Mass Effect 3 Demo Impressions
After seeing Mass Effect 3 at E3 last year, I was pretty sure the game was in good hands. I shouldn't have been surprised that the demo BioWare has released a few weeks in advance of the game's March 6th release date was based around the same set of content, but there's more than just a quick run-through available to gamers here. This demo also includes some basic character creation, both male and female variants of Shepard, and adventures alongside some of the game's most beloved characters as well. You'll also get to play as all six of the game classes and, in the second section of the demo, get enough saved-up points to try out all of the game's abilities on Shepard as well as your two squadmates. And yep, you'll even get to try out a good chunk of the multiplayer action as well.
SPOILER ALERT: there's really no way I can realistically do a preview of this game without talking about what happens in it or which characters make a return, so if you're avoiding all spoilers, just stop reading and wait the few weeks it'll take before this game hits stores.
The demo is split up into three chunks: a section at the beginning of the game detailing Shepard's experiences after the events of the ME2 Arrival DLC to the Reapers actually showing up and starting to destroy cities, a pretty solid selection that takes place on the Salarian homeworld later in the game, and a portion of the cooperative multiplayer mode which does not involve Shepard at all.
I chose to play the demo on PC, where mouse-and-keyboard controls gave me the best pinpoint accuracy for my guns and a half-decent CPU and GPU supplied the best visuals. (It should be pointed out that the PC version of ME3, like its PC predecessor, does not support a gamepad at all. It's not an issue for me, but it will be for some.) I also chose to play on Insanity difficulty, as I feel like that's the only way to force the player to make best use of tactics, cover, positioning, and all of the squad abilities. I've found that the Mass Effect series is generally quite easy on medium difficulty, allowing you to just get away with a few well-placed shots and some only mildly aggressive behavior and win most fights pretty handily. On Insanity, you've got to master each weapon,order your squadmates, learn all of the powers and abilities, and make best use of the flanking opportunities that the level designers have given you.
Part One
Admittedly, the difficulty doesn't matter too much in the first portion of the demo. It's more about getting you accustomed to using cover, firing from behind it, playing with a couple of basic abilities, and taking out one of the Reapers' new Husk-based organic monstrosities. Shepard can now dive and roll on the ground, although we're still over-using that same single "use/cover/sprint" button that, just like the A button often does in third-person console games, simply controls too many functions to really feel like we've got tight controls - and now that same button or key controls the ability to roll around, too. Along with a reunion with either Ashley or Kaidan, you'll also get a heaping spoonful of Admiral Anderson and you'll finally see Earth for the first time in the series.
It's a pretty limited, linear, on-rails sequence, though, and by the time the Normandy saves your butt, you might find yourself a little disappointed in the demo - but stick with it, as the second part of the demo is probably closer to what you want. Either way, your mission is clear: round up every alien race that's capable of piloting a fleet, and successfully resolve their conflicts so you can bring them together to defeat the Reapers. It might seem silly to hear Shepard and Anderson talk about coming "back" to save what's left, considering that Earth will probably be glassed by the time Shepard returns. And in most "save the world" scenarios, it really would make no sense, but Mass Effect's races occupy many planets and systems across a whole galaxy. It's not really about returning to Earth, but instead coming back, fighting the Reapers, and helping save the human race - along with all the others, too.
Part Two
The second part of the demo shows us a return of Cerberus. Shepard's back in the Alliance Navy in this third game, and our favorite morally ambiguous group of People Shepard Shouldn't Have Trusted is now taking advantage of full-on intergalactic war as they try to capture a fertile Krogan female on the Salarian homeworld. Professor Mordin needs Shepard's help to defend this Krogan from a serious Cerberus assault, and while the Salarians won't allow Wrex to step foot on their own home planet, they're fine with Shepard bringing Garrus and Liara. This is when you get to distribute quite a few ability points for the class you chose in the first part of the demo, so you can experiment with abilities and try out a decent chunk of the game's basic weapon loadout as well. You'll notice that each ability and power has a longer, slightly branched tree of ways to make it more powerful, and while you'll never have more than two choices to make, adding it all up is interesting, especially in that some of the power upgrades make them much more powerful when coupled with other characters' abilities.
The fights here involve a fairly diverse set of enemies in some well-designed levels that allow you to get the high ground, flank, and outsmart Cerberus. You'll need these advantages, too, because the AI seems better than it ever has been in Mass Effect, and some enemies carry large riot-style shields that protect them from most small arms fire. One of the easy ways to take them out is to simply get behind them, so that even if they turn around to protect themselves against you, your squadmates can fire at their unprotected flank. And speaking of that, there's one new squadmate command you can now issue, which tells your buddies to attack a particular enemy that you're pointing at. Obviously, if your squadmates are out of position or pinned down, issuing this order could mean their untimely deaths, but I like how all of this works together to make for a fairly tactical game. And that holds true even when you're playing as the Vanguard, using Biotic Charge to fly across rooms and slam into enemies face-first.
Many gamers took issue with how some RPG elements disappeared between the first and second game. The removal of things like dedicated inventory, weapon mods, mid-mission experience points, and a reduced number of skills and powers to increase when leveling up all made ME2 a little bit less of an RPG from the more classical pen-and-paper perspective. BioWare has addressed this somewhat in the third game with a reintroduction of weapon mods, the return of getting experience points in mid-mission, and having more skills and powers to level up - along with a very basic tree in each one that forces to make difficult choices more often when spending points. You still find weapon and armor upgrades in the middle of missions like we saw in ME2, and won't be replacing whole sets of armor on squadmates. Of course, you can still Renegade and Paragon choices and branching the plot based on how you treat events and characters, but you can even turn parts of these off upon character creation. The idea is that you can choose an Action-style game when making your new Shepard so that all cutscenes play out without dialogue choices, go for a Story mode where you have full dialogue choices but get vastly easier combat to go through, or the regular game like you're used to. I will be picking the standard Mass Effect experience, of course, but I like the idea of having options like this.
Multiplayer
The third part of the demo is the multiplayer mode, which is exclusive to those who own Battlefield 3 until this Friday the 17th. After that, everyone will be able to play the demo's multiplayer. It's a wave-based, one-to-four-player survival game where you pick your weapons, class, and powers, and work together to win. Yeah, we've seen this exact idea more than a few dozen times by now, but BioWare has done a surprisingly good job with this mode. There are multiple levels of challenge that are kind of akin to higher difficulty levels, and you've got access to all six classes that are Shepard-playable in the single player game. Different races have unique subsets of skills they will level up and put points into, although in this demo there's only a subset of races available. A game lasts of ten main waves and a final "get to the shuttle" wave where you hold out until the shuttle arrives. On PC, I did have some issues connecting to games, and had to open up Task Manager to end the task here and there when failing to connect to a host, but I still spent far more time enjoying the game than I did fumbling with the connection screen.
What makes a difference here is that the enemy makeup and objectives of each wave are randomized along with where they spawn on the map. Some waves require you to take out specific targets in a given time, some have you defend a certain spot, and another will make you move around the map to hack computers. Atlas mechs, riot-shield enemies, engineers carrying deployable turrets, infiltrator-like Phantoms (with cloaking!) and Nemesis-branded stronger opponents all attack in mixed arrangements in given waves, and the game uses a Gears of War-style "down but not out" mechanic where you can get taken down but brought back up if your buddies get to you in time, or if you use a one-time item to bring yourself back from the brink. Otherwise, the enemy can stomp you to kill you until the next wave (assuming your remaining buddies win the wave) or you will eventually bleed out after a little while.
And speaking of the medkits: these one-time items are brought from the in-game store with credits awarded for completing a few specific waves. These one-time, temporary items include include the game's trademark ammo upgrades, special weapons, and other ME1-style weapon mod perks. There's more too, though: new weapons and upgraded versions of existing weapons (available for all classes) can be won through special randomized crates you can save up to purchase.
Finally, there's one last little bit to the multiplayer that I found interesting. Your character can carry one or two weapons, but the heavier your loadout is, the slower your powers refresh. So if you want to go full biotic powers as one of the physically weaker classes like an Adept or Engineer, you can just equip one lightweight pistol and fire out powers nearly constantly. To balance this, classes that rely more on limited-ammo weapons and less on reusable powers have powerful grenades that can take out whole groups of enemies. These are balanced as well, as they also have a separate, limited ammo supply and must be restocked at ammo caches scattered throughout each level.
The Rest
Now, let's move on to some technical stuff. Mass Effect 3 on PC was put together by the same internal BioWare team that completed the PC version of ME2, and crazily enough, I even found an old bug I remember seeing back from the previous game. (Specifically, it's a crash to desktop when trying to drag around powers on the tactical screen's hotbar.) Apparently this bug has been fixed for the full game, but I want to point out that if you had a particular technical issue with ME2 on PC, there's a good chance that issue will still be around here. With that said, the texture quality, while not stellar, is decent, and the signature look of this series is still intact - and it looks quite good at screen resolutions that go beyond the console versions' 720p HD limitation. Mouse-and-keyboard controls feel great, and while the game does unfortunately require Origin, at least this game (unlike Battlefield 3) has a way to join multiplayer matches directly from the game. Or, if you want, you can use the invite system to bring Origin friends into your online games, but that's running under the assumption that you actually know at least one person that hasn't boycotted Origin yet...
BioWare has taken a lot of flak in the last year or so with the missteps made in Dragon Age II and the difficult task of completing Star Wars: The Old Republic. I'd be remiss to say I still wasn't at least slightly hesitant about Mass Effect 3 leading up to the release of this demo, but now I realize there was really nothing to worry about. But that's just me; if you thought ME2 was more of a bad sequel than a good one, then I doubt BioWare's efforts this time around will set your thinking on a totally different course. Sure, some new and returning RPG elements help give players more choice, but there still is no full inventory system, and the attitudes and style of Mass Effect, for better or worse, seem to be alive and kicking. But if you're a diehard fan of this series that hasn't had any serious problems with what BioWare's served up in the past, then you'll love what they've got in store for us on March 6th.
