Articles MassEffect22010-03-0320-00-23-62-650x325

Published on February 14th, 2012 | by Sharp-O

10

Mass Effect 3 Demo Review

Yes, it’s Valentines Day and like many other across the world, I’m spending it with the one I truly love; the Mass Effect 3 demo.

Holy awesomeballs, does this ever get me excited for the release next month. True, the missions available in the demo are the same two we’ve seen at trade shows for the past year but it’s still nice to play it for myself. As soon as you fire up the single player demo, you’re given three choices: Action, Roleplaying, and Story. Each focuses more on a certain aspect of the gameplay than the others. Then you’re given a character creation process, allowing you to choose your origins, your character class, facial customisation and whether or not certain characters died in previous games, only affecting the demo as much as certain characters appear while others don’t and a few choice dialogue segments.
There will be spoilers but if you’ve seen anything of the game up to this point, you’ll probably already know what’s coming. If not, be warned, SPOILERS.

The first mission of the demo appears to be the first mission of the game proper. Commander Shepard, stripped of his rank after events in the ME2 DLC Arrival, is brought before the Alliance Defense Committee to confirm their worst fears. The Reapers are coming to Earth. What follows is a psuedo-tutorial as you’re taught the basic controls and your goals for the rest of the game are made clear; Find help, unite the races, survive. The controls felt a little light when I began (I haven’t play ME2 in around 8 months so maybe they’re just like that) but the controls all came back to me after a while. You can still map your powers and select weapons in much the same way as before, which helps assign the new grenade powers to a button.

Speaking of which, I don’t like the new grenades, mainly because they seem like a huge step backwards from the ones in the original Mass Effect. The original grenades could be thrown like a discus and would fly for a while before attaching to an enemy or wall. They could also be modified to allow different effects, regardless of class. They were tits! In ME3, they’re just regular grenades that you lob and the only way to get different effects is to choose a different character class.

The second mission takes place further in the story on the planet Sur’Kesh, homeworld of the Salarians where you help evacuate a group of fertile female Krogan. What they’re doing there is not explained but it seems to tie into the animosity between the Krogans and the Salarians. It features more action and plenty of opportunities to use some of the new abilities and weapons.

The demo also features a multiplayer demo but I’ve not been able to play it yet. It’s been said that you can play the multiplayer without XBOX Live Gold membership but as I said, I’ve not been able to.


All in all, it’s a fun demo and just makes me more excited to get my Collector’s Edition on release day! You can find it now on the XBOX Live Marketplace and the Playstation Network in a few days.

Mass Effect 3 is available on XBOX 360, Playstation 3, and PC from March 6th in North America, March 8th, in Australia, and March 9th, in Europe.

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