I just got done with the demo. The combat was actually a big step up from Mass Effect 2 - a bit faster and a bit less ducking behind cover all the time. Enemies are more aggressive and flank you etc. a lot more often. Weapons also feel powerful and melee is important, but not exactly imbalanced either, as you don't always insta-kill unless you level things up a lot. Enemies tend to be fairly dynamic and will do stuff like set up turrets or use shields to deflect your fire, use suppressing fire, and so on, which means you have to prioritize a bit when fighting. Honestly, it's still a bunch of corridors and boxes, but at least they've made them a bit more interesting to play in.
At the end of the day it's still a Gears of War clone as far as gameplay goes, but at least it's a decent one. However, past that? Eh. It was okay. The writing was, frankly, even more atrocious, badly-paced and stupid than I anticipated. It's ham-fisted at best and completely incoherent at worst. During the second segment of the demo, Shepard and crew are attacked by Cerberus, and then after surviving a twenty-minute firefight against a hundred of their goons, Shepard suddenly rushes over to one of their dying soldiers and goes "why are you here, Cerberus?" in the most cliche crappy detective movie way possible. I practically fell over laughing.
Characters like Wrex act completely out of character, as well, and Shepard's whole "I'm just a soldier" attitude is getting really fucking annoying because after saving the galaxy twice, you'd think he/she would have an arc. Instead we stick with the "average guy" archetype for the audience to project onto, with basically no personality whatsoever.
Visually it has great art direction, though Mass Effect seems to get a bit more bland and less colourful with each installment. However, while technically the game ran very smoothly for me, and played well, the actual visual bump is negligible except for some moderately improved lighting and generally just more of everything. More shakycam cutscenes, more bloom, more explosions, etc. It looks fine but the presentation is kind of getting stale, especially due to all the reused art assets. There's also a strange lack of background ambiance that kind of leaves some parts of the game sounding dead - the introductory sequence, for instance, nobody has any footsteps and there's very little background noise. Music is fine but not really anything different.
I dunno. Overall it's just meh. If someone took Mass Effect 2, improved the leveling a little bit and made the shooting a bit quicker and more responsive, you'd get Mass Effect 3. It's very, very obvious that they are churning these things out at a rapid pace and cutting corners in the process. The promise of more derpy, dumb story does not in the least make me interested in continuing - which is pretty telling considering that I was really into Mass Effect and wanted to see where it would go after the first game. I don't want to judge it too early, but I'm just not seeing a major leap and while it's fun, it's also extremely by the numbers and I just can't see myself putting money down for it until it's heavily discounted.
We really needed a new thread for the ME3 lulz.
I thought that was the LOL BioWare thread?
