Mass Effect 3 is both a great game and a tremendous disappointment.
Cons: Almost no gameplay significance of any decisions from any game; Ending feels out of place; Some side missions are tedious; Disappointing multiplayer
Mass Effect 3 might possibly be the best disappointment you'll play all year. It's the greatest dissatisfying product you'll have the pleasure of playing. You'll have a blast AND feel let down at the same time!
Mass Effect 2 was a phenomenal experience. It raised the bar for the series as far as action and character development were concerned. It had great pacing, largely good writing, some interesting moral dilemmas, and one of the best final missions to ever grace a game. Bioware nailed almost everything with the second Mass Effect, and set the third one up to be one of the greatest games of all time. If they could keep the gameplay intact, and just focus on delivering a great payoff to all the decisions you made in the first two games, then Mass Effect 3 would have gone down in history as one of the greatest games of the generation. Possibly ever.
Unfortunately, that's not how history is going to remember this one.
There are certain things that will be remembered fondly: Mass Effect 3 plays really well. In fact, I'd say it plays the best out of the three entries. Following the trend started in the last game, Mass Effect 3 refines shooting so that the action is smooth and largely indistinguishable from your average third-person shooter like Gears of War. Movement is sped up and combat is more varied, allowing Mass Effect 3 to compete with the best of the best. Even better, the light RPG leveling from the past games is retained, and you're still allowed to command two teammates and use various abilities in conjunction with your guns. Aside from overuse of the spacebar (which allows you to roll, take cover, perform context sensitive actions, and sprint), the action largely goes off without a hitch and makes Mass Effect 3 a very enjoyable experience.
Given that this is a Bioware game, the story has also been given a good deal of focus. The deal here, following up on the first two games of the series, is that the Reapers (a race of colossal robot squid things) have arrived in our Galaxy and are out to destroy everything, starting with earth. You as Commander Shepard basically have the role of uniting all the civilized alien species in an attempt to defeat the Reapers. On the way, you get into various smaller adventures to help individual species with their problems, and to unite various races that don't see eye to eye.
What Bioware has really done right here is nailed the tone. The Reapers are a big threat, and are treated as such. No matter where you go, you feel the Reapers' presence. All the quests, for their almost episodic nature, have something to do with Reapers (or a certain organization that I shall not spoil) doing evil things. For once, the main threat of a game permeates every moment, and actually comes off as a legitimately big deal. For instance, if you walk around the Citadel, you find that the Reapers have caused tons of people to be displaced, having conversations about missing loved ones, or destroyed home planets, or economic consequences of such wide scale destruction-I highly recommend taking some time to just listen to conversations as you walk around. Some of them are surprisingly poignant.
Other poignant moments come from the various reunions with squadmates from past games. Assuming that your squadmates from Mass Effect 1 and 2 are still alive and counted for, you have the possibility of running into them during a mission in Mass Effect 3 (up to four of them even join your team, though I won't say who). At this point, these characters have all had their own arc, and all that's left is the conclusion. Avoiding spoilers as much as I can, seeing where everyone winds up based on the events of the past games is always interesting, occasionally heartwarming, and usually entertaining.
It's for all of the above that Mass Effect 3 is a great game in its own right, and worth your time. It's one of those games where the 20+ hours it takes to complete just breeze right by. However, Mass Effect 3 arrives in the context of a very ambitious and significant series, and here it disappoints.
Mass Effect is a series built upon choice. While your end goal is always the same, you choose how to reach it. Who do you ally with? Who lives or dies? Should I come out guns blazing or try a talkative approach? Most of these choices are small and have little consequence other than getting a different item or a different line of dialogue in a mission, but some are larger and should have much bigger consequences. Thus, the first two games exported their save files so that your choices carry over from game to game. The idea being that the third one would potentially be very different for each player: the culmination of three games worth of branching decisions.
Here is where Mass Effect 3 most tragically drops the ball. To put it bluntly, there's very little significance to any of your choices in this game. Most of the time you only get two dialogue options in a cutscene and both lead to the same place. This isn't exactly news, given that almost every game with branching dialogue employs the same trick. What is surprising is just how obvious the game makes it: I rarely feel like I had even impacted the tone of the conversation very much (something that you've been able to minimally do in the past games).
But, perhaps we should excuse the moment to moment dialogue for not branching enough. Bioware, as large of a company as it is, is still composed of humans. To offer true branching would multiply the work exponentially, and so tricks like that should be expected here and there. As long as they branch for a few major decisions, things should still be all right. Unfortunately major decisions in Mass Effect 3 don't tend to make much of an impact. You basically check off one War Asset (a thing you collect to get a marginally happier ending) instead of another, and a couple lines of dialogue acknowledge what you chose later on. That's it.
So perhaps you rationalize it: 'but Mass Effect 3 is the conclusion of the trilogy. It should be about the consequences of your past actions-throwing new choices this late into the game isn't where the focus should be.' Here things are a little more mixed, but nonetheless still disappointing. As mentioned before, the cast of characters you encounter depends on who survived, and past choices are typically acknowledged in dialogue options, if not in slightly different war assets. Thus, you can certainly say that past choices affect the dialogue in Mass Effect 3.
But here's the kicker, the events and the gameplay remain the same in the grand scheme of things. You still go on the same missions and have the same opportunities regardless of what you did in the last two games. The conversations just proceed to the same point a different way, and a less memorable character shows up where you would have otherwise had a reunion with an old friend.
[WARNING: The following two paragraphs contain massive spoilers for the first two Mass Effect games, and smaller ones for Mass Effect 3. If you haven't played either of them yet, go do that. Now. Or at least skip the next couple paragraphs until you see END SPOILERS so you can enjoy the experience with fresh eyes]
At times it feels like the game even directly refutes what you chose in the past. In Mass Effect 1, I chose to make Anderson the Chairman instead of Udina. Turns out Anderson doesn't like the politics (reasonable enough), and it so happens that Udina takes over anyway, which has certain plot implications later on that would have been avoided had my original choice been respected. If Bioware wasn't going to let this choice have an impact, they shouldn't have built it up as being important, if not outright removed it in the first place.
Even more damningly is the way Mass Effect 3 handles the rachni situation. In the first game you chose whether or not to spare the rachni queen. This could be very serious since the rachni caused major problems in the galaxy, and a resurgence could be troublesome if the queen doesn't hold her promise to disappear. The implications of this decision are huge, and Mass Effect 2 basically glossed over it, leaving the plot point to be handled in the third act of the trilogy. Unfortunately, this potentially huge decision is relegated to only a side mission, and it doesn't even matter what you chose. Despite there being no reason to encounter rachni if you didn't spare the queen, they make an appearance regardless of what happened.
[END SPOILERS]
I could go on with several other cases, but the point stands: your decisions have next to no gameplay or overall story bearing in this entry of the trilogy. This lack of consequence is not only a bad showing for Mass Effect 3, but it sort of ruins dramatic tension for replays of the series, since previously significant choices are revealed to mean nothing in the long run. Bioware doesn't even perform the simple task of removing missions that are not relevant based on your past decisions-understandably this is to avoid excluding people who just started with the third game for some reason (don't), but when even that simple undertaking-which requires a simple variable check, and next to no additional work-isn't performed, it hurts the whole series.
And then there's the ending. This has already been the subject of a lot of heated debate on the internet, so I won't dwell on it, but let me quickly add my two cents: I subscribe to a certain popular theory that explains a lot of the ending, and thus I will say that the concept of the ending in itself isn't bad. However, even with the extended cut, the ending is inconclusive, tonally inconsistent with the series, and too far isolated from the rest of the story (and thus, obviously your decisions), and thus it's understandable why a lot of people are upset. Even if it's not a terrible plot point in concept, it should not be the end of the Mass Effect trilogy for a number of reasons.
However, it takes more than a bad ending to stop me from recommending a game (see: Bioshock, Okami, Batman Arkham Asylum). Hell, even the massive disappointment in how my choices were handled won't stop me. The fact is, Mass Effect 3 is a great shooter/RPG hybrid, with an interesting story and some moments that should absolutely be experienced. Taken on its own as an action game, it's pretty great, and matches the standards set for it. However, with the groundwork laid by its predecessors, it's clear that it could have been so much more.
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On multiplayer: Mass Effect 3 is the first entry in the series to boast a multiplayer mode, and it shows. The basic concept of the mode is solid enough: survive waves of enemies and complete objectives with a few teammates. You can choose various classes and races to your liking, and success will make it easier to get better endings in single player (though fortunately this isn't required).
Unfortunately the execution is fairly flawed. There is no server browser, and the matchmaking service is fairly limited. You can't see your lag, either via ping value or connection bars, and with peer to peer connections, lag can vary greatly from match to match, outside of your control. Even the basic text chat functionality is missing from the PC version for those who don't have a headset to talk with.
Aside from missing a ton of basic features, the mode is solid, if repetitive. As is the nature for wave based modes in games, the waves start to blend together eventually, causing a repetition that the unique scenarios and controlled pacing of single player reduces. The amount of unlockables is a little absurd, though likely to keep people occupied for a while, and at least a lot of the bigger DLC is free.
Although it's likely that this was another tacked on multiplayer mode (a high-up from EA has been on record for desiring no single-player only games), the mode showed promise, which is why it's unfortunate that it's so unremarkable in the end.