Space Age Love Story

Forty hours over 13 days: that’s the time I've put into Mass Effect 3. It would have been sooner, if I didn't have to go to work. Bah. At the end of it all, I was left with a tinge of sadness at saying farewell to the characters that I’d worked with and a whole load of other feelings about the ending. I doubt I’ll offer anything new to what has already been said out there, but minor spoilers may abound.

So: over the two previous games, our main man/woman (former in my case) Commander Shepard has been busy trying to warn everyone that a bunch of rather nasty bods called the Reapers are on their way with the express intention of wiping out all intelligent life in the galaxy, as they apparently do every 50,000 years or so. This is obviously A Very Bad Thing, and something Shep cannot emphasise enough. In response, he’s treated as being like those maniacs you see in city centres carrying a sign saying “THE END IS NIGH”.

When we get started, we’re on Earth – called to explain our lunatic ramblings. Naturally, the bad guys suddenly turn up without as much a phonecall of warning and proceed to bomb seven shades of shite out of Vancouver. One sharpish exit stage left later, and we’re left with the job of essentially nagging the rest of the universe into getting their arses in gear to prevent mass extinction. Not something you’d have thought they’d need much persuasion about, but politics is politics, and our orders are to shake some action and get everyone onside.

Most of the various people from all species that we came across previously are back, assuming you didn't let them get killed. Because I’m ace (ahem), I made it through the “Suicide Mission” at the end of Mass Effect 2 with a full complement still breathing. Therefore, they all rocked up here, though I somehow managed to completely miss Kasumi. Doh.

As per with these games, the voice acting is top notch. Martin Sheen is back and the characters of Hackett and Anderson are made sheer bad-ass by sheer virtue of being voiced by Lance Henrikson and Keith David, the former’s character despite having the same name as someone from prog-rock bores Genesis. Most notable of the newcomers is Freddie Prinze Jnr, who offers his, erm, voice talents to Lt. Vega, a chap apparently made entirely of muscle. Interestingly, the alien race who copped for it last time the Reapers rolled into town have Jamaican accents and in an inversion of stereotype, the one who can join the squad (if you bought the Collector’s Edition or coughed up extra for his Downloadable Content) is a real hardcore type who’s known nothing but war and loss. No jamming with Bob for him.

The game itself: no real major changes from ME2, just a few tweaks. Diving between cover is handy for getting better angles for shots, especially when the more-brainy mooks start lobbing grenades at you, and the new melee attack is very handy and enjoyable to use. The mining section of the prequel has been streamlined, which is good, and the way you pick up side-quests by essentially nosing in on other people’s conversations somehow works, even if sometimes you rush past someone and only hear a few words before the quest pops up in your journal.

There’s some annoying bugs in the cut scenes: a couple of times, my man’s head spun like he was possessed by the devil and in others, his eyes bulged out to the degree that I thought Marty Feldman had been raised from the dead. Bizarre stuff.

For me, and I’d think a lot of people, we’re mainly here for the story. In most aspects, we get the quality we expect. The first visit to the centre of galactic government sees leaders reluctant to help out, oblivious to the scale of the threat – nice parallels to the 1930s, there. I also got a warm feeling when old friends turned up – especially Mordin, Jack and Tali, who turned out to look nothing like I expected under that mask. The Shepard I played as showed plenty of signs of the immense stress he was put under, being charged with saving everyone everywhere. You’d need more than a few Yoga sessions to deal with that kind of pressure, I’d expect, and his nightmares of those he couldn't save gave him a nice sense of depth and development.

Which brings us, inevitably, to the ending. By accident I’d already kind of spoiled it for myself by catching sight of a headline on a news feed that said “Mass Effect 3 Gamers Protest Ending” or something. Having now played it for myself… I see their point. It’s a damp squib of an ending that doesn't tell us anything, probably leaves us with more questions and essentially ensures all the choices we've made over the past two or three games were pretty much irrelevant. We get some vague explanation of why the Reapers do what they do – which wasn't “for the lolz” as I thought it might be.

On a positive, Buzz Aldrin makes a cameo, which was pretty cool – after all, for all our whizzing around space in a gameworld, he’s a dude that’s done it for real and walked on the moon.

My main qualm was the lack of any epilogues of sorts to show us how everyone got on after we’re done with them. The actual fate of Shepard I can deal with, it’s the other people I want to see, like did Tali get her house on her homeworld? And on the topic of her, I didn't feel the whole romance sub-plot got a proper resolution either. How does Vega get on in N7? It’s as if Bioware can only end a game on a cliffhanger rather then a true resolution. While the Metal Gear Solid series lacked Mass Effect’s level of immersion, it did end the whole storyline with the feeling that just about all loose ends were tied up: we knew who lived or died and what the future held for those still with us. Except Nastasha. I missed her sexy, three-packs-a-day voice in MGS2 and 4.

Of course, the more ambiguous/rubbish (delete as applicable) ending for the Mass Effect trilogy may well be because it’s not over after all. I fully expect some DLC* in a few months (weeks?) that will offer to tie up loose ends in exchange for a few more of my pounds. That kind of thing is enough to piss anyone off, and it appears to have done so to a lot of folk out there. Did it leave me feeling cheated? A bit. Put it this way, I ran through ME2 twice in quick order to explore the choices. I’m very reluctant to play through this one again at the moment. Except that I do have that ME2 file where I made a lot of opposite choices, so it'd be interesting to see how that makes things different...

If/when the new content comes out (and on previous form, there will probably be three or four of these), I actually hope they don’t change the actual ending. Yes, it wasn't what a lot of people wanted or expected. But there you go: epic fail for Bioware/EA, but one they can perhaps learn from, rather than try to rewrite to please daft fuckers like me.

*Which reminds me that there’s another DLC for Dragon Age II that I’ll end up buying now I've finished with Mass Effect 3. I really am a complete fucking mug.