Mass Effect 3

Five bucks, thirty bucks, whatever. I had a hankering for some sci-fi and, to put it simply, Mass Effect 3 delivered. As in the franchise's last installment, it's not without its flaws - you may have heard of a bit of a dust-up over the ending - but personally I came away from it very satisfied.

I was worried at first, though. Mass Effect 3 does not put its best foot forward; when the story begins, as the Reapers come to Earth, what should be a both emotional and bombastic scene is instead a hand-holding tutorial. And the next several sequences continue to hold your hand through heavily linear plot points, none of which are particularly interesting or relevant. But in time, ME3 does develop a much more open-ended structure, similar to ME2, where enough optional (yet still meaningful and engaging) side-quests are sprinkled between plot events to keep the galaxy from feeling too claustrophobic.

Gameplay-wise, if there are differences between the ME2 and ME3 experiences, I wasn't able to pick up on them. (So if you hated ME2's departure from the classic-RPG complexities of the first game, you'll find no solace here.) There are new enemies, some of which are really fun to fight, and some of which are the most annoying things in the history of forever; but by and large, it's the same deal as last time, which is pretty good. Personally I've never wanted to play as anything other than the sniper (Infiltrator) class, and headshotting alien dudes from across the map is as awesome now as it's ever been.

And then there's the, uh, Multiplayer. What's surprising about this isn't how it feels relevant to the campaign (it doesn't), or how it respects the player's time and money (it doesn't), but how it isn't terrible. There is actually some fun to be had here, in the same way that any other recent game's Horde Mode can be entertaining for a few minutes at a time. I can't see how anyone would care enough about it to put real money into randomized character bonuses, or even to play it long enough to get the full Galactic Readiness bonus out of it (which deteriorates over time!?). But I played enough matches to get tired of it, and still got a pretty good Readiness boost out of it, so I won't harbor any particularly ill will toward the feature.

One aspect in which ME3 definitely falls short of ME2 is its cast. Given that the second game was all about assembling a rag-tag team of ass-kickers, the third game's crew has relatively few shining stars. There's really only one new crew member I would call "awesome," and it's a bit disappointing that, at least for my tastes, none of my favorite fighters from the last game are even able to join the crew. It's not a bad assembly, especially with classic standbys like Garrus and Tali, but it's just not as good as last time.

I've always criticized Mass Effect for its half-assed choices: dialog options don't sync up with what actually happens (let alone what you wanted to happen), and often the consequences make it feel like you really didn't have much of a choice to begin with. Well, ME3 still isn't perfect in this regard - not to mention the ending (which I'll get to in a bit) - but I felt like this time, my choices had more meaningful consequences than ever before. Choosing between crewmates, and between civilizations, for the ultimate goal of liberating the galaxy; the premises of most of the game's big decision points really built up my sense of the game's stakes, and made me feel like I had a real, significant impact in them. Granted, I looked up the plot points later and found that the potential outcomes were not actually that different, but at the time it really felt like my Commander Shepard was orchestrating the salvation of the galaxy.

Now, about that ending -- there are some really legitimate complaints to lodge against it. In many ways, with its random-ass contrivances and the multiple endings' utter lack of variety, it does feel like something that someone whipped up in ten minutes. Analytically: it's pretty stupid. But holistically, as I felt my dozens of hours of preparation leading up to this one conclusion, it did feel very powerful to me. Hell, maybe it was just the music (which does reach an emotional swell in the game's finale). And, yeah, it's pretty arbitrary and dumb. But I didn't feel as upset about its shortcomings, as I felt happy to see Shepard's three-game story come to a end. I'm pretty curious what that Extended Cut DLC will attempt to do from here.

Fun, engaging, but imperfect. Mass Effect 3 is definitely worth playing, as long as you didn't hate the second game. And for what it's worth, my Origin experience was actually very pleasant. Kudos to BioWare for wrapping up this trilogy on what I would call a good note.

Better than: Mass Effect
Not as good as: Batman: Arkham City, I guess (hard to come up with a good comparison)
Basically as good as: Mass Effect 2

Progress: Finished on Normal