Mass Effect 3 Demo: A Bad First Impression

The Mass Effect 3 demo held the promise of giving us a small taste of the full, retail version of the game. And if it intends to keep that promise, it's not one I intend to see fulfilled. 

Before I get ahead of myself, I'll first mention that the demo comes with two single-player missions and a multiplayer mode. These impressions focus solely upon the game's single-player offerings simply because it's what I've come to enjoy the Mass Effect series for given the absence of any multiplayer mode in previous games. If I wanted to play a multiplayer title, I'd get into Gears of War 3, Battlefield 3—or the new Syndicate demo instead of Mass Effect 3.

The single player portion of the demo begins with the prologue, and allows you to design your Shepard character as either male or female. One of the new choices available to the female Shepard during the design phase is the a new pre-defined face, with looks voted upon by the BioWare community on Facebook. She looks better, and more tenacious than the older default look, which resembled another one of the game's nameless NPCs. Her laugh lines and jaded expressions add to the impression that Shepard's been around the galaxy a lot more than most people. She's been in a lot of shit, and it shows on her features. I picked the female character because Jennifer Hale brings Shepard to life with her voice—a fact that hasn't changed in Mass Effect 3.

The fact that she isn't based on a model and is rather an artist's composition means she doesn't resemble a real life person as much as the male Shepard. Whether this detracts from the game is entirely subjective.

Once you've picked your combat class and background story (the demo doesn't allow you to import an existing save) you're dropped into the game's prologue, which begins at a military council on Earth. The game doesn't explicitly tell you what you're doing there, but based on the marketing for the Mass Effect 2 DLC, Arrival, and what BioWare has told us, Shepard is presumably on trial for her actions in Arrival, when the Reaper invasion draws the hearing to a close by killing pretty much every military council member present, with Shepard and David Anderson as the only survivors. How lucky for us.

For the entire time, you're not allowed to control Shepard and are instead treated to what amounts to a five minute cutscene before Shepard is given her first dialogue option, to answer a question posed to her by the soon-to-be-dead council. The answer doesn't matter and the Renegade option doesn't seem particularly Renegade-ish. What follows is another short cutscene before you're handed the reins.

With regards to the cutscenes, the framerate on the PlayStation 3 version of the game is very uneven, dipping below what my gut tells me to be 20FPS. The cutscenes are a far cry from the smoothness of Resistance 3 and Uncharted 3, at least in terms of consistent framerate.

Everything that follows is essentially the game's tutorial mission, which has you holding the thumbstick forwards for nearly the whole time, and occasionally pressing X. Some action follows, when Shepard and Anderson dispatch a few zombie robots—or Husks, as they're called in the game—first with their guns, and then unarmed. Shepard does not use her fists to fight them and instead kills them with a single elbow slash to the chest. The melee combat—if I could even call it combat—is entirely superficial, and feels more like pressing the square button to kill an enemy.

Along the way, Shepard runs into a child—one we've seen at the intro to the extended prologue sequence—who refuses to follow Shepard regardless of whether you choose the Paragon or Dialogue options. "You can't help me," he says, as he scrambles away in the air vents before you're called along by Anderson to move ahead. Thematically, I understand the call for this scene, but it isn't particularly moving nor is it poignant due to the fact that it's only there to emphasize the idea that Shepard can't save everyone. I expect it's a foreshadowing for the deaths of Shepard's friends throughout the rest of the game—that the battle against the Reapers will not be without great sacrifice. It's even something Shepard says to the council (shortly before they die) if you choose the Renegade option—that winning the war requires death and sacrifice.

All throughout this part of the prologue, explosions and action happens in the background as Shepard and Anderson make their way forward, out of the tower and down to a landing pad. These background animations are not perfect, but they do not resemble sprites. They manage to convey the illusion of a large environment, even though the actual playing field is a very small one.

After the prologue, you're treated to a single mission that takes place on a Salarian planet. You reconcile with Wrex, who asks you to rescue a female Krogan from a Salarian research facility where she's held captive. Your teammates Liara and Garrus accompany you on the mission, with Wrex staying behind for the reason that Salarians classify Krogans as a hostile species. To my dismay, it looks like he won't be joining Shepard any time soon.

When the Salarians refuse to clear your dropship, Wrex forces touchdown by initiating a "Krogan landing", essentially by jumping out of the shuttle and pointing his gun at the Salarians, who threaten to take him out. When Shepard arrives seconds later, you're given Paragon and Renegade options, neither of which matter because Wrex is still forced to stay behind. If BioWare was intending to showcase the scene as an example of the game's choices and consequences system, they failed, because it's neither a real choice nor does it have any consequences whatsoever regardless of what option you pick.

The game then skips ahead to what is the epilogue of the rescue mission, with Mordin Solus helping you to free the Krogan Matron from her isolation chamber. Like Wrex, he too is locked away, and serves solely as a supporting character rather than one who joins your party.

Along the way, new waves of Cerberus troops throw themselves into the meatgrinder in a quotidian display of pre-scripted nihilism.

What follows is quite possibly one of the most tedious and poorly designed combat missions ever conceived by BioWare—short of the missions in Dragon Age 2, anyway. The mission is made up of three main floors, with at the end of each long corridor. You are tasked with clearing the corridors of all the Cerberus troops on a floor, hitting a button, and making your way up the stairs. Along the way, new waves of Cerberus troops throw themselves into the meatgrinder in a quotidian display of pre-scripted nihilism.

You have to do this three times in total, climbing one ascending floor after the next until you finally reach the top where you do battle with a Cerberus mech for the first time in the series. Little more than a bullet sponge, killing the mech takes neither tactics nor clever aim but simply lots and lots of shooting.

The combat is better than the first two Mass Effect games, but it doesn't hold a candle to other cover shooters like Gears of War 3 or even Deus Ex: Human Revolution. It's a struggle to move in and out of cover, and whenever you come out of cover to shoot, all enemies take aim at you and reduce your health to near-nothing. You have to pop back down to regain your health and repeat the process again, killing one enemy at a time.

During combat, it's difficult to tell what your AI companions are doing because there's not enough verbal indicators or visual alerts to keep you abreast of the whole situation. You can pause, but it doesn't help a whole lot because your AI companions seem more than happy to do whatever it is they do. Furthermore, the game lacks any kind of SitRep to tell you what to expect or what you're getting yourself into. You're more or less forced to charge blindly into every encounter. Much like Dragon Age 2, new waves of enemies pop out at will turning every situation into a potential clusterfuck if you plan on playing on hard mode.

In short, combat in Mass Effect 3 is little more than a three-dimensional shooting gallery.

If this is what I can expect in the full game, I do not look forward to playing Mass Effect 3.