotional scene. I tell him about the Dalatress’ knowledge that the Shroud (The thing we’re planning to use to cure the genophage) had previously been sabotaged. This leads to Mordin staying at the Shroud to fix the sabotage whilst the Shroud is exploding. For some reason. Anyway, after previously talking to Mordin about what he’d like to do after the war, he said he’d like to go relax on a beach. He’s then told he’ll get bored easily, in which case he says he’ll experiment on the seashells. At the Shroud, he says “Would’ve liked to run tests in the seashells”. This better become a meme for likable characters deaths. Then of course there’s the other dramatic death scene where Mordin yells “I MADE A MISTAKE!”, regarding his work on the genophage, showing his guilt over what he did, even if he did say it was the right thing.

Gameplay wise, the game has reduced the RPG aspect of the game. There’s hardly that aspect which the first game and the Dragon Age series have, in which you can play the game the way you want. In the end, there’s only one outcome for every mission, there aren’t that many other options for them. Okay, maybe there’s options like spare/help the Rachni Queen (Again), spare/kill a certain character...okay so maybe that aspect is somewhat still there but just barely.

Then there’s the little things, like Vega and Cortez arguing which is better; the M35 Mako, or the M-44 Hammerhead (Neither of which you could operate), with Cortez citing what a lot of fans have said about the Mako. Honestly, I never had a problem with the Mako, to be it handled really well, climbed mountains unless it was too steep, and it had heavy fire power. Heck, I actually found it quite agile when I wanted it to be. The M-44  Hammerhead on the other hand I found tricky to operate, it overheated easily, lacked firepower, and was easy to destroy. There’s also bits in the game which actually take the DLC for the previous games into effect, ‘Bring Down the Sky’ and ‘Project Overlord’ being the prime examples. I thought this was pretty cool, especially since I’m pretty sure that this was the first game that has done that.

 

A new aspect introduced in ME3 was the melee combat, primarily the omni-blade melee function. Gamers have said that this proved to be useless against enemies later in the game, but for me I actually probably used it as much as I did in the early part of the game, especially on insanity as it was an instant kill move.

And the other new aspect? Multiplayer. I for one think that the multiplayer is actually pretty good, though it is the same thing over and over again, facing wave after wave of enemies. They do tend to change the objective of a wave, like eliminate certain enemies in a time limit, hack a terminal or turn off multiple devices around the map, but it is easy to see why some players may get bored. However you have to keep playing multiplayer, as the galaxy readiness  rating decreases daily. This is both a great way to keep players playing the multiplayer, and annoying as you have to stop playing the single player campaign as you’re getting less war assets in the final battle.

Oh yeah, war assets. During the game you need to gather war assets, which changes the result of the game, whether certain groups are able to hold their own against Reaper forces or fail miserably. These war assets are interesting to look at as they do also depend on decisions in the previous games.

Uh, what have I gone over, romance, characters, story, missions, gameplay. I think that’s it. Yeah! I believe I’ve gone over everything. So overall this game is fantastic, it’s a great addition to the franchise. Is it the best one in the series? Hmmmm, maybe, but whether it is or it isn’t, the game is brilliant.

Oh wait! I know what I’m missing. The ending! But that will require another post. So coming up next, the infamous ending to Mass Effect 3!