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Mass Effect 3 review

Game: Mass Effect 3
Platform: Xbox 360
Genre: Action RPG (Sci-Fi)
Developer: BioWare

Staff review by Mike Suskie

March 14, 2012

Mass Effect 3 is an awful lot of fun. That should, by all means, be the biggest takeaway from the hugely anticipated conclusion to BioWare’s epic space opera. I love the original Mass Effect to death – ask me how many times I’ve beaten it – but it was a game in which you select an option in a radial menu to make a particle effect appear. This third installment borrows the refinements that the previous game brought to the combat, and it’s all the better for it. Cover-based shooter fare is standard these days, so getting the basics down has allowed BioWare to incorporate its own distinct edge, with the game’s six classes all offering their own unique tech trees, specializations, and powers. My Infiltrator had the ability to snipe in slow-motion while invisible, in between curving fireballs around corners and rewiring synthetics to fight on my side. When I completed a playthrough with him, I’d effectively only experienced one-sixth of the game.

This was all true in Mass Effect 2, and now that BioWare has figured out how to make the combat work, they’ve spent the last two years figuring out how to make it better. New enemy types abound; heavily-armored soldiers advance with shields and smoke grenades, engineers set up automated turrets, and ninjas with biotic barriers advance swiftly under cover of cloak. With EA’s budget backing what’s already proven to be a million-selling franchise, BioWare’s art team churns out the most breathtaking set pieces I’ve ever seen in a game. We’ve all watched the demo of Shepard engaged in a fierce battle while a colossal Reaper stomps about overhead just before being attacked by an enormous Thresher Maw, and those are the sort of production values you can expect here. Mass Effect 3 is never less than exhilarating to look at, let alone to actually play.

This is by far the series’ most action-packed entry to date, and the fact that it’s also the longest – clocking in at over 30 hours – yet never once manages to drag is a testament to how much of a blast Mass Effect 3, at its basest, is. In fact, I’ll do you one better. BioWare finally incorporated a multiplayer mode into this series, and it’s that same old cooperative, endurance-style, hold-off-waves-of-enemies fare that was popularized by Horde and has more or less become standard for modern action games since. And you know what? It’s actually really good. Since the variables in combat builds lead to players all developing their own play styles, triumphing over the mode’s challenges feels like a genuine team effort rather than four players shooting at things. Couple that with a single-player campaign that’s at least as fulfilling as the previous two – fans will be arguing for ages about which Mass Effect is the best, but this is at least the most well-rounded of the three – and Mass Effect 3 is precisely what every video game should be: pure, wall-to-wall fun.

But you know as well as I do that there’s far more to this trilogy than that. We get “fun” games all the time, but they’re certainly not all marked as major events on serious gamers’ calendars.

Mass Effect 3 asset

This is it. The galaxy-wide invasion that BioWare has been teasing since players raided the lab on Virmire in 2007 is finally here in full force. Mass Effect was a game about preventing an apocalypse. Its sequel was about delaying it. The third and final entry is about surviving it, as the Reapers have already seized a fair portion of Citadel Space even before the opening cutscene is over. We’ve walked through the ruins of civilizations wiped out by the Reapers, and now we get to fight that same fight, and discover how this war is won (if it even can be won). In a broader sense, Mass Effect 3 finally brings BioWare’s experiment in inter-game connectivity to a close. This trilogy tells a story that’s always going more or less in the same direction regardless of your decisions, but the Shepard you import in Mass Effect 3 is a composite of hundreds of variants – choices, actions, failures – and they’re all so heavily represented in the dialog that you can’t help but feel that no matter how scripted much of it is, this is your personal adventure.

The best example, for me, is Ashley. My Shepard had a fling with her just before the final mission of the original game, and then became separated from her – for two whole years – at the beginning of Mass Effect 2. They bumped into each other later in the game, and the reunion was bittersweet. Ashley felt betrayed to see Shepard working for what most perceived as a terrorist organization, but she was glad to see him alive and even confessed that she loved him at one point. My Shepard finished that playthrough without romancing anyone, and just before the game’s finale, at the point where the sex scene would usually go, I was instead shown a brief clip of Shepard staring at a framed picture of Ashley on his nightstand.

So while Shepard teams up with a lot of familiar faces in Mass Effect 3, reuniting with Ashley during the opening sequence had the biggest impact. While speaking with Liara early on about how this war has changed his perspective and forced him to fight for the things he cares about, Shepard gave a split-second glance at Ashley, who was standing on the other side of the room. I had to wonder: Did BioWare throw that in there for people in my shoes, or does Shepard always do that, regardless of his history? Doesn’t matter, because either way, I’m experiencing a major dynamic in the story that only a small fraction of Mass Effect players get to see. For many, Ashley’s just another squad mate. For some, she didn’t even make it out of the first game alive.

I mentioned that Mass Effect 3 follows the template of its predecessor, and that includes the relatively bizarre manner in which it’s structured. There’s a much-hyped “final mission,” and everything that precedes it has you preparing for said mission at your own pace. The difference is that Mass Effect 3 benefits from a far more focused narrative. Instead of running errands for your teammates to gain their loyalty, everything Shepard does here has a bearing on the eventual fight to take back Earth: rallying forces, gathering war assets, and forging allegiances. Bringing the civilizations of Citadel Space together pulls you even deeper into the series’ expansive mythology than the previous two games did. You’d think uniting against a common enemy would be easy, but how do you convince the krogans to ally with the two races that have been slowly sentencing them to extinction for over a thousand years? It’s rich stuff, and Mass Effect 3 has three whole games’ worth of lore assisting in making its frequent themes of sacrifice, loss, and hope ring true even when most of the characters aren’t human.

Mass Effect 3 asset

I continue to be floored not only by the consistent quality of the storytelling – the excellent writing aided by voice actors who are more than comfortable with their roles by now – but the sheer volume of it. You could spend an hour in between every mission exploring your ship and the Citadel, engaging in conversations that didn’t need to be there and have no effect on the story beyond simply strengthening the relationships of people in a fictional world. Several years from now, when I think back on this trilogy, I guarantee I’ll be thinking less about whether or not I chose to preserve the Collector base and more about that one time Shepard and Garrus went on a joyride to the top of the Presidium as a way of spending some time together once more before the final battle. Fans have been railing on BioWare for phasing out certain elements – the side quests are virtually nonexistent at this point, and dialog options are more limited as Shepard speaks quite a bit on his own – yet in my mind, Mass Effect 3 is where all of the things that I truly love about this series come together.

That’s why I’m cool with the game’s already-unpopular ending. It does that Deus Ex thing where it forces you to make a choice with incredibly far-reaching consequences and then leaves you to ruminate over the aftermath, and I can see how players caught up in the Search For Answers would be underwhelmed by the conclusion’s abruptness, but we knew from the beginning that this wouldn’t be the end of Mass Effect. This trilogy is about Shepard, and his story ends here. That’s not to say that he dies, or that he lives. It simply means that from the perspective of Mass Effect being a character-centric narrative, this finale closes the gaps, completes the arcs and leaves me – a diehard fan of this franchise – feeling fulfilled. (Incidentally, I felt the same way about Lost’s ending, so I expect to be in the minority about this for a long time to come.)

What a phenomenal trilogy this wound up being. Three games, all flawed in their own ways, all masterpieces for unique reasons, all coming together to tell one of gaming’s greatest (and, frankly, most epic) stories, and making audiences feel more personally invested in the protagonist, his comrades, and their battle than any other medium could. I’m sad that it’s over, but I couldn’t realistically imagine myself being much happier with the way they sent it off.

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