Mass Effect 3 (Xbox 360) review "So, yeah, bitching and moaning can easily apply, but then something fantastic comes together, and everything is blown out of the water."

It will be an impossible task to talk about Mass Effect 3 at this time without running rule over its series of disappointments. In a lot of ways, the last game in the much-lauded series is a victim of its own crippling ambition and stifling hype issued both from its rabid fan base and starry-eyed developers. So, let’s break some hearts: some of those choices you’ve been making through both the previous 30-50 hours games amount to exactly nothing. This would be fine if they were the smaller ones like letting down minor NPCs or picking shop X as Shepard’s favourite place in the Citadel, but it’s often the big stuff that suffers. In Mass Effect 1, you meet a biologically engineered alien from a long extent race brought back from the void by unscrupulous science. In its prime, this race held countless races under siege in a war that changed the landscape of the entire galaxy. The revived alien seems to bear no ill will, and only asks for a chance to vanish into the depths of space to try and rebuild her vanquished race. You can grant her this choice knowing that you release a mammoth potential danger into the universe at large, or you can kill her off and think nothing more of it.

Mass Effect 2 gives you little reflection on this choice. If you let her live, there’s a side mission where you encounter some of her rouge children, and she does manage to get in contact to assure you of her continuingly pure intentions. But in the third game, she’s captured, indoctrinated, and forced to spit out countless brood that are synthetically enhanced and marched out to war on a biological manufacturing belt. Your kindness has eventually backfired; the race you tried to save has been turned into mindless walking artillery and has greatly tipped the odds of survival against you. Though a bitter battle can eventually ebb the tide of misfortune, you’d not be blamed by anyone if you started to wish you’d swallowed your mercy and killed her when you had the chance.

Except that would make zero difference. Kill the alien, and your enemies simply construct a new one for little rhyme nor reason, and then have you fight them anyway, but in a much blander and generic fashion.

It’s hard to take some of the misfires in your stride when Bioware have been shouting from the rooftops for years about some of the things they’ve royally screwed up on. Building platonic and romantic relationships with the core of your crew has long been a staple of the series, but doesn’t live up to its potential. Post-Mass Effect 2 featured news releases straight from Bioware PR about the consequences a bed-hopping Shepard might encounter in the third game to the point where new files were created by players to expressly sidestep such a potential pitfall. Little did we know all this would amount to is the odd chilly conversation. And then, there’s the controversial ending that anyone with a passing interest in videogames and an internet connection is probably sick of hearing about. Though it does base itself on the war assets you’ve been able to drum up throughout the majority of the title, it boils down to a straight-up, unhidden choice of morality check A. B or C, all neatly colour-coded and explained to you in crayon. This review is late because I, and the rest of the internet, held our breath while Bioware’s huge patch fix was demanded, agreed to and released. It tidies around the edges a little, introduces option D (be a dick) and ultimately changes nothing.

Mass Effect 3 gets a lot wrong, or, at least, does a lot that fails to live up to the lofty expectations the rest of the series have built up for it. I’ve been ranting about it for around 600 words and, really, could keep going in an attempt to really wind up my copy editor. What’s remarkable about the title is that for every single thing it gets wrong, it absolutely nails another ten things.

Most of these go unnoticed; it’s little fixes in the combat engine or the streamlining of menus that you only really notice when you step back to ME2 or, god forbid, the absolute clusterfuck the original has turned into in comparison to both its sequels. Powers and enhancements work exactly like they’re meant to, from the simple stuff like Inferno Ammo’s ability to set things on fire and make a real notable difference to the big stuff, like Singularity making almost anything without shields float serenely in the air while you pump bullets into them. Rolling in and out of cover works now more often than not, melee attacks are finally made relevant. Ordering your squad of two around is simplified, and computer controlled allies now come equipped with a new understanding of common sense, letting them seek cover and provide suppressive fire while you actively set up flank attacks that get their own damage multiplier. Moreso then ever, ME3 finally can become the thinking man’s game it set out to be. You can snipe around the edges, you can meatsheild. You can hack, burn, or just play god with physics and gravity. There’s a lingering sense that more could have been done with the plotline, and the last hour or so just feels lazy, but too many people have let this corrode the simple fact that, as a video game, Mass Effect 3 is peerless.

What hurts it in some ways, also acts as strength. Without needing to worry about creating X number of links to (probably balls up in) a Mass Effect 4, often satisfying conclusions are offered to the assembled cast that have managed to survive this far. ME3 is more linear than the previous two games to achieve this, cutting off large sections of the galaxy and limiting exploration in order to guide players down the corridors of conclusion, but the side missions you can partake in feel all the heavier for it, and often feature all the odd faces that couldn’t quite make the transition to the main cast. There’s a few happy endings, but galaxy-wide genocide is widely acknowledged as a pretty miserable time, and numerous atrocities are handled with surprising gravity. So, yeah, bitching and moaning can easily apply, but then something fantastic comes together, and everything is blown out of the water.

Like ending a century-long feud between two races permanently at war. Featured heavily as antagonist in the first game and still very relevant in the second is a sentient AI collective known as the geth. Because of a tragic sense of timing, their long-run war with the quarian has picked the middle of an intergalactic bout of mass extermination to come to a head, and their home planet is under siege by their enemies and former masters. Their initial introduction way back in 2007 portrayed them as nothing more than mindless machines hell bent on destroying organics, but their origins are gently explored throughout the series to give them a tragic backstory that puts their roles as rampaging villains into a new light. If you’ve played ME3 and have employed no imported save files over from previous titles, then you’re forced to either side with or destroy the geth, forever alienating the race you side against. Or. If you’ve been clever, if you’ve been slowing eroding their feud throughout the three games, trying to show each race that they are not without blame nor undeserving of pity, you accomplish something that seemed completely impossible all the way back in Mass Effect 1. It’s a staggering achievement that drives home the significance of every baby step taken throughout three titles and makes worthwhile the efforts ploughed in. If the Rachni example used in the introduction to this review is a prime example of Bioware prat-falling over their own lofty claims, the geth possibility is one of many shining examples of what this multi-release platform is capable of. It’s built on a shaky deck of cards foundation you’ve been nurturing since day one, hoping like hell it will pay out some day and not collapse around you. Success sure as hell isn’t assured, there’s no guarantee one seemingly insignificant choice made two games ago isn’t going to come back and bite you on the arse.

If it didn’t feel so delicate, then it wouldn’t be such a satisfaction to pull off.

So, yeah, double-edged sword. The fact those moments work with such effortlessly brilliance really does only serve to highlight the severe failure of the ones that don’t. It’s easy to get carried away on this wave of disappointment and cast a negative shadow over the entire game, but that would really be missing the point. Mass Effect 3, like the others in the series that came before it, is virtual crack, dispensed in blocks and imposable to put down until completly devoured, then left craving for more. So, fine, bitch about the few areas the game falls over, and ignore the fact you’ve done little more then play obsessively into the early hours of the morning for the third day running. Whine about EA’s standard policy of having to register everything in order to get onto the multiplayer defeat-waves-of-baddies mode and ignore the fact that it’s bloody fantastic, is still continually updated at no cost, and shows no sign of slowing. I’m with you, faceless complainers of the internets, the times when the ball is dropped, it’s dropped sodding hard, and endgame sucks. But I’m not about to forget the absolute blast I had with the forty or so hours that preceded it.

Staff review by Gary Hartley (October 20, 2012) Gary Hartley arbitrarily arrives, leaves a review for a game no one has heard of, then retreats to his 17th century castle in rural England to feed whatever lives in the moat and complain about you.