I recently finished playing through the Mass Effect trilogy straight after each other and thought I'd do a review on the series. I will avoid spoilers though the games have been out for a long time, so I will talk about any game choices in general terms rather than specific plot points.
The player in Mass Effects controls Commander Shepard who is the main character in the story, you can customise the gender,appearance and class for the Commander when you start the game, with the choice of class having a significant influence on the game as each class has a different set of abilities. There a six classes to chose from with each class having one set of powers or a mix of two: the soldier (combat), the engineer (tech), the adept (biotic), the vanguard (combat/biotic), the sentinel (tech/biotic) and the infiltrator (combat/tech), Each of the power sets are different, with combat being the most straight forward as you rely mostly on weapons and buffing weapon damage, tech has a selection of powers that are strong against shields and armour as well as disrupting synthetic opponents while biotics have lots of crowd control and debuff abilities while relying mostly on powers for damage. Your class selection depends on what play style you wish to use, and it is possible to change your class between each game even if you load the previous games save.
The story through the three games is amazing in my experience, it has lots of interesting well developed characters, interesting enemies, memorable locations and an epic story running through it that wouldn't be out of place in a movie or tv series. There are points within the story where your actions have both an immediate effect as well as a knock-on effect in the later games. I also had all of the expansion packs during the play through which add extra missions, this additional content add more direct links between the current game and the next, and in the third game one of the DLC mission arcs is a bit tongue-in-cheek and makes fun of the game itself in places in a good way, which is a very funny set of missions to play through filled with tropes and clichés and is bet done with as many crew-mates as possible.
The game play of the series is a fusion of role playing game and shooter elements with combat consisting of a mix of firing your guns and activating targeted abilities while the non-combat parts were often dialogue based, with a wheel giving different ways to advance the conversation, as well as interacting with objects such as hacking, collecting and examining. The combat gets more streamlined and evolved through the series with a cover system appearing in Mass Effect 2 and at the same time the cool down for abilities changed from individual ones to a combined one. Characters also have one or more guns to use in combat as well as powers from heavy pistol, sub-machine gun, shotgun,assault rifle and sniper rifle. Each has strengths and weaknesses, the slower firing weapons do more damage per shot and are good against armour but require more aiming and are less effective vs shields whereas the faster firing weapons are easier to aim and good vs shields but do less damage per shot and less vs armour, which often means that you want one fast firing and one slow firing weapon to suit any situation. The ammo system in one differs from two and three, in one weapons can firing a certain amount of shot before overheating and needing to cool whereas in two and three a more traditional ammo system is used where you collect thermal clips, which can be used in any weapon, that have a certain amount of shots before needing to reload the weapon.
Mass Effect 3 introduced an on-line multi-player that is linked to the single player campaign in which up to 4 players co-operate to survive waves of enemies while completing small objectives such as collection/drop off items, kill specific enemies, take and hold an area or escort a drone. In each match your character earns experience and credits, with the experience levelling up the characters as in the single player and the credits are used to buy random "boosters" of equipment, new characters, bonus exp for certain characters, and one use items. I found this addition to be a really nice one and allows for a quick game without cutting the story into too small chunks to do anything significant in.
Overall I really enjoyed the series and would definitely play again in the future if I were to have a gap in my hobby, so I'd give it a 5 out of 5 rating. I hope this helps inform you on the series and I would definitely recommend playing it if you like strong story driven rpgs and haven't already.
The player in Mass Effects controls Commander Shepard who is the main character in the story, you can customise the gender,appearance and class for the Commander when you start the game, with the choice of class having a significant influence on the game as each class has a different set of abilities. There a six classes to chose from with each class having one set of powers or a mix of two: the soldier (combat), the engineer (tech), the adept (biotic), the vanguard (combat/biotic), the sentinel (tech/biotic) and the infiltrator (combat/tech), Each of the power sets are different, with combat being the most straight forward as you rely mostly on weapons and buffing weapon damage, tech has a selection of powers that are strong against shields and armour as well as disrupting synthetic opponents while biotics have lots of crowd control and debuff abilities while relying mostly on powers for damage. Your class selection depends on what play style you wish to use, and it is possible to change your class between each game even if you load the previous games save.
The story through the three games is amazing in my experience, it has lots of interesting well developed characters, interesting enemies, memorable locations and an epic story running through it that wouldn't be out of place in a movie or tv series. There are points within the story where your actions have both an immediate effect as well as a knock-on effect in the later games. I also had all of the expansion packs during the play through which add extra missions, this additional content add more direct links between the current game and the next, and in the third game one of the DLC mission arcs is a bit tongue-in-cheek and makes fun of the game itself in places in a good way, which is a very funny set of missions to play through filled with tropes and clichés and is bet done with as many crew-mates as possible.
The game play of the series is a fusion of role playing game and shooter elements with combat consisting of a mix of firing your guns and activating targeted abilities while the non-combat parts were often dialogue based, with a wheel giving different ways to advance the conversation, as well as interacting with objects such as hacking, collecting and examining. The combat gets more streamlined and evolved through the series with a cover system appearing in Mass Effect 2 and at the same time the cool down for abilities changed from individual ones to a combined one. Characters also have one or more guns to use in combat as well as powers from heavy pistol, sub-machine gun, shotgun,assault rifle and sniper rifle. Each has strengths and weaknesses, the slower firing weapons do more damage per shot and are good against armour but require more aiming and are less effective vs shields whereas the faster firing weapons are easier to aim and good vs shields but do less damage per shot and less vs armour, which often means that you want one fast firing and one slow firing weapon to suit any situation. The ammo system in one differs from two and three, in one weapons can firing a certain amount of shot before overheating and needing to cool whereas in two and three a more traditional ammo system is used where you collect thermal clips, which can be used in any weapon, that have a certain amount of shots before needing to reload the weapon.
Mass Effect 3 introduced an on-line multi-player that is linked to the single player campaign in which up to 4 players co-operate to survive waves of enemies while completing small objectives such as collection/drop off items, kill specific enemies, take and hold an area or escort a drone. In each match your character earns experience and credits, with the experience levelling up the characters as in the single player and the credits are used to buy random "boosters" of equipment, new characters, bonus exp for certain characters, and one use items. I found this addition to be a really nice one and allows for a quick game without cutting the story into too small chunks to do anything significant in.
Overall I really enjoyed the series and would definitely play again in the future if I were to have a gap in my hobby, so I'd give it a 5 out of 5 rating. I hope this helps inform you on the series and I would definitely recommend playing it if you like strong story driven rpgs and haven't already.
