I started Mass Effect: Andromeda last Friday with every intention of finishing it, or at least finishing the majority of it, by Sunday night. Based on my experience with other Bioware RPGs this seemed perfectly doable; my completion times for all three previous Mass Effects clock in at under 20 hours and I had nothing else to do that weekend, and they’d all at least been fun enough for me to blitz through them in a similar timeframe. It’s not Bioware, but when Alpha Protocol came out I completed it three times in a single week¹. What I’m trying to say here is that I have absolutely no problem smashing my way through an RPG in a very short space of time, and I’ll usually enjoy doing it unless the RPG in question is Dragon Age 2.

On Sunday morning, faced with the choice between playing more Mass Effect: Andromeda and doing literally anything else with my time, I instead elected to clean my fridge. I took all of the shelves out, washed them in the sink, dried them, thoroughly wiped down the inside of the fridge to remove some pretty gnarly hidden stains, replaced everything, and then went on to clean the microwave and the easy parts of the oven for good measure. Doing a proper job of it meant enduring a couple of hours of the sort of mild intellectual tedium that accompanies all housework, but you know what? It was an infinitely, infinitely more thrilling and satisfying experience than playing Mass Effect: Andromeda.

Playing Andromeda has made me more than a little bit weary. It’s yet another unfinished AAA game that’s been rushed out the door long before it was ready, and those are becoming less and less fun to encounter with every successive one I play. I can usually derive some level of enjoyment — or at least interest — from playing a game that’s just bad, or which has very questionable design elements, because I think that seeing an example of how not to do something is almost as important as seeing it done right – after all, how can you identify right without the context of wrong? In the case of games like Andromeda, though, I’m struggling to see what lessons could possibly be learned other than “Don’t release unfinished games.” Perhaps “Don’t hire the Halo 4 writer because he’ll just vomit out the same garbage-tier story tropes all over again” could have been one key takeaway, but I think Halo 4 itself was a sufficient argument for that. And perhaps another would be “If you’re moving the setting to a whole other galaxy, maybe actually have some elements of the game that are little bit new and alien rather than importing all of the same sodding races we’ve seen in the previous three titles”, but I also think that one is just plain common sense. This is Andromeda’s crime: it’s not just that it’s bad — although it is — but it fails to even be interestingly bad, to make mistakes that could be learned from in future games. It’s just overwhelmingly shallow and tiresome to play, a pale imitation of the original trilogy that, at its best, is still somehow less enjoyable as an experience than staring mouth agape at the fucking space ghost from the third installment.

Still. I’ve spent 35 hours slogging through to the end of the game, and I’m sat down in front of my computer with a Google doc window open. Let’s see if I can find it in me to spend just a couple more hours bashing out a review that bashes Andromeda.

The premise of Andromeda is that the various Milky Way civilizations fired off a bunch of colony ships towards the Andromeda galaxy just after the events of the first Mass Effect (so before the Reaper apocalypse had really hit full swing). Six hundred years later they arrive.  You play a Pathfinder – no, you’re not a Spectre in this one, the fact that Pathfinders are functionally identical is purely a coincidence – tasked with finding habitable worlds for the Andromeda colonists to, well, colonise. Exactly why a hundred thousand colonists require so much lebensraum is never explained, especially when their prospective new homes are littered with strange ruins and homicidal robots left behind by an ancient alien civilization — Protheans? No, no, these are the Remnant, they’re totally different. Your base of operations is a huge space station called the Nexus — SHUT UP IT’S NOT THE CITADEL, just look at it, it might be the same size and shape but it doesn’t have nearly enough glowy lights — that the Milky Way colonists have somehow constructed in just a couple of years despite the Citadel being plainly described as beyond the engineering capabilities of the races living on it. Your expansion efforts are opposed by the Kett, who are a race of Andromeda natives that have conveniently followed a line of parallel evolution into cover shooter baddies, and who are very interested in kidnapping other races for their genetic material  – they’re NOT Collectors, we swear. Shortly after the game begins your Chosen One character gets the ability to do the Special Thing with the alien ruins — ah, but it’s not at all like Commander Shepard and the Prothean beacons because there’s an AI involved! — and starts turning on a network of rather convenient terraforming monoliths, but also attracts the attention of the two-dimensional Kett Archon, a villain who shows up maybe four times in the whole story (and at least two of those times are to mwa-ha-ha at you over the holophone about how the last two hours of gameplay has been entirely according to his design, which is a really easy way to identify Lazy Writing) and consequently has even less relevance to the game than the nobody antagonist from Dragon Age: Inquisition.

This is, for me, probably the most infuriating thing about Andromeda. I’m not going to pretend that Bioware moved the story to a different galaxy because they in any way wanted to do anything particularly new with it; it was a move born out of necessity after the Milky Way setting was effectively blown up at the end of Mass Effect 3. The amount of repetition going on is absolutely incredible, however, like they’re students who have copied and pasted an article from Wikipedia and are hoping it’ll pass muster as an essay if they just change some of the words around. There are all of two new alien races in the game: the Angara, whose defining trait appears to be that they speak with Australian accents and who are absolutely indistinguishable from humans in every single way save for their physical appearance, and the aforementioned Kett, who might have been moderately interesting if your interactions with them extended beyond shooting a couple of thousand of them in the face. The Andromeda races are outnumbered two to one by existing races imported from the Milky Way: the Asari, Turians, Salarians and — bafflingly — the Krogan² all made the trip over, but even these have been diluted down to the point where they’re now just funny-looking humans (in particular every single Asari in this game acts like a moody teenager, which is pretty much the opposite of how they’re supposed to be). Anyway, the Arks containing the majority of the alien populations got conveniently lost on the trip over so that in practice you spend most of the game looking at the awfully-rendered faces of your fellow human beings. Despite the premise, Andromeda is definitively not a game about exploration; its obsessive focus on retreading old ground means there’s scant attention given to creating anything genuinely new for the player to discover.

Case in point: the star map. Just like every previous Mass Effect, Andromeda has a star map that you can use to travel to a host of star systems. In the first Mass Effect you could physically land on many of the planets found within these systems in the Mako; the surface of any planet not directly related to the main plotline was always procedurally generated gumpf with nothing of interest on it, but an effort had at least been made to promote the concept of exploring the unknown. Mass Effect 2’s implementation was both better and worse; you now scanned planets from orbit to find points of interest, but visiting them was still worthwhile as there’d usually be some cool piece of lore or backstory to uncover in the planet description³. Mass Effect 3 kept the scanning but added Reaper fleets that’d chase you if you scanned too much, which didn’t have much to do with exploration but was at least in keeping with the theme of the game. The series has never quite managed to nail this mechanic, but there’s always been enough that was worthwhile about it for me to never fully resent it no matter how tedious it got.

Andromeda’s star map, by contrast, is some unholy amalgam of the worst elements of every previous iteration of the star map with additional time-wasting injected into it. The star map is closest to 2’s implementation, in that you’re scanning planets from orbit and launching probes, except every single planet you scan is an incredibly dull list of environmental factors that present as the writers desperately trying to explain why you can’t build a colony there. There’s no cool lore snippets, no backstory and no standout planets to discover; they’re just points on a map that Bioware would very much like you to scan so that you can get the progression counter at the top of the screen to 100%. Anomalies that you find are all the same 4-5 things repeated over and over again: a satellite, an asteroid, a rich seam of ore on the planet surface etc. etc. If I were part of the colonist team I’d be pretty damn outraged to have spent 600 years travelling to the Andromeda galaxy only for it to turn out to be even duller than the one I just left. And worst of all is the travel time, as any time you do anything on the star map you have to sit through a 10-15 second first-person sequence where your ship zooms along to your new destination. As Andromeda’s quest structure absolutely loves making you revisit places you’ve already been to on multiple separate occasions you will find yourself staring at this sequence a lot even if you outright ignore all of the pointless fluff; I would calculate how much of my life I wasted staring at the zoomy ship screen but I’d just get even more depressed with the game than I already am. It’s not even like they can make the excuse that it’s hiding a loading screen, because:

1. Those are distinct things that you still have to sit through any time you elect to actually land on a planet.
2. It’s a two-dimensional star map with individual not-very-detailed 3D planet models. It shouldn’t need a loading screen, and certainly not 200 of them.

I can’t conclusively rule it out, however, because Andromeda in general is a bug-ridden, poorly-coded mess with rock-bottom production values. You will have no doubt already heard many terrible things about Mass Effect: Andromeda’s animations and lack of polish, and I would just like to take a moment to confirm that everything you’ve heard is absolutely true. I don’t know if it’s the switch to the Frostbite engine that’s done it, or just everyone who was previously responsible for the character animation at Bioware upping and leaving, but aside from raw texture quality and lighting effects (some of the environments are quite pretty) Andromeda looks like a game released ten years ago. To be precise it looks like Mass Effect 1, and I know this because after finishing Andromeda I booted up the first installment to see how they compared — and ME1 actually came off better in several areas such as overall visual design and facial animation. Don’t believe any stills you see from this game: go on Youtube and watch it in motion and you’ll quickly see what I mean. Coupled with some truly awful voice performances that I can only assume were completely undirected (such as the infamous “My face is tired…” scene”) and which sound like the voice actor is reading them off paper for the first time and making their best guess at intonation and general mood, and the overall impression you get of the Andromeda Initiative is that it’s populated solely by a collection of robots on Xanax.

The general low quality of the visuals and audio goes hand in hand with a startlingly rough gameplay experience. There’s pop-in absolutely everywhere, and I once got imprisoned by a trio of NPCs who loaded around me three seconds after I walked into a room. Enemies get stuck on (or sometimes inside) scenery with depressing regularity. There were a couple of fights where they were flat out invisible (and I don’t mean that they were cloaked). Andromeda has stolen the Destiny thing of having enemies be transported in by dropship — and relies on it to the point of absurdity, so that you’ll be driving around a planet and three dropships will fly in and drop off troops near to your location in the space of thirty seconds — but if you’re in an environment where it can’t rely on this, such as the interior of a building or a ship, it has absolutely no qualms about spawning them out of thin air right in front of you. The scripting for the final bossfight broke no less than three times, forcing three separate restarts. Finally, the game itself crashes at the drop of a hat; my friends get consistent crashes during multiplayer, I had two soft crashes back to the system menu in single-player, and — worst of all — my PS4 hard crashed and had to spend five minutes checking disk integrity and rebooting after one particularly badly glitched cutscene. This is supposed to be a triple-A game, and I am amazed it got through whatever passes for Sony’s console cert.

So the premise is terrible and breaks the universe’s own internal fiction, the game doesn’t play to the supposed themes of the new setting in the slightest, and the general production values are so low (for what was previously the premier sci-fi RPG series) that they’re on the verge of tunnelling into the Earth’s molten core. This is usually the part where I’d say “But at least the combat and characters are okay” because those are the parts that Mass Effect normally manages to get right, but I’m not so sure that’s true of Andromeda. Plentiful bugs aside the combat is okay, just so long as you’re the melee-focused Vanguard class; I suspect I would have been far more frustrated with it had I not been able to recharge my shields by punching people in the face. The problem with it is that — as with so much of the game — it gets ridiculously repetitive; there are three sets of enemies and you’ll have fought all of them by the time you get to the second planet, and then Andromeda fails to introduce any new variants for the next twenty-five hours. Even the final bossfight doesn’t actually have a boss in it, it’s just you shooting wave after wave of the same goddamn enemies while a timer ticks up. There is precisely one enemy in the game that hasn’t been designed around the wave-based multiplayer mode, and there’s next to no coordinating design in the combat encounters themselves; enemies are just spawned and left to get on with it, and then when you’ve sent their corpses ragdolling over the horizon you move on to the next room or location and the next enemy spawn.

Then we have the characters, and… hoo boy, I really don’t want to get into the characters, largely because I’ve managed to go 3000 words so far without mentioning The Witcher 3 and I don’t want to be constantly comparing the two. Suffice to say, though, that Witcher 3 raised the bar in just about every single area for both AAA RPGs and videogames in general. It wasn’t achieved without effort. CD Projekt poured a ridiculous amount of money and manpower into it, and even if the Bioware of 10 years ago were still around and developing on an engine they knew they’d still have trouble matching it in many areas; it’s a little unfair to hold every subsequent RPG up next to The Witcher 3 since they’ll almost always come off worse thanks to having fewer resources to play with. However, the thing Bioware are known for, first and foremost, is the quality of their writing; this is the one area where I’d expect them to look at what The Witcher 3 achieved with questlines such as the Bloody Baron and Heart of Stone and substantially up their game in response.

Instead, Bioware have simply doubled down on having all of their characters making lighthearted quips at the slightest provocation. There is clearly somebody on the writing team at that studio who has seen far too much Buffy The Vampire Slayer and fancies themselves as the next Joss Whedon, except they completely forgot to include even the ridiculously overblown drama of Buffy⁴ as a counterbalancing force. The result is that everybody in Andromeda comes across as either a childish buffoon or an unlikeable asshole, like the initiative to colonise Andromeda was secretly an effort to get rid of the Milky Way’s most unwanted inhabitants.  The Krogan companion Drack is about the only character for whom the self-referential writing works because he’s a thousand years old and really has seen it all before; everyone else appears completely incapable of taking anything seriously, and this robs the storyline of what little weight it has because there’s absolutely no sense of the value of the stakes involved. Characters have conversations about the wholesale slaughter of colonists as casually as they would talk about what they had for breakfast that morning; life-or-death situations are faced with the same robotically-smirking expression and sarcastic comments as the rest of the game, and are totally robbed of any consequence as a result. Thanks to both the lackadaisical writing and the low production values ensuring that all too often we’re told about things happening in lieu of actually being shown them happening, there’s absolutely no emotional depth to anything that happens in Andromeda. Even Dragon Age 2 didn’t sink this low.

Speaking of Dragon Age 2, I got a very similar vibe from Andromeda, especially in the latter stages of the game. Development of the game was underway for five years so it probably went through several different iterations as new mechanics, worlds and storylines were developed and then later discarded, and what I think happened was that at some point last year Bioware were told enough was enough and that they had to release it before the end of the 2016 financial year or else. This is because Andromeda plays like a game stitched together out of several parts that were made more-or-less in isolation, regardless of how well they actually fit into the game; this is particularly obvious with the final pair of worlds that you unlock, as they have practically no worthwhile content in them and appear to have been included largely because the surface map for the planet was complete and it let them pad out the running time of the game. The finale is an incoherent mess that feels like it’s been ripped out of a completely different game (called Halo 4), while spaceship interiors are reused again and again in a similar manner to Dragon Age 2’s dungeons; the Ark interiors in particular are recycled on four separate occasions⁵. The whole thing starts to feel like an episode of Babylon 5, where they had a single apartment set that they redressed for each individual ambassador’s quarters – except this isn’t a relatively low-budget mid-90s sci-fi show, it’s a modern triple-A video game that’s had millions of dollars of development money thrown at it.

Impressively I think the damage Andromeda does to the Mass Effect franchise might actually exceed that inflicted by Mass Effect 3’s ending. That might have been catastrophically bad, but it was at least one specific point in what was otherwise quite a good game (and quite a good trilogy) rather than this sustained background noise of nobody giving a fuck. I’m struggling to think of a single thing about it that I unambiguously like; even its best planet, the ice world Voeld, wouldn’t even register as mediocre if inserted into any of the previous games. With a game this poor, and a reception this bad, I think there’s a fairly good chance the Andromeda setting will be abandoned – after all, it’s hardly a rich and fertile ground for new storytelling when the inception is this horrendous. But then if they do that, how do they make another Mass Effect game? Because I guarantee you they will try, so given how the storyline of the original trilogy panned out Bioware have three options:

1. Grit their teeth and make another game set in Andromeda. The problem with this is that I wouldn’t buy it, and I’ve bought every single game they’ve ever made⁶. Thanks to Mass Effect: Andromeda they’ll effectively be releasing to a hostile audience if they do this.
2. Retcon the ending of the original trilogy so that they can make more games set in the Milky Way. This would be exceedingly ill-advised since it would engender previously unheard-of levels of fanboy rage.
3. Make a prequel to the original trilogy. Probably the outcome with the least chance of crashing headfirst into a brick wall, but the problem here is that unless Bioware crafted a personal tale with smaller stakes (something which I think they’re now completely incapable of doing) we’d already know the end point to it.

So from where I’m sitting, Andromeda is not only a terrible Mass Effect game, it also dooms the next iteration of the Mass Effect franchise to also being terrible. Perhaps that was already a foregone conclusion given the current state of Bioware, but I liked to think there was at least a chance they’d pull their heads out of their collective asses and turn it around; Andromeda effectively guarantees the opposite. Probably don’t expect great things out of the franchise any time soon, eh?

The post Thoughts: Mass Effect Andromeda appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

This part of the review has more spoilers. I’m not going to reveal important plot specifics, but I am going to talk about the story structure and how some of the more promising mechanics actually panned out at the end of the game.

So Shepard’s goal in ME3 is to defeat the Reapers, and she’s going to do this by gathering forces for a final showdown while the Systems Alliance builds the Crucible, a magical MacGuffin which can apparently wipe out the Reapers in one fell swoop. It’s a bit of a crappy way to defeat them, but honestly given the way the Reapers have been built up over the course of the series it’s the only real way to do it; they can’t be defeated in conventional war and they can’t be talked down, so the only way to do it is via deus ex machina.  For most of the game construction of the Crucible proceeds autonomously without Shepard’s input – she can find items and recruit groups who help in its construction, but they’re just added to the War Asset list rather than having a tangible affect on the outcome – but then about halfway through it turns out they need a MacGuffin to make the MacGuffin work. They don’t know what the MacGuffin MacGuffin is, but Shepard gets a tip; she has to go to a certain planet to find yet another MacGuffin to discover what the second MacGuffin is so that the first MacGuffin will work. At this point I was just about ready to put my fist through my monitor if the game revealed one more hitherto completely-unsuspected galactic artefact of phenomenal cosmic power, but the worst was yet to come.

For much of the game you’re not fighting the Reapers. You’re fighting Cerberus and the Illusive Man, who are now full-on cartoonishly evil rather than interestingly and ambiguously evil. During my trip to find the MacGuffin MacGuffin MacGuffin, I was confronted by the Illusive Man’s henchman who also wanted it, and promptly beat the shit out of him in a gunfight. Unfortunately that wasn’t good enough for the game, which then switched to a cutscene where the henchman effortlessly takes out Shepard and her party and swipes the MacGuffin. Afterwards, Shepard is really cut up about her failure to retrieve the MacGuffin and stop the Reaper invasion.

Only, it wasn’t her failure, was it? She succeeded. I succeeded. It wasn’t the henchman or the Illusive Man or the Reapers who stopped her, it was the game designers, who thought that it was entirely okay to remove all player control over the outcome of that mission and have it play out entirely via cutscene. Shepard’s reaction to her failure therefore isn’t heart-wrenching or tragic in any way, it’s just annoying. Annoying because it’s an artificial reaction to a contrived situation. Annoying because this is my Shepard, who I’ve built up over the course of three games now, and she’s acting completely out of character because Bioware think she should be undergoing some emotional conflict at this point in the storyline.

This sort of railroading is prevalent throughout the main plotline. There’s loads of things you can do to add more numbers to the War Asset list, but at the end of the day that’s all it is: a number. It doesn’t even have any effect on the way the end of the game plays out beyond a very slightly different cutscene at the end. The things Shepard does to affect the outcome of the war are very, very linear and restricted, and when the explanation for a certain thing happening is “Because plot” I start to wonder whether this can even be called an RPG-lite any more.

Nowhere is this more apparent than the ending. The retaking of Earth was a little underwhelming, but what I thought was the ending – the battle to deploy the Crucible – was quite well done. I would have been very satisfied if the game had ended there. Unfortunately Mass Effect 3 then proceeds on to the real ending. which comes completely out of fucking nowhere and makes literally zero sense, being a choice between three utterly contrived situations. It is pretty much Human Revolution’s “Push a button to pick an ending” only worse, because the endings make even less sense, are extremely vague and inconclusive and are frankly an insulting, unnatural and awkward way to round off the trilogy. I was later told that the head writer on the first two games, Drew Karpyshyn, left development on ME3 halfway through to work on The Old Republic, which goes some way towards explaining why the conclusion to ME3 is so disjointed and nonsensical, but I still have trouble believing that the entire rest of Bioware saw the plans for this ending and said “Yeah, looks good!”

Ugh. What I’m trying to get across here is that ME3 follows a markedly different philosophy of scenario design from the previous two games. Mechanically, the game is a triumph, and the characters – always Bioware’s strong suit – are as excellent as ever. As far as resolving the overplot is concerned, though, ME3 is an abject, pathetic failure. It’s why I said Bioware very nearly proved me wrong; I was all ready to reconsider my opinion of them until I actually finished the game, at which point they merely resoundingly confirmed it. While they have displayed an ability to improve and refine the nitty-gritty of actually playing the game, ME3 proves beyond a doubt that they have absolutely lost what little ability they had to satisfyingly resolve a story – and given that Bioware’s games are often referred to as “Guns and Conversation” rather than “RPGs”, not being able to get the Conversation part right rather sabotages the entire thing, I think.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t buy ME3. I was enjoying it immensely up until that final hour, and there’s actually a reason to shell out for it beyond wrapping up the plotline now because the multiplayer is also excellent fun. If your primary interest in the game is to find out what happens at the end, though, I think you’re better off saving your money and making up your own conclusion to the trilogy in your head. I can guarantee that whatever you come up with will make more sense than what actually happens, even if it involves 400 foot tall purple platypus bears with pink horns and silver wings; that, at least, would be self-conscious in its absurdity, rather than the all-too-serious mystical New Age bollocks the game confronts you with. As it is I’ve come out of it with a sense of crushing disappointment rather than the complete satisfaction I craved, and so ultimately I can only call ME3 a brave failure; one which pushes forward mechanically, but which completes Bioware’s regression away from making RPGs. I don’t know what ME3 is, but it’s not an RPG. Calling it an RPG would suggest that I had some control over the outcome besides pushing a button, and that is the one area where ME3 doesn’t just fail; it doesn’t even try.

The post Thoughts: Mass Effect 3, Part Two. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

This is going to be split into two parts: non-spoiler where I talk about the mechanics of the game and how I feel it pulls them off in as vague a way as possible, and then another part where I go into slightly more spoily plot details. This is the non-spoiler half of the review, but please bear in mind I have to talk about some really, really general plot points like the basic premise of the game in order to explain how certain bits and pieces work. It’s only stuff that’s revealed in basically all the marketing material for the game, but if you’ve somehow managed to avoid that and want to remain unspoiled I’d stop reading now.

It’s always puzzled me how there seem to be two Biowares. They’re an inherently schizophrenic developer, responsible over the last few years for both the fine RPG-lite that was Mass Effect 2 and the nadir of “RPG” design represented by Dragon Age II as well as the DLC/expansions for the original Dragon Age. DA II was very nearly the straw that broke the comel’s back as far as I was concerned; I had become convinced I was watching the rapid deterioration of what had once been the biggest and best developer of western RPGs in the world. Mass Effect 3 was their last hurrah, a game I was buying more for old time’s sake and to round off the triology than I was out of any real expectation that it would actually be good. I was all ready to hate it, condemn it, cut tites permanently and move on with my gaming life. Having played through and finished it now, I’ve come to the bittersweet realisation that Bioware very nearly proved me wrong.

The short way to describe Mass Effect 3 would be “Mass Effect 2, except a bit better.” It uses the same engine, same textures, some of the same maps, same locations, same galaxy map and many of the game characters. It’s a fair bet that if you enjoyed ME2 at all you will also enjoy ME3. And yet to describe it this way would be to do ME3 a disservice despite the massive superficial similarities, as ME3 makes a huge number of significant under-the-hood changes that have a sizeable impact on how the game plays.

Somewhat ironically – given my initial reaction to the news that they were going to shoehorn a multiplayer mode into a game that seemed to need it like a majestic wildebeest needs an attack by a pack of blood-crazed, starving hyenas – I am forced to concede the multiplayer has actually had a very positive effect on how ME3 plays. ME3’s multiplayer is light, disposable fun rather than the half-assed effort I was expecting, and in order to make this work Bioware have had to pay a lot of attention to the one area of Mass Effect that always seemed like a bit of an afterthought: the combat.

In the two previous ME games I didn’t bother with the combat – didn’t understand it, didn’t enjoy it, and didn’t want to. It seemed like an annoyance, like a series of mindless shooting galleries whose sole purpose was to provide breaks in between the conversations and cutscenes, and consequently I stuck the difficulty down to Easy and blasted through it as quickly as possible. Probably ME3’s greatest accomplishment is that it makes the combat fun, that it’s something I looked forward to – or at least, didn’t try to actively avoid – rather than having to grin and bear it. There’s much more to do than just running and gunning this time around; the biotic system has finally reached the point where it’s quick and easy enough to use that it’s a viable choice over just shooting someone in the face, while the added melee is also a lot of fun and actually encourages you to close with the baddies and engage them at close-range. For the first time ever I started using a shotgun, which was satisfying; and then I stuck a bayonet on it, which was hilarious; and finally I upgraded it to the Graal Spike Thrower, which was utterly brutal.

The story and mission structure is workmanlike at best, but what’s interesting here is that Bioware are trying something new: actions and decisions with actual, genuine, and sometimes personal consequences. Instead of the suicide mission the premise this time is that you’re gathering forces from across the galaxy for a war against the Reapers – and this provides an intriguing method of tracking the player’s actions throughout the game. The choices you’re given are still the milquetoast Bioware Good/Evil (or Good/Dick in this case) binaries; however, ME3 differs from other Bioware games that have tried the same thing in a more tedious, conventional way (step forward, Dragon Age) by providing you with about a zillion war assets you can find and add to your army. These range from single ships you can find while scanning planets and characters/factions from previous games making cameo appearances, to the fleets and ground troops of an entire race which must generally be secured by running errands for them. Most of the time once you’ve secured an asset its presence in the game is reduced to a number and an entry on the war asset list, but that number isn’t fixed and can fluctuate up and down depending on subsequent decisions you make. It’s a little bit clinical, and the ultimate consequences basically boil down to “Get this much military strength for a five second clip added on to the ending sequence”, but as a record of your actions and moral choices it’s far more effective and fluid than the now-meaningless Paragon/Renegade alignment bars. Which are still inexplicably present, by the way.

Speaking of character cameos and ultimate consequences, I think Bioware have hit much closer to the mark this time than ME2 did, especially considering the fact that they’ve now got 12-15 NPCs that all have to be dealt with. Nearly all of them get actual face time in the game (a far cry from ME2’s cop-out emails) and most of them have whole missions centred around them even though they might not be recruitable. Many of them are, but – awesomely – you’re given a choice whether or not you want to take them, and if you don’t they join the general war effort instead and show up in the asset list.

That’s if they survive, of course. ME3 doesn’t quite adequately portray the stark, relentless nature of the Reaper invasion – while individual civilizations are crushed effectively, you seem to have all the time in the world in which to save Earth – but it it pulls no punches when it comes to deciding the fate of your NPCs. I lost at least five during my playthrough, and some of those deaths I absolutely did not see coming, with the determining factor sometimes being (apparently) reliant on decisions I made in ME2. While securing the support of the larger races is somewhat underwhelming, it often necessitates the sacrifice of one of your companions – and I should stress again, those sacrifices seemed organic and natural rather than the RNG encountered at the end of ME2. Bioware seemed to be adjusting to a new paradigm, one where it is not possible to get a “good” or “best” outcome without taking some hard blows along the way. Watching Shepard’s friends die in the course of the mission brings home the stakes of the game far more effectively than war reports on the news or refugee camps in the Citadel.

This has come at something of a cost, unfortunately; there’s so many returning characters present that the game spends very little time on new ones. In fact I counted exactly one brand new recruitable NPC, a stock human male soldier who manages the impressive feat of being even blander than Kaidan Alenko. It’s a bit of a problem with the game in general, in that I feel it spends a little bit too much time revisiting the things that worked in the past and not enough time doing new stuff. For a trivial example, you know how when Portal 2 came out we were all pleasantly surprised that Valve had shown some restraint and there was nary a reference to cake or Still Alive in the whole thing? Bioware could learn a thing or two from them. The Blasto joke? That’s still going. Shepard VI? It’s here too. It’s like the game is trying a little bit too hard; like it’s jumping up and down just behind your shoulder shouting “Look! You found this vaguely amusing/fun in the first/second games so here it is again! Aren’t I clever?” The sad part is that the injokes are pretty much the only humour to be found in the game. Mass Effect 2’s premise was a suicide mission on which literally everyone could die, and yet it still found plenty of time for levity. Mass Effect 3 is incredibly grimdark in comparison, and while that’s understandable given the mass slaughter that’s going on it does make the conversation part of the game a little bit less enjoyable. There’s only so many times you can watch Shepard ruminate on the futility of her struggle against the Reapers before it starts to get a little bit old.

Still, while the story doesn’t exactly blow my socks off it does work, the missions you go on are entertaining to play through, and the character interactions with both Shepard and each other are as outstanding as ever. For twenty hours I was enjoying myself and immensely, and I was all ready to declare Bioware partially rehabilitated since ME3 seemed like a fantastic return to a form that I thought they’d lost two years ago. Then at twenty hours plus one I reached the end of the game and the wheels promptly came off the wagon. Most of the flaws in the game were revealed in that hour-long finale, and that’s what I’m going to talk about in the spoiler half of the review. If you don’t want to read that, you should know that ME3 — despite its innovations — is still a Bioware game through and through: it didn’t just collapse at the end, it completely imploded, leaving me with a very bad taste in my mouth. If it had been a standalone game I wouldn’t have minded so much, but as a way to round off the trilogy it is almost comically awful. I can guarantee that almost no-one is going to come out of Mass Effect 3 feeling satisfied about the way the story of Shepard has finished.

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