Game Review: Mass Effect 3

This is a brief review of Mass Effect 3 written for a class Game Name: Mass Effect 3 Developer: Bioware Platform Used to Play: PC Description (from official website): "Earth is burning. Striking from beyond known space, a race of terrifying machines have begun their destruction of the human race. As Commander Shepard, an Alliance Marine, your only hope for saving mankind is to rally the civilizations of the galaxy and launch one final mission to take back the Earth."

--Bioware

What did this game do that was different from its predecessors?

This was the first Mass Effect game to explore dream sequences. It also gave companions several different lines to say when not in conversations so as to give them the appearance of more depth of character. The game also utilized a new equipment system and changed the way you spend upgrade points when you level up. Mass Effect 3 also did not explore companion missions nor did it really do into the same depth as the previous games for mission descriptions.

This was also the first Mass Effect 3 game to have male homosexual relationships whereas in the first two, it was only possible for female characters to have homosexual relationships.

There was also an option, if you started a new game with no import, to choose which kind of game experience you wanted rather than a difficulty setting. This allowed a player to choose from 3 options: action based, normal, or narrative based.

Once of the biggest differences between this game and its predecessors was the ending. This was the first game in the series that required the player to extrapolate from incomplete information provided by the ending. This may be related to the fact that this was the end of the series, but it remains an important difference that has caused many players to complain.

Favorite Part about the Game (and why)

One of the best parts of Mass Effect 3 is the decisions. Not the small, easy ones, but the big ones, the ones you really need to think about before finally settling on a single choice. Even if the choices do not have a huge impact on later gameplay, or even the immediate gameplay, the choice still feels fairly significant. There are a few exceptions, but they are few and far between. Many of the choices really give the feeling of a moral choice, a choice no one would ever want to make in real life, such as choosing which race to kill off entirely. This provides excitement in a way that doesn’t require a fight sequence. It makes the player stop and think. Yes, it does occasionally break the immersion when the player chooses to make the decision on a meta level, but it doesn’t do it in a way that ruins the moment or the gameplay.

Least Favorite Part about the Game (and why)

The thing I liked the least in Mass Effect 3 was the way romance options were handled for a female Shepard. It felt as though all of the possible romance options were throwing themselves at me, most specifically, Kaiden, a human male returning from Mass Effect 1. Without ever having my character say something that could be even remotely construed as “flirty,” he still pushed forward, asking me for a romantic relationship that I was uninterested in pursuing. The same happened with several of the female characters throwing themselves at me, none of whom I was interested in pursuing a romance with. I was told that as a male Shepard, the romances are less forward, with no one trying to force an unwanted romance on you. This should be the same for females, and it made the romance part of the game feel weak and not wholly fleshed out to me.

How would you change the game to make it better?

If I were able to make changes to the game to make it better, I would change the way the Effective Military Strength was presented. It is a number that has no real meaning to the player, yet it determines how the player’s choice at the end of the game affects the rest of the universe/life/what-have-you. Depending upon how high the score is, the player may actually fail or succeed at saving earth but it also changes whether or not the player is given a third option called “Synthesis” rather than destroying all synthetic life or controlling it. Also, if the Effective Military Strength is at approx. 5000 or higher, the player may receive the “secret” ending where Shepard can be seen waking up, alive, whereas Shepard always dies in any other case. I would like to better present the meaning of Effective Military Strength so players are aware that it actually does something in the game since it really does nothing before the very end when the final mission begins. If the player is aware that the number is actually relevant at some point in the game, he or she may actually, even if he/she is not an explorer gamer type, go out searching the different galaxies to find more war assets to improve the number.