Mass Effect 3 Review - Page 3
Whichever option you choose you feel you lose a lot. The relationship you pursued, the friends, your Shepard’s life, all of it gets lost for the needs of the many – although, with the ending I chose my Shepard was still breathing, so who’s to say that she didn’t find her beloved? Yet without Mass Relays would she be able to reach his/her location?
While I completely understand that in a war with so much at stake sacrifices need to be made, the ending left me with a strong “no-win” feeling. You invest so much time and emotion in your Shepard, yet you don’t get to give him/her a happy ending. It would have been nice if at least one of the three choices would have resulted in a “live happily thereafter.” One may think that everyone would choose that, but who’s to say? Plus the game re-playability would allow people to try all choices eventually. Yet this way I know some people decided they didn’t want to play the game again because in the end “it didn’t matter.” The win against the Reaper threat gets overshadowed by the loss of everything you have worked for. All I ask is one of the endings, just one, that would allow your Shepard to be safe with the rest of the Galaxy.
Gameplay
Shepard is agile, either with a new Omniblade or a big ball of biotic energy for melee attacks, depending on whether your character is a biotic or not. Rolling in and out or even in between cover is much easier, much faster, and all in all Shepard’s mobility has been greatly improved. You also get plenty of skill choices to make Shepard a melee powerhouse if you so wish. Having one button to execute many functions can be frustrating at times though, especially if you are trying to pick something on a ledge and wind up running into cover, or want to run into cover and pick up something on a ledge and get shot in the process. On the other hand I do appreciate the effort of keeping the controls simple.
BioWare promised that weapons would feel a lot more real and they delivered. They adjusted them to live up to the expectations of veteran shooter gamers, improving recoil effects et al. In Mass Effect 1 your inventory and mod handling was very clumsy. You’d wind up with hundreds of mods and ammo types, so the developers decided to simplify that in ME 2. However they oversimplified them, not giving you any real way to check how much damage your weapons actually did unless you looked it up on a third party site, like the Mass Effect Wiki. You had no way to mod your weapons either, and all you could do was finding general damage upgrades for each type of weapon as you did your missions. In Mass Effect 3 they found the right balance: you have access to a lot more weapons than you did in ME 2, and you can mod them to suit your needs, yet the modifications aren’t taking up inventory space and they are a lot more manageable than they were in ME 1. You also get your very own room where you can test how much damage your weapons deal against shields, Armour and health.
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