Here’s the full review of the single player campaign!

Mass Effect 3 is the first ME game with multiplayer; though, it’s not like BioWare cannot do a game with a bunch of people playing at once. Don’t forget, they are responsible for big games like Star Wars The Old Republic and even Ultima Online, but this online is a little different from franchises past. For starters, it a third person shooter with a power wheel full of special powers that focuses around the Mass Effect 3 Universe. These guys didn’t fug it up, for reals.

Real quick, the button layout is different from the single-player campaign. The major difference is there is no squad controlled combat. Though it is four players, you only control yourself due to no computer NPC allies (unless you AI Hack the bad guys). With that exclusion you get one-time use abilities like medi-gel, missiles, ammo-types, etc. And while the power wheel is still in effect, you are given only three abilities at a time and a two gun max per character. Of course, you can customize your weaponry but military talents differ by class and race.

Instead of picking one of the six military classes, you have all of them at your disposal. To even top that off, you are given one male and female human along with two alien races. The catch? You will need to purchase the extra races through space bucks, or DLC (more on this later), which are placed in packages at the space store. Luckily, you only need to level up one of the four characters per class to earn necessary experience points to really master a class. So, in summation you are given exp points for everyone in the same class no matter which male/female/alien you choose, but you will have to level up each class separately. It’s pretty thoughtful of the developers to leave us to mastering only 6 races instead of all 24 characters.

You may be asking yourself, “Why are there multiple races?” Each class has different skill sets and the each race differs by their talent combination. This means each race per class is preset by their abilities because you are given three usable abilities on the controller layout. For example, a Human Engineer class will have the Incinerate, Overload, and Combat Drone abilities; while the Quarian uses Incinerate, Cryo Blast, and Sentry Turret, and the Salarian has Incinerate, Energy Drain, and Decoy. Every military class works out like this but just fits an alien race for you.

Remember all of those smaller mapped missions in the story campaign? Well, those are your multiplayer maps. I think they are well designed and force you to pick your position to protect your team’s back. You start off with six maps while battling off the likes of Cerberus, the Geth, and Reaper minions in a total of 11 waves. The waves of enemies vary from beating up all of the enemies and bonuses are given out for protecting an area for an allotted time, killing a particular baddie, or surviving the onslaught of ME3 enemies. The difficulty is spread out between a Bronze, Silver, and Gold, and generally how jacked your character is defines how well you perform on said setting.

As you play missions online, you will accumulate space cash to buy random grab bags of goodies at the space store. There are four different packs (as one of the packs are rotated about) to purchase and you find weapons, weapon upgrades, new races of each of the military classes, and the one-time items like medi-gel and such. The packs are not overly expensive, however, you can just us MS points or PSN credits to buy them for a buck or so. I mean, you could spend real money on these upgrades but it doesn’t take long to earn enough credits. Anywho, the multiplayer is shitloads of fun so it isn’t ever a burden to earn them.

Ooooh, who likes a leaked photo of what might come!!!

The only things I would have added to this mode are but a short list:

1. Would be better to have NPC (non-playable character) squad mates when people drop or when you are unable to collect a full four person team.
2. Piggy-back off of that and give us a mode that allows us to control how many teammates you want. Doing a bunch of waves alone or with just a buddy is also pretty cool.
3. More waves. The regular class is great but the idea of a survival challenge to see how long you can hold out for would be cool too. Would be cool to see multiple enemy types on one map and even see them interact.
4. Not make the multiplayer tie into the story’s ending, or losing influence as time passes making you play it more for the story part as it could be more of a creative incentive to play the online. Luckily, it isn’t that big of a deal and it’s super fun anyways.
5. Expand this mode further because it’s so much fun!

And that’s what we call nitpicking folks. BioWare and EA most likely chose to add multiplayer to appeal to more people. Thankfully, it doesn’t feel tacked on and kinda feels amazingly natural to the Mass Effect 3 experience. With how controversial the ending of the game is, it definitely makes up by its quality and quantity of content that Mass Effect 3 packs in.