Given the rather heated public debate over the endings in Mass Effect 3, I wanted to make sure that I'd played through the entire game before I posted anything about it.  Some 68 hours later (including a fair amount of multi-player), I've come to understand why players haven't been happy... even with the 'extended cut'.

The game itself isn't vastly different from the previous two outings so if you've played either of the first two games, you'll be immediately familiar with how to get things done.  The usual array of classes with tweaked skill sets and a good selection of weapons and upgrades for Sheppard to dispatch bad guys with although this time around you aren't restricted to any particular types of weapons.  Instead, Bioware have introduced weight system; the more powerful the weapons, the heavier they are and having a higher weight has a detrimental effect on how fast your skills/abilities recharge.  It's actually an excellent system and allows for some useful combinations.  Later in the game, for example, I loaded up my Infilitrator with the most powerful sniper rifle (modified to give maximum damage and ammo capacity) I could get my hands on, but supplimented it with a sub-machine gun (modified to make it a light as possible but with a decent punch).  It just adds a little more RP to their G.

The story is fairly straight forward, get out there and find allies against the Reaper invasion.  Getting everyone to cooperate while they desperately try to save their own species/world is not so straight forward, however.  While you travel from planet to planet playing an intergalactic boy scout solving people's woes, you'll collect 'War Assets'... people, ships and technology that increase your chances of beating the Reapers, including people you may have helped/hindered in the previous two games.  The idea is to reach a level of 'Galactic Readiness' before you get to the end of the game.  Reach the correct level and it'll ensure you get the 'best' outcome... which is where I found my first complaint.  If you are only interested in playing the single player game (like the previous two games) then you are restricted to 50% of all War Assets you aquire.  This originally meant that in order to reach the 'best' endings meant picking all the best War Assets, which often meant picking something out-of-character to ensure you got the highest value asset.  Fortunately Bioware have since amended this... but I don't appreciate any game that attempts to bully me into playing multiplayer, or one of their mobile games. 

That's not to say the multiplayer is bad, in fact it's quite the opposite.  Having spent a considerable amount of time getting at least one of my multiplayer characters to maximum level (and promoting them to the Galactic Map), I can happily say I've enjoyed the multiplayer immensly.  Each game involves up to four people coopratively fighting either Geth, Reapers or Cerberus while completing the occassional objective.  Kills and objectives reward you with credits and XP.  While the XP works in a similar fashion to the single-player game, the credits allow you to purchase upgrade packs that come in numerous different flavours, each containing a random selection of weapons, consumables or unlocks. The better the pack, the more expensive it is, with the top end packs containing some rare or ultra-rare unlocks.  You can, as you'd expect, spend real cash instead, but I never felt I needed to.  A single successful Bronze level match, for example, would normally give me enough to buy three or four 'Recruit' level packs, or almost enough for the next level pack.  Sadly, being peer-hosted, the multiplayer does suffer from the occassional 'bad' host or rage quiter, but with only four players in a match, once you find a decent group things are pretty stable.

So, all in all, an excellent entry into the Mass Effect series, tainted only by an attempt to push you into multiplayer... so what about those endings?

********** SPOILERS ALERT FROM THIS POINT ON **********

So you've played through all three games, made some tough decisions, lost some friends, maybe wiped out a species or two, when you reach the end of your journey you want all those things to count... you want it to have made a difference.  And that is where the game falls down, big time.  In theory there are sixteen different endings (so I'm told), but in reality there is only really one with slight tweaks.  No matter what you've done, how good or bad you've been or who's left in the universe, you meet a sureal space-child that gives you a final choice with four possible outcomes... destroy the Reapers, control the Reapers, create harmony between synthetics and non-synthetics (essentially by making all non-synthentics into semi-synthetics) or nothing at all.  In each ending, Sheppard dies and the Citidel creates an explosive wave of a different colour (meaningful choice) that sweeps through the universe via the mass effect gates (destroying them in the process) eventually catching up with the Normandy causing it to crash land.  The Reapers then either fall over, or take off into space and the remaining people are left to pick up the pieces.  If you chose to create 'harmony' then everyone has glowing eyes and circuits on their skin in the cutscene... but the cutscenes are all pretty similar.  The only real difference you may notice, is which characters climb out of the wrecked Normandy.  All that time and emotion you've invested in the three games means nothing here... and that's why it's a problem.  The Mass Effect series is built on those choices, it's what made the game.  It's why people complained when the choices you'd made in the first game had little impact on the second game.  Does the 'extended cut' fix this? No, not in the slightest.  It attempts to explain a little better and may take the sting out of the end decison a little, but you can't escape the fact that after all the thought and story that went into making the rest of the universe it's almost like they got bored with the story.  I appreciate that connecting all of those decisions into the climax of the series would not have been an easy task... but they could have at least tried.  Like a lot of players, I felt a little robbed, and that was a real shame as, regardless of the players, the game deserved better.

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