Review: Mass Effect 3

Well the trilogy has finally come to an end and after what 7 years, the journey is over and it only took 120 hours+ to finish the story. Well it's time for me to throw a review into the ocean of Mass Effect 3 reviews to be ignored so here's my review of Mass Effect 3.


Mass Effect 3 is a hard game to review since like most Western RPGs, it's all about your personal choices and experience. The story is the final chapter in Commander Shepard's fight against the Reapers. The Reapers have final come to exterminate all advanced life in the galaxy(kinda like Daleks but only to advance races) and it's up to Shepard to rally the galaxy to fight against the Reapers and build an ancient weapons that may have the power to destroy the Reapers and end the war. You'll experience many victories and loses of life during your journey and the big finale will not disappoint... assuming you're paying attention and have been playing since the first game.


The gameplay hasn't changed much since the last game so returning players have nothing new to learn but newcomers will have no problems getting used to the game because the game does a good job of teaching you how to play it but I highly recommend getting Mass Effect's 1 and 2. A few things have changed since the previous games though, now the resource mining is gone completely and when you're traveling you can use a type of sonar to find stuff in each star system, which can also attract Reapers that can cause Game Over if they touch you. You also don't need to hack anymore!

Like in the previous games this is a 3rd person shooter first and a RPG second. The shooting is as you'd expect from 3rd person shooter but they've added the special powers to make it unique. These power are tech and biotics and while useful, don't really make you want to choose a class other then soldier since your teammates cover all spectrum's of the powers.

When talking to people and in cutscenes you'll be given choices on how to respond. The responses are usually a choice between good or bad(they call it paragon and renegade) and rarely you get neutral choices. In some cutscenes a little icon will appear onscreen that will give you a chance to make a paragon or renegade reaction towards an event. These can have a variety of effects and can be ignored but you may want to give them a shot and see how the story flows with them.

The game has a fair few sidequests to pass the time with. These are found by talking to people at the Citadel or by walking around, listening in on conversations. Most of these quests require you to scan planets in certain star systems or talk to specific people. Occasionally you'll get sidequests that will have you actually fight but these are given to you on your ship by Specialist Treynor or other people. The sidequests are the meat of the game and if you ignore them you'll miss out on roughly 50% of the game.

During the game you'll find armor parts, weapons and weapon parts while on missions. These shouldn't be missed since the better the weapons and upgrades you find, the better chance of survival. Some parts can be purchased and the weapons can be upgraded for extra power, ammo capacity and lighter weight. You can also buy full armor sets with locked in stats. Personally I suggest just going with an armor set that looks good or choosing pieces of armor that look good, mainly because I never noticed a difference in combat.

They also threw in an online multiplayer for the sake of pocket mining. It's pretty much no different to most 3rd person shooters multiplayer but you can use the special powers from the single player in it. Seriously this multiplayer won't live long considering it's generic and unnecessary. The multiplayer is just waves of enemies and a couple of small objectives like kill a specific target or interact with a specific item. Like I said it's generic and won't live long. Also if you buy this game for the multiplayer, then you're an idiot and should go buy Gears Of War 3 for the online multiplayer.


Mass Effect 3 is a fantastic game and a great conclusion to one of the best modern game franchises. With 40+ hours of gameplay(depending on how much DLC you've purchased from the previous games and if you got the Prothian DLC) and is worth every penny. I recommend buying all 3 games in the series and get all the DLC for the full experience. Regardless it's a great game and a fantastic franchise. I honestly expect Bioware to release a trilogy pack in the near future but don't take my word for it, just go buy all the games. I also recommend buying them during the gaming drought since it will cover the entire 3 month period if managed right.

Score 5/5