Mass Effect 3

 

Mass Effect 3

 

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B004FYEZMQ
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches ; 14.1 ounces
• Media: Video Game
• Release Date: March 6, 2012
  

By : Electronic Arts
Price : $59.99

Product Description

Platform: Xbox 360|Edition: Standard
Amazon.com Product Description
Mass Effect 3 is a Role-playing Game (RPG) / Third-Person Shooter hybrid set in a Science Fiction universe. Mass Effect 3 is the third game in the popular Mass Effect series, and is rumored to be the final installment. In it players continue the adventures of Commander Shepard utilizing extreme character customization which is the hallmark feature of the series. Additional features include: the ability to import decisions from both of the previous games into the new game, ownership/play of previous games not required, customizable weapons, improved mobility and melee combat, many returning characters (if they were not killed off in previous imported games), an improved cover system that allows for more action, compatibility with the Kinect Sensor for Xbox 360 and more.

The Final Chapter in the Mass Effect Trilogy
Not everyone will survive. An ancient alien race, known only as "Reapers," has launched an all-out invasion leaving nothing but a trail of destruction in their wake. Earth has been taken, the galaxy is on the verge of total annihilation, and you are the only one who can stop them. The price of failure is extinction. You are Commander Shepard, a character that you can forge in your own image. You determine how events will play out, which planets to explore, and whom to form alliances with as you rally a force to eliminate the Reaper threat once and for all. How you wage this war is completely up to you: go into combat with guns blazing or use cover to plan a more tactical assault. Utilize your squad to full effect or take a lone wolf approach. Rain death from a distance or go toe-to-toe with enemies using devastating melee attacks. Mass Effect 3 will react to each decision you make as you play through a truly unique experience of your own creation.
Key Game Features

• A Rich, Branching Storyline - Experience a sci-fi epic with multiple endings determined by your choices and actions throughout the game
• Massive in Scope - Battle on many worlds across the galaxy as you unite the ultimate force to take back the Earth before it's too late
• Large-scale and Intelligent Enemies - Battle enormous enemies and take on a smarter type of foe that will consistently challenge your best combat tactics and put you on the edge of your seat
• Unlock a Customizable Arsenal - Tailor each weapon with devastating upgrades including scopes, grips, barrels and dozens of other unique attachments. Each weapon boasts its own powerful impact and visual flair
• Unleash Death from Afar or Go Toe-to-Toe - Customize your soldier and squad to engage the enemy on your terms. A huge variety of weapons, abilities and equipment allow you to combat the enemy in your preferred style of play
• Play with Kinect - Mass Effect 3 features compatibility with the Kinect Sensor for Xbox 360

Additional Screenshots

Earth is burning. Striking from beyond known space, a race of terrifying machines have begun their destruction of the human race. As Commander Shepard, an Alliance Marine, your only hope for saving mankind is to rally the civilizations of the galaxy and launch one final mission to take back the Earth.

Product Features

• Battle as Commander Shepard on many worlds across the galaxy as you unite the ultimate force to take back the Earth before it's too late
• Enormous enemies and take on a smarter type of foe that will consistently challenge your best combat tactics and put you on the edge of your seat
• Customize your Commander Shepard, your squad and weapons to engage the enemy on your terms
• Allows the option to import decisions from both of the previous games and supports optional use of the Kinect Sensor for Xbox 360
• Experience a new emphasis on melee combat, movement and an improved cover system

Customer Reviews

Be warned, this review contains some spoilers so read at your own risk. This is also a bit long winded; I apologize but, as a fan, I invested quite a bit of time in the series. Time for me to give back what they took from me.
My Real Rating: 4.5/5 until the last hour or so, at which it becomes 2/5
Game reviews can often be subjective so this review is coming from someone primarily with an RPG background who, in terms of game play, enjoyed the first game better than the second. The second wasn't terrible in terms of story but it was much less of an RPG and more of a shooter. The first thing I noticed about Mass Effect 3 is that BioWare gave us a game that gives us the best of both worlds and should be recognized for that. There are also some things here and there that I either loved or hated but these were not things that impacted the overall experience so I exclude them.
Some Observations
=================
1. Some people complain about graphics but that isn't as much as an issue for me. I am a hard line gamer who still pulls out the classics from the 80s and 90s and can generally forgive not-as-good graphics for a good story or game that is simply fun to play. Mass Effect 3 is, for the most part, both. That being said, the graphics weren't terrible and I feel that this is really a non-issue.
2. The re-design of the Normandy is great! I love the lounge (reminds me of a line from Mass Effect 2 when Shepard told Jacob that the next Normandy gets a lounge). Nice touch.
3. The writing was generally good. There were some places where I felt it was lacking but I'm saving my anger to discuss the ending. Also, character development is good, especially across the three titles; this is insanely difficult to accomplish in a game trilogy so kudos for that. There were several points in the game where a scene elicited an emotional reaction from me. In the last hour, that emotion was sheer terror that all this character development had been for nothing (see below).
4. As I mentioned, many of the RPG elements that were taken out of the second title were brought back but vastly improved. One such feature was weapon modding. While it didn't bother me like it did some people, I must still admit that modding in the first game could become rather tedious, especially for someone who feels the need to collect everything (not a good idea in the first game).
In this game, for example, suppose you mod a series of weapons with, say, a Rifle Scope I. If you pick up or purchase a Rifle Scope II, all weapons with the earlier mod are automatically updated as well as your inventory.
From the start, you can choose to upgrade weapons you are using to better weapons right away. Moreover, weapons are no longer constrained to a particular class (i,e, infiltrator, soldier, vanguard, etc) so you can enter a combat situation with the weapons that are best suited to the task. There are some weight limits that you should observe when carrying weapons that depend on class, however.
Overall, the game play is fantastic.
5. Halleluiah, planet scanning is gone! It has returned in some form but one does not need to spend large chunks of time collecting resources to upgrade weapons and ship components. Planet scanning is mainly used to collect war assets in Reaper controlled territory but even this can still get a bit tedious at times.
6. I am not a huge fan of multiplayer games, cooperative or not, so I do not feel like I am in a position to adequately critique it.
Comments on the Story
=====================
The story was great. I was on the edge of my seat digging it, that is, until the last hour minutes or so when, in my view, the totality of the trilogy came crashing to the ground. There is a huge, heated debate about the ending of the game where both sides are calling names like rather ill-behaved children. I do not intend to call names here as games, like movies, are very subjective. However, I do have some thoughts about the ending and the story. If you don't share these thoughts, great. But don't be pompous, acting like your opinion is the only one out there. And, beware of spoilers.
//[Work Hard and Still Get the Shaft]//
The first thing that really annoyed me was that I played through every mission/side quest and got most (but admittedly not all) of the war assets from the various worlds using the planet scanner (this also got tedious at times but was nowhere as bad as the scanning in ME2). The way I understand the galactic readiness rating (GRT) is as follows: it is basically a multiplier that takes your raw military strength and is used to produce an effective military strength (EMS). If you spend more time in the multiplayer (which I did not) you can, in principle, spend less time on side quests and vice-versa. Good idea, I thought, as it gives players some leeway on how to proceed.
However, when I went into the final battle, I feel that the EMS rating was rather misleading. Mine was roughly at about 3200 or so with a default GRT of 50%. The green bar was completely filled. However, my ending sucked (I'll get to this in a minute). In fact, the first time I played through, I was so shocked that I re-loaded the Citadel mission to see if I missed something. Nope, as I feared.
Now, my initial reaction was knee-jerk. I was furious that EA/BioWare made a game where, as I perceived at the time, a decent ending could not be achieved without multiplayer. I have since then been corrected. A decent ending, where Shepard presumably lives (there is still some ambiguity here), can be achieved with an EMS of 4000 or better (at least, according to sites like IGN). However, my complaint is that the game misled me about this as my EMS bar was completely filled going into the last mission. Even if you can get the good ending without playing multiplayer, much of your readiness rating depends on previous choices from earlier titles. Also, admittedly, there is a box that told me that my chances against the Reapers was even but I didn't think much of it because in Mass Effect 2, they still called it a "suicide mission" even if you made all the necessary preparations.
I should note that the supposed "good" ending includes a very brief cut scene where Shepard is still alive but appears to be in bad shape; I don't have much of an incentive to work hard to get my EMS up for a 20 second cut scene that leaves some ambiguity about Shepard's ultimate fate.
//[Past Decisions?]//
I didn't feel that all of my decisions really mattered. My feeling is that your decisions mattered mainly insofar as a character might briefly appear in the game and promise to help you but you may not ever encounter that character again in the game and a positive number would be tallied, in your favor, to your military strength. So, basically, I feel like I made decisions not to see further development of a character who was willing to fight and, possibly die, along side me but rather, to see a sum magically increase by a few hundred points.
A good example is the Rachni Queen. She appears if you save her and you are again given an option to save or let her die as she has been taken over by Reaper tech. If you let her live, she appears in a list under the war assets and that is that.
The collector base, for example, does play a role in what choices you have in the ending but I didn't really feel like my decision to destroy it made much of an impact throughout the game. This was, at least I thought, a huge decision and all it does it determine which three crappy choices will cause you to "win" if you even "win" at all. That is, the crappy choices are permuted depending on your choice to destroy or not destroy the collector base.
You also see Major Kirrahe who promises to fight by your side no matter which way the political tide turns. What is frustrating is that I expected a full scale, epic battle where all sorts of people I have rallied were fighting by my side. Literally. I don't think that this was a wrong or misleading assumption. But this isn't what I got. Perhaps my expectations here were far too high.
I understand that making a game that is custom tailored to the player is a difficult, technical task but this is how they marketed the game. I remember feeling that my ME1 decisions, with the exception of Wrex, didn't really have an impact on ME2 except for a few casual encounters with Conrad or an Asari communicating on behalf of the Rachni Queen. I really felt like I would feel the heavy weight of my major decisions from ALL three titles. Instead, there were many times when it felt like "Oh yeah, I remember doing that." The only decisions that seemed to carry sufficient weight were ones that I made in this particular game.
//[Total Annihilation/Gooification of Humanity Isn't So Bad So Long As it is Justified by a Child]//
The ending didn't make much sense to me. In fact, I felt like more alcohol would assist me in understanding it. So, to save organics from the hands of super advanced synthetics or AIs we have to brutally destroy entire species with a race of ultra-sophisticated synthetic-organic hybrids? Okay, perhaps "destroy" is a bad word; more like, gooify you and collect you as a museum exhibit of what once was. So, instead of being destroyed in the usual "the machines have revolted" sense, we will be brutally harvested by super advanced machines. Yeah.... that is a great....uh.... solution? Chaos is not necessarily a bad thing; it is found in nature. This was hard to stomach.
In Mass Effect 2, we discovered that the collectors were really Protheans who were re-purposed and it was generally agreed by Shepard and crew that this was a fate far worse than extinction. Why the... Read more›

This game is absolutely AMAZING right up until the final 15 minutes or so. The end of the game is really a slap in the face to anyone who has stayed with the series from the beginning.
I am not saying this because I did not get the end that I wanted. I would have been perfectly fine with an ending in which everyone died - because at the very least that would have been a clear and well defined end. This series has always been defined and advertised as character driven. The player is encouraged to get invested in and attached to the characters in the Mass Effect universe. And yet the way this game ends is simply unacceptable. The ending gives very little understanding of exactly what happened, and the player is given very little to go on in terms of the fates of the characters.
I have never been one to write reviews or have strong opinions on games. I am not even one who typically gets attached to series the way I got attached to Mass Effect. But the way the end of the game seems like Bioware came up with it in maybe 10 minutes is, in my opinion, a betrayal of the fans.

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