PREVIEWS
Dr. Liara is not pleased
that you dumped her.
“I knew I shouldn’t have left
that banana peel there!”
Mass effect 3
played it The Normandy’s D-Day is fast approaching
At the center of the roleplaying petri dish, a colorful swirl of games are gently bleeding into each other. Flat-out action games adopt the
character builds and XP systems of the
traditional RPG, while roleplaying
adventures of a certain mass-market
mindset bury their statistics deep behind
rows of headshots. Mass Effect 3 looks to be
a high point of this trend, with Bio Ware
maintaining that it’s set to make a leap in
quality beyond ME2 equivalent to the leap
ME2 made beyond the original.
Deep within Bio Ware HQ, I eagerly
borrowed the keys to someone else’s
Shepard and sawed off enough Cerberus
commandos to give this bold claim
credence. The premise of my early mission
was a violent race in the
shadow of an encroaching
sandstorm through a
Mars mining facility.
A Prothean artefact
with anti-Reaper qualities
has been uncovered, and READ ME publishER EA DEvElopER BioWarelink masseffect.com
both Shepard and the Illusive Man gang
dearly want it on their mantelpiece. Aided
and abetted by new boy James Vega
(heavily inspired by Sawyer from Lost) and
whoever survived from the Ashley/Kaiden
collective in Mass Effect, the advance in
action quality is apparent from the start.
My mission was a race
through a Mars mining
facility in the shadow of
an encroaching storm.
Shield-wielding enemies scuttle down
parallel corridors to flank you while their
buddies tactically retreat further up in the
map, while the simple addition of
verticality (ladders!) manages to spruce up
level design. Sudden twists in the action
were used sparingly in ME2, yet here
they’re laid end-to-end. Ambushes on
incoming NPCs, surprise attacks from the
dark through satisfyingly smashable
windows, long-distance fire-fights on a
moving monorail—there’s more life on the
Red Planet than you might expect.
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