Mass Effect 3 Preview

The Reapers are about to destroy the Earth, Commander Shepard isn’t even a Commander any more (he’s just a shepherd, now) and his PA got turned into a milkshake because you spent too long dicking about when you had an important mission to do. The Mass Effect series – or its initial trilogy, at least – is drawing to a bombastic close. It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.

I really do, actually. While there’s no shortage of people who are absolutely stoked for this game, there’s also been an outbreak of pessimism in some quarters, with concerns largely stemming from the revelation of the multiplayer mode, and the script that leaked online last year. To be honest, I’ve been a member of this negative camp too – not in a Private Frazer, “We’re doomed!” kind of way, you understand, but more as someone who doubts that BioWare can make good on all the promises it’s made with the past two games. Mass Effects 1 and 2 set up so many future pay-offs, so many Chekhov’s guns that need to fire – did you save the Rachni Queen? Re-programme the Geth? – that it seems all but inevitable that this finale will resort to some form of cop-out, in at least a couple of instances.

So yes, you can colour me “glass half empty” – but after being granted a generous hands-on with the first 90 minutes of the game, I feel fine. However the full experience fares in tying its loose ends into elegant narrative knots, it seems that Mass Effect 3 will certainly maintain the series’ upward trajectory in terms of delivering gratifying tactical gunfights. I’m one of those people who found Mass Effect 2’s handling to be a bit clunky, but it’s already obvious that its follow-up will be a slicker, more agile beast.

I should point out here that I’m not going to dwell on the plot points of the opening hour and a half; there’ll be plenty of other sites providing that information if you want it, and I suspect most of you won’t care for spoilers anyway. Suffice to say that the sequences I played came immediately after the bit detailed in Martin’s E3 preview (careful, there are spoilers in there), and featured plenty of Cerberus operatives to kill.

So, why is the combat better? It’s very similar to the last game, obviously, but everything feels a little bit faster, a tad smoother in its movement, a mite more self-confident, even. Mass Effect 2 still had the occasional sign of being an RPG that had grown into a shooter, whereas this feels so close to the tropes of established Gears of War conventions, it’s barely an RPG at all. Indeed, when you start a new campaign you’re confronted with a trio of options that determine how the game plays – and one of these more or less turns the game into a linear action experience. All NPC conversations are stripped of their interactive qualities, playing out instead as traditional cutscenes; presumably you don’t even get a chance to determine whether you’re Paragon or Renegade. At the other end of the spectrum is an option that focuses on story, dialling the combat difficulty down so far that your enemies all but shoot themselves.

Naturally there’s also the middle option for those of us who want the normal middleground. Even here, however, there’s still evidence of BioWare’s renewed focus on straight-up shooter fans. Among the more exotic talents nestling on the command wheel, most classes now have some form of grenade as one of their powers. The two I saw for myself came in the classic flavours of Frag and Sticky – Cheese n Onion wasn’t available – and worked pretty much exactly as you’d expect. Personally, I’m not convinced why you’d want to pick one of these when more interesting attack options are so readily available. They work well enough, but they’re hardly as interesting as a skill that levitates your enemies out of cover, or one that rips them apart on a molecular level. And while your other powers can be used as much as you like, cooldown pending, you can only carry three grenades at a time.

Still, these dull explosives are merely the marzipan surprise in the bumper chocolate box of your murderous skill sets. Regardless of what class you pick, you’ll find seven powers to upgrade as you progress, though one will be locked out until you gain enough XP to reach level six. More important than this increased arsenal is the fact that a couple of your abilities are split into parallel branches: In Mass Effect 2 this only amounted to a one-off, binary choice of options at the very end of a maxed-out skill path; now you can veer back and forth between two distinct paths. When playing as an Infiltrator, for example, your Tactical Cloak gets one branch focusing on the duration of your invisibility, and another that boosts the damage you do when attacking whilst hidden.

In the first 90 minutes there’s obviously only so much scope to enjoy this new flexibility, but over the course of an entire game it should result in a more diverse spread of upgrades, which in turn should help the feeling that your Shepard and his/her chums are special unique snowflakes. And really, this is a big part of what the Mass Effect experience is all about.

All told, the combat is looking pretty tasty. Aside from the grenades and a larger selection of powers, the most notable single addition is the inclusion of a heavy melee attack, triggered by holding the button down. This results in Shepard sprouting a nasty-looking blade from their omni-tool, battering the enemy with a massive attack that was a one-hit-kill on most of the chaps I used it on; combined with the Infiltrator’s Cloak, it felt borderline overpowered, though it was certainly a blast to use. In any case, I suspect it’ll be harder to abuse when tougher opposition shows up.

On a technical level, the changes to Mass Effect 3’s combat feel like small steps rather than giant leaps – but then it’s not like the game needed massive changes in the first place. As I said up top, the crucial factor is going to be how BioWare resolves all those little choices we’ve been making since 2007. However they fare, there’s bound to be a few surprises waiting for us on March 9. A sneaky peek at the game’s Accomplishments list – there are 50, this time around – reveals one by the name of “Untouchable”, which is awarded for flawlessly escaping a Reaper on the galaxy map. Outrun a Reaper and win an Achievement/Trophy? Sounds good to us…

Mass Effect 3 will be released on PS3, Xbox 360 and PC on March 9.