The best way to describe Mass Effect 3 is to put it in the Third Person Shooter/ Roleplaying Game Genre along with its predecessors. Who's reviews you can find on my blog as well.
Story:
The story takes place only a few months after the second game the final story begins on Earth, with Commander Shepard on trial for the consequences of his/her actions in the Mass Effect 2 DLC Arrival (if you haven't played Arrival you might be somewhat lost) During the trial, Earth is attacked by Reapers. Faced with insurmountable odds, Shepard is forced to escape the planet. Shepard leaves a dying Earth to set on his largest task yet: to gather support from alien civilizations and mount a counter-attack.
The story provided many different emotions throughout, some good times and sad times and while some questions were answered Bioware missed a large portion of questions and by the end of the game forced their fans to eat the dirt from a rushed ending.
Mass Effect 3 story score: 3.2/5
Gameplay:
Mass Effect 3 improves upon most aspects of the Mass Effect 2 style of gameplay. The dialogue wheel is still present but it feels alot more empty. Velcro wall combat is still present and the RPG leveling system is still in place.
The new gameplay mechanics introduces a Galaxy at War system, you collect war assets from various missions to improve your chance at defeating the Reaper forces in the forms of fleets, armies and various other objects of interest. Another new feature is multiplayer co-op, with various classes to choose from with many different races (besides Humans finally) and can level up and get new and better weapons and upgrades through reinforcement packs as you play along. Multiplayer features a handful of maps and indirectly effects singleplayer through galactic readiness increase if you do well enough. There are 3 difficulties (bronze,silver,gold) and 3 different enemy groups (Cerberus, Geth and Reaper forces.) Each game you play 11 rounds on a map with 3 other people and complete various objectives and clear out the enemies the better you do the more you're rewarded. Multiplayer is plenty fun but suffers from not having dedicated servers leaving you to deal with client based hosts that don't always have the best connections.
Character customization returns again, you can import your save from Mass Effect 2 which will retain a basic custom face and the name of your character. You can tweak the face to your taste as always and choose a different class as well.
The roleplaying element is made larger again with many more weapon choices, upgrades and attachments reminiscent of Mass Effect 1 no omni-tool upgrades still. The power trees are bigger again and have 2 diverging paths that give you various special effects on each power. With all these upgrades they still retained the better part of Mass Effects gameplay and Mass Effect 2's combat parts.
The transportation allows you to again control your destination with the Normandy, you can interface with the galaxy map and steer your ship to different sectors, planets and jump to many different systems the new challenge is the scanning and probing tweak, in some systems as indicated on the map there will be reapers, instead of scanning all along planets you utilize a ping scan around your ship on the map and may detect things of interest on various planets or in a section of empty space which then allows you to scan the planet for a singular object and launch a probe to acquire it. The danger here is when you ping scan you alert the Reapers to your presence and if you do that to much they appear from the edges and hunt you down which means its time to run away. These scan improvements makes things alot less tedious and gives you more time to enjoy the actual game.
Many characters , old and new make appearances and promise to deliver many interesting plot points to the game. Though Bioware left a few out with barely a word about them.
Mass Effect 3 Gameplay Score: 4.6/5
Graphics:
A step up from Mass Effect 2 in most aspects however quality is lost between console to PC ports as per usual. There are some beautiful backgrounds and environments, powers look great it still has alot of recycled and reused objects like Mass Effect 2. My only real concern is the blatant use of stock photographs, while this isn't a problem in most cases a key character was reduced to a stock photo after the allure of so many fans wanting to see her face she gives you a photograph in your quarters which is just a photoshopped stock photo.
Mass effect 3 Graphics Score: 4.1/5
Mass Effect 3 Sound and Music :
Jack Wall....oh wait, Jack Wall has little to do with the music in Mass Effect 3. What I mean to say is the various music artists that contributed to Mass Effect 3 create a compelling soundtrack. They hit the right emotions at the right times. The voice actors managed to play their parts but neither female Shepard nor male Shepard improved by any right and some dialogue forced emotions I don't think the voice actors have ever actually experience in their lives. Most supporting characters did a excellent job though. The sound effects upped the ante again and provided a crisp audio experience (we have Dice to thank for this.) Environments sounded great as well.
Mass Effect 3 Sound and Music score : 4.8/5
Overall: The series comes to a close on a very even ground, while the story is mostly back on track since Mass Effect 2 Mac Walters ignored key ideas left behind by the previous writer Drew Karpyshyn and the end felt unsatisfactory and it seems like EA wanted to rush the game out of the doors.
Total: 16.7/20
Average: 4.17/5
Image sources:
http://images.wikia.com/masseffect/images/c/cc/Mass_Effect_3_Box_Art.png
http://files.g4tv.com/rimg_606x0/ImageDb3/269070_l/mass-effect-3-screenshots.jpg
http://oyster.ignimgs.com/mediawiki/wiki-api.ign.com/mass-effect-3/thumb/e/e2/Mass_Effect_3_-_Weapon_Customization_2.png/450px-Mass_Effect_3_-_Weapon_Customization_2.png
http://sticktwiddlers.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/me3mpspacescreen.png
