So I finished the game a few days ago and I've been milling about it in my head. I tend to be a critical person and expect the best out of people and products and have no qualms about ripping something or someone that is shit a new one for good reason. If you are shit, you are shit and I'll explain why you're shit. Deal with it.
I went into this game expecting it to be an enormous turd after SWTOR and DA2 being bad games with high production values, and I can safely say that hasn't changed.
Things I liked:
- Production values. It felt very "Hollywood" in terms of cinematic direction and actual content. Think "Michael Bay meets the new Star Trek movie".
- All the minigames were removed. They were fun a few times, but I got sick of them for every item.
- Scanning minigame was stripped down to the bear essentials. Fuck that stupid game.
- Combat felt better, but it's still as clunky as ever.
- Controls feel a bit better, but they're still janky including things like sticking to the chest high walls set up everywhere and pulling away from them or rolling to another one.
- Modding guns? Finally, I loved that feature. Too bad it took two games to re-implement a feature they already had.
- No Heavy weapons. This is also a negative.
- Conversations were improved but you also felt like you were playing a visual novel instead of playing a typical Bioware game where you can choose conversation options.
- Graphics were hit or miss, typically having a really unacceptable level of texture quality for a PC game on everything but faces. Lots of stuff like garrus' armor looked great, if he was not close up. I can see it looking good on consoles being farther away, but whenever he got close I saw how pixellated it was and it was pretty gross. Overall it felt pretty cinematic.
- Music design was also very cinematic, but suffers from feeling samey as a whole.
- Story was alright, how relations between characters and the fact they actually moved around the ship and interacted with each other was a major plus. Especially interactions during cutscenes.
- Progression was severely improved from ME2, instead of feeling like episodic garbage where you played dr.phil with everyone, you now feel like you're making progress as time goes on. Parts of the citadel changes as you complete priority missions.
- I liked that there was lots of tie in with the books and the dlc. This is also a negative because it's tons of content that's never mentioned either to anyone new.
Things I hated:
- How many fucking terrible shallow Hollywood tropes they had, along with the Michael Bay-esque directing.
- They still included code that SLOWED DOWN your mouse cursor while scanning. What? Why? FUCK YOU
- No exploration whatsoever. Rarely any actual multiple approaches to the levels unlike the Arrival DLC. Come on, hallways are fucking no effort and boring.
- ONE BUTTON DOES EVERYTHING STILL
- No real conversation choices, or lack of choices.
- ENDING
- Too many guns with no real major difference between them that was important other than ammo and dps and whichever gun you liked the looks of.
- Only two mod slots per gun, some of the mods I never used (such as weight reducer)
- some mods increased the dps of a gun barely, others increased the dps by a LOT. It wasn't really equivalent.
- Skills were still kind of lacking, but the choices you got made it a little better
- No summary screen to show overall stat totals for guns or intel
- The pc version was plagued with Baby's First UI. Typical UI behaviors didn't work, felt clunky, etc
- Javik is on the disk (at least for PC he definitely is), yet you still have to pay money for him or preorder. Sleazy.
- Sound for guns is pretty weak sounding.
- Soundtrack has a few standout tracks but most are flooded with the Inception horn and sound like everything else. Symptom of the "Hollywood" music effect, sounds good but it's not really recognizable for most tracks.
- Male Shepards still don't get cool haircuts
- Diana Allers
- Different writers for companions make them feel out of character, rather than maturing or evolving.
- Preorder items are all on the disk and can be enabled by editing an ini. Bioware won't even give them to you normally.
- Multiplayer. This shouldn't exist in Mass Effect and the resources spent should have been spent on the story instead. Additionally I don't play ME for the combat in particular because it's clunky as shit, so why would I want to play a clunky MP game? No thanks.
- Can't holster, though never was a problem for me. Apparently it was because consoles don't have enough ram for all the new things they added. Thanks lowest common denominators.
- FOV is WAY too tight. it's an FOV of 70, when it should really be an fov of 85-95 for PC users (who tend to sit closer to a screen and need a higher fov compared to console users who sit way back and need a shallow fov)
- Citadel should have been setup like the Presidium commons for all of the sections. Please go back to ME1 sized levels at the minimum please.
- The omni tool blade, lol Halo anyone? Fuck that bullshit.
- Felt a lot like crysis 2 and halo towards the beginning and end in terms of the typical Space Marine military that has become trite and tiresome instead of trying to actually work on being a Space Oprah like it should be.
- too short. 28 hours to do literally everything and take my sweet time? And get that ending? ugh no.
- Some bugs of some characters never showed up such as Conrad or Kasumi.
So basically even with all my complaints and enjoyment, I still don't think it's that great and has soured me replaying it especially since that's how the game/series ends.
If I had to rate it, I'd give it a 7.5/10 (5 means average).
By the same metric, I'd rate it ME1 > ME3 > ME2 of the 8/10, 7.5/10 and 5/10 variety respectively.
Hopefully you won't be seeing me there.
