Mass Effect 3 is third person action RPG developed by BioWare and published by Electronic Arts released March 6, 2012 for PC, Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii U. It’s the finale to a trilogy which tells the story of Commander Shepard and his/her heroic exploitsin saving the universe from total annihilation.

Shepard and his followers

The single player campaign has 3 modes to choose from; Action, Role Playing and Story, which adjusts difficulty settings, dialogue responses and character customization. There are 6 classes you can play as; Adept, Soldier, Sentinel, Engineer, Infiltrator and Vanguard, each with unique powers that can increase damage and defense of the player. You take command of a spaceship ‘Normandy’, tasked to seek out and form alliances with alien races, recruit new teammates to aid you on missions, and collect war assets to increase your battle readiness. Weapons, upgrades and armor can be purchased from vendors, or found lying around maps, which allow you to further customize the overall damage and defense of your character. During combat, you can direct a teammate’s placement and power use to land combos for increased damage.

Choices made in previous games can be imported, affecting historical events, and relationships with characters you encounter. Dialogues are provided with short action prompts, which by selecting makes Sheppard respond in different ways that has affect on how he is perceived as a leader. You can choose Paragon to be a compassionate and heroic leader, or apathetic and ruthless as Renegade. These choices have a major impact on the friendships and romances you can develop, as well as the outcome of certain conflicts you will engage in.

Collector Praetorian Boss in Coop mode, Run and take cover or Die

Mass Effect 3 offers a multiplayer co-op mode, where you can join three other players to take over enemy strongholds by completing mission objectives and surviving waves of enemies. There are 4 levels of difficulties; bronze, silver, gold and platinum, with 4 different enemies; Reapers, Geth, Cerberus, and Collectors. Players need to complete 11 waves of enemies, while completing mission objectives such as escorting probes, hacking computers, killing enemy targets, uploading data terminals. There are 65 characters that can be unlocked, each with there own skills bonuses and powers. You can play as earths elite N7 Special Forces, or one of the aliens races from the Mass Effect Universe such as; Asari, Batarians, Drell, Krogans, Quarians, Salarians, Turians, Geth, Vorcha, and Volus. Completing all 11 waves earns the player experience to level up your characters, and credits which can be spent at the store to acquire new, characters, weapons, upgrades and bonuses. There are also challenges and trophies, which encourage you to explore multiplayer and earn a title that can be displayed to other players.

Tons of Characters to pick, game last a long run, I personally logged 500+ hours into the multiplayer coop

On the downside; a single button is used to run, revive a teammate, dodge an attack, do a mission objective, take cover, and jump over cover. It is extremely frustrating trying to get away from a swarm of enemies only to get stuck taking cover behind every object in front of the enemy. The camera movement is constantly sticking when ever an enemy spawns, projectiles are being shot at you, or when there are any animations going on in the environment. A large majority of the weapons you get are either too heavy to carry or have terrible recoil/stability, regardless of what mods or skills you use to address it. The ending, which was suppose to synthesis all the choices you made through out the series, was a short cut scene based off the final choice, and each multiple ending was just slight variation.

Game's coop mode even let you play as collector trooper, How Cool!

The enemies are largely overpowered; they can auto lock-on to you, hitting you non stop regardless if you run or dodge the attack. Hit you from one end of the map to the other, and at times through the map. There melee, powers and weapons do a ton of damage and can drop you in under a second, regardless of how much health and shields you leveled up. The enemies tend to glitch fairly frequently shooting 2 to 3 more bullets, rockets, and powers per shot. They can dodge your attacks as soon as you enter it into the joystick, not get stunned, or take any damage even when you are landing direct hits. Stagger you repeatedly until you drop, and when you go down they immediately execute you, making the feature to revive a fallen teammate completely useless. An enemy can instantly sync kill you within 5-10 feet of you, faster than you can move out of the way. They can spawn 10 feet from you completely surrounding you during a mission objective.

N7 Shadow in action, who can stop her ninja blade

In Multiplayer, ammo boxes are extremely cheap, only giving a tiny bit of ammo for the entire team, the first person to grab it takes it all. When setting up detonations or explosions your teammates can unintentionally cancel out your power combos instead of the combos being stacked. Some of the characters have bonuses such as rage mode, adrenalin, bloodlust, etc. which visually impair in maps that have biohazards. Commands entered into your controller aren’t recognized and often takes numerous attempts to get it to activate. The Collectors are so buggy, they froze my PS3 80% of the time. The server is unstable; players are always loosing connections and having blank screens forcing them to leave. The store which lets you spend the credits you’ve earned is extremely stingy; on average it takes an hour to earn 100,000+ on Gold to buy an arsenal pack that’s designed to give you weapons and upgrades, yet after buying 50 in a row I received nothing.

Summary: Mass Effect 3 has a great presentation; the sound fx, dialogue, music, graphics and overall game play are really good. Even though the single player campaign is pretty basic; cut scenes, followed by interactive dialogue, followed by making your way through an area battling waves of enemies, it introduces a fantastic multiplayer experience that gives it a wonderful replay value. I had tons of fun teaming up with friends playing with a wide variety of characters, powers and weapons. If there weren’t so many problems with the server being unstable and the store being stingy, I would still be playing it today.

• Graphics: 9/10
• Game play: 9/10
• Sound FX & Music: 10/10
• Story 7/10

Overall Score: 8.5 /10

The games you might like if you enjoy Mass Effect 3:

• Mass Effect 2
• Lost Planet 2 (for online coop fun)