While a good game, Mass Effect 3 is a shadow of it's predecessors.
As you would expect Mass Effect 3 continues on from the end of 2. Anyone who hasn't played the previous games will have a hard time getting to grasp with the story but then no one starts a book set from book 3 for good reason. The reapers are coming, what little time Shepard bought the galaxy is up and they still aren't ready. Earth gets hit fast as one of the primary Reaper targets leaving Shepard to rally the other races to try and fight back. It's a last ditch effort, one final chance to save the galaxy from complete extinction.
The general plot premise is fine, pretty good in fact, but a lot of the ride along the way feels pretty tired and the ending as Yahtzee puts it "doesn't go out with a bang or a whimper but much like the sound of a balloon when you let it go". The Mass Effect games have always been about choice and the ending simply manages to make every choice carried over from the previous games irrelevant without explaining anything. This is a real shame because there are some excellent plot points and levels to be had leading up to that moment but the ending to Mass Effect 3 left a rather bitter aftertaste.
The conversations available also seem stripped back like Bioware was calling it in. I played as a female Shepard who in private conversations with one of my male squad companions had the choice of flirting outrageously or being a mean ass. The middle ground in every conversation is gone. Some of the conversations were still genuinely entertaining with people and it's nice to talk to a lot of your old squad but the playable character selection is pretty bland with most of your previous interesting or unique companions available in cameo form only.
The main gameplay fortunately is still pretty solid with a nice mixture of combat missions and exploration. From the Normandy's galactic map Shepard and crew can fly all over the galaxy to find "war assets" to help push back the Reapers. Some of these are from Priority story missions, while some are from, rather poor side quests. The priority missions are for the most part fantastic, the real highlight of the game, taking Shepard through battlefields with giant Reapers, explosions and often emotional moments. The side quests are normally snippets of conversation overheard while running around the citadel about lost relics or needed schematics that can either be found on Priority missions or through planet scanning, that's right, it's back.
Combat has been slightly improved from previous titles while still keeping the third person shooter/RPG hybrid. Melee attacks are now a bit more varied and can perform a charge attack dealing more damage but more interesting are the weapons and mods. Each weapon in the game, many returning favorites can be leveled up, increasing ammo, accuracy, power etc. They can also all equip two mods of your choice either purchased or found. These mods vary depending on weapon from a bayonet, scope, to the less obvious which improve weapon damage or stability. These mods also level up giving greater benefit so that almost any weapon has pretty good potential with enough time of money invested.
The real big change to the series comes with it's mew co-op multiplayer mode. Similar to COD or Gears's Horde/Survival mode, 4 players must work together to fight off waves of increasingly difficult enemies. This is really surprisingly good. There are multiple classes, races, weapons and maps to choose from as well as three enemy varieties to fight. This mode is actually a real challenge, even on bronze difficulty if you don't work together it can be easy to fail. It does however like everything in Mass Effect 3, have a downside. Each mission takes 15-20 minutes, EA's servers for the first 3 days disconnected me towards the end of a match meaning I gained no credits, no experience, it was essentially a waste of time. Secondly with credits earned you can buy packs that will give you access to random weapons, mods, classes etc. You can also buy these with actual money as it's linked to the PSN store which is where I believe this issue arises. I bought some packs with credits refusing to pay money for something I could get with skill, I got an error message saying I couldn't get them at this time, yet it took my credits and gave me no gear. Several times this happened through the course of playing wasting over 100,000 credits, or 9 matches worth of gain. Lastly in what day and age is there a multiplayer mode with no mute? several games I just quit out because I couldn't silence idiots singing, swearing or whatever.
Visually Mass Effect 3 at times looks amazing. The art design for many of the planets, Reapers and races can be breath taking. At times Mass Effect though on a technical level is less impressive. In game cutscenes suffer from frame skips, conversations will show just the ship bulkhead with no character, loading screens using the citadel lift crashed my PS3. My favorite glitch though had a character with her head on backwards who then walked through a wall at the conversation end. There wasn't anything game breaking but there does seem to be a dip in technical quality from Mass Effect 2.
The sound however is brilliant. The voice acting for every character is magnificent and the series wouldn't be the same without Jennifer Hale's excellent voice work as female Shepard. The music is also superb using some previous music mixed in with the new composer Clint Mansell's work. I have nothing but praise for the audio quality of Mass Effect 3.
So final word. This game is really hard for me to write about. There are moments of pure awesome with an especially good bit of dialogue, epic background art design or touching moment. On the other hand there are things about it that I really can't stand or disappoint. At the end of the day Mass Effect 3 is a good game, no doubt about that, but it would always struggle to reach the hype it had generated for itself, I just expected it to get a little closer.
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+ Multiplayer is surprisingly fun.
+ Excellent artistic design.
+ Epic music and stellar voice acting.
+ Solid gameplay and ability selection.
- Terrible ending, explains nothing.
- meh side quests.
- Limited playable character selection.
- Weak conversation at times.
- No mute in multiplayer.
- Minor bugs and glitches.
- EA server issues.