Why Mass Effect 2 will go down as one of the best games of all time is that it told a great story that had some brilliant personal touches. The general gist of the game was that you would do a mission to recruit a character, and then later you’d be given the option to do a mission for them which is tied to their personal lives. Doing so would earn their loyalty. These missions really set the game apart. Whether it was finding out about Jacob’s “lost” father, helping Thane stop his son from following in his footsteps as an assassin or helping Grunt become a “man” in the eyes of his people – they had an emotional resonance that was rare for a game. And there were many of these moments.
These two types of missions, both being brilliant fun to play, were interspersed with skirmishes with the Collectors that were epic and challenging. Then there was a final trip to the Collectors’ hidden base to defeat them once-and-for-all to end their threat to the galaxy. All the way through the game, I was making choices through Commander Shepard about who should live and who should die, which race should be helped and which shouldn’t and even which crew member I preferred over another. These all came to a head in the Collector base where you make further decisions, and where the people you spent the whole game with could die based on your actions. This was so much more compelling to play than games where everything was pre-determined and you were just unravelling more of the already spun story as you played.
Mass Effect 2 was a great game from start to finish and my hopes were set high for the always promised Mass Effect 3. Although I didn’t play the first game, the choices you made in that game could be imported into 2 and affect some of the storylines and characters involved there. The same was true going into 3. From the get-go the series was designed as a trilogy. This also helped make the series so much more than what other game series are. Each game was a very real extension of an over-arching story, rather than just a rehash of something that proved popular. That over-arching story was the invasion of the “Reapers”, a race of sentient machines that purge the galaxy every 50,000 years of advanced civilisation. The threat was there in both of the first games, and both enemies in the first two games inherited the mystique and overbearing fear of the Reapers, which they both revered. These machines had wiped out every civilisation ever found, and were as powerful and dangerous as the largest of spaceships. As far as enemies go, the Reapers are as overwhelming as you would ever find.
With the Reapers being the enemy in Mass Effect 3, and a conclusion to the trilogy promised from the third game – my excitement for it was immense. And it delivered, for the most part.
The combat is Mass Effect 3 is perhaps some of the best of any third-person game out there. It’s not a game where the gunplay is the primary draw, so it doesn’t need to be perfect. But in Mass Effect 3 there is a perfect balance of fluidity, weapons that are different and fun to use as well as the signature biotic powers of Shepard and his squad mates.
The story for Mass Effect 3 has many amazing touches that made it a roller-coaster journey the whole way through. As hard as it was to believe, some missions provide as much of a tugging on the heartstrings as the loyalty missions did in the previous game. Seeing the history of the Krogan race, meeting up with old squad mates and sometimes seeing them die provide something that was more powerful than I thought possible. Again, spending time with these fantastically crafted characters makes them seem almost real, and seeing them go through hardships truly made you care. Although the Reapers were a massive, soulless enemy – you felt for Shepard in his struggle to defeat them for the good of his friends, Earth and the whole galaxy.
The ending is what everyone was gearing themselves up for in this game, and although a major improvement to it was made via DLC a few months after the game’s release, the original ending to the game, and the trilogy, was lacklustre. Without spoiling things too much for those of you that haven’t played the game, the ending came from left field, featured gaping plot holes and, worst of all for a game that based its story on previous decisions, ended based on a simple choice of three paths with little discernable difference between them. The endings may have had different significances, but they were all far beneath the story-telling standard which the other two games and the vast majority of the third held itself to. The Extended Cut DLC and Leviathan DLC released later on, with the first one being free, added to the experience and made the ending much more bearable. With the Extended Cut, I was happy with the ending to Commander Shepard’s war with the Reapers. Whether it is just because it was better than before, though, I’ll never know.
Ending aside, as hard as it is to say, Mass Effect 3 is probably the best all-round game in the series. But Mass Effect 2 is the one that I’d recommend most.
My expectations are just as high for the next adventure around the Milky Way. Bioware have been less than secretive about the fact that the next game in the franchise is well into development, announcing that the game is in a playable state last December, and that work on motion capture had begun in January, which would suggest a launch towards the end of this year, or more realistically at the start of next year.
I’m hoping to find out more about the next Mass Effect at this year’s E3 conference in June. Until then, though, the anticipation for what will probably be the game that launches me into the next-gen will remain speculative. So in the immortal words of Commander Shepard: “I should go.”