After my first few hours in Mass Effect 3, it’s time for my First Opinion of the game. How does it look, and how’s the game play? Let’s find out.
As I said, I’m only a few hours into the game so this is an early look. My Shepard is an engineer (you can read his first hour or so in my Live Blog from last week), so I’m using my allies, along with combat drone and sentry turret to defeat my foes. The action is great fun and I actually look forward to the next action segments this time.Finding new gear like armor, weapons and weapon mods has me scouring zones for anything I can interact with.
Having a weight limit on my gear seemed like serious hassle in concept but works out well. Each class has a different amount of gear they can carry – for example, soldiers can carry more then most – and your carrying capacity is able to be upgraded. You can upgrade your weapons as well, and that makes them lighter and allows you to carry more. When you’re over your average carrying weight, you start to get increases in your powers’ recharge time, and the inverse for being under your carrying average.
The story is fun and more open-ended then I expected. For some reason I was under the impression that ME3 would be more linear then it’s predecessors, but so far that’s not the case.
The game mode choice is pretty nice, with an action style for those who don’t care much for the story, a role-playing mode which is the default Mass Effect style (and my preferred mode), and a Story mode that makes combat a trivial event so you can just follow the story. That alone makes ME3 one of the more gamer-friendly titles on the market.
My Shepard, Bub, is mostly Paragon but it’s fun to mix in some Renegade actions and not have it negatively affect my Paragon rating. The reputation model adds both ratings together to make one complete standing. This allows the player to play to one side and yet toy with both sides of the coin without hurting their reputation much.
In short this is so far my favorite Mass Effect. I’ll have my review up in the coming weeks.
