This is the third act in one of the most popular game franchises ever made, and I can't argue it's anything less than an impressive game. With some 40 hours of gameplay, remarkably few meaningless side missions and high production values, Mass Effect 3 is objectively an excellent game. And yet, we've done it all before.
Like an old boyfriend, it just keeps taking me to the same places and doing the same old things -- and it's boring. I've been to the Citadel already, twice, and to be honest, it was a more interesting place to explore in the previous games. I've explored all the different areas of my space ship, the Normandy, and I've mined planets for resources. I've already been pleasantly surprised by BioWare's decision to allow me to play as a woman and to have gay relationships. I've convinced a squad mate to have a virtual romance and giggled at the 'sex' scenes. I've fought the Geth and the Reapers and discovered ancient Prothean artifacts. I've learned about the fascinating Krogan, Turian and Asari cultures. This time around, I was hoping there might be something... more. Perhaps a different city to explore, a different ship to command, new races to discover and a different set of squadmates. But there's nothing new to see here, so move along. It's hard to really enjoy a game when you feel like you've played it all before, and that's how it feels to play Mass Effect 3.
Mass Effect 3 starts with the player-created heroine (or hero) Commander Shepard under house arrest. She'd tried to warn the Galactic Council that the whole galaxy was under threat from synthetic beings called the Reapers, but they locked her up for her efforts. It seems that life in the galaxy is trapped in a 50,000 year cycle -- as soon as organic life reaches a certain point of intelligence, the Reapers come and wipe it out, and the whole cycle starts again. As Mass Effect 3 open we are nearing the end of our cycle, the Reapers are coming, and time is running out.
The whole 'saving the universe from being destroyed' plot is getting really old, and the 'we're destroying organic life to save organic life' plot line doesn't really make any sense, but it just about manages to pull it off. What is harder to forgive is some of the cheesy dialogue in cutscenes -- if Steven Spielberg made video games, Mass Effect 3 would be his War Horse.
To "win" Mass Effect 3, you'll need to gather War Assets (Krogan soldiers, Turian ships and new technology, for example) and rally others to your cause. The amount of War Assets you have represents the Galaxy's likelihood of pushing back against the Reapers and will therefore determine how your story ends, so you spend most of the game watching your War Assets meter like a hawk. You can also accumulate War Assets by playing Mass Effect 3 multiplayer, though the developers claim achieving the 'best' ending is possible without ever joining a multiplayer match. What you will need to do in order to rack up War Assets is side quests, and lots of them, but then I'm not sure that anyone who enjoys playing RPGs could really have a problem with that. However, the 'good' ending, where Shepard lives, is incredibly hard to get -- you'll probably need to follow a walkthrough to guide you through it, and as it's based on the choices you make as well as completing side quests it would take away the fun of being able to play the way you want to play. I completed 95% of the side quests (but without access to the DLC or multiplayer) and only managed 2917 Effective Military Strength, presumably as the choices I made during the game were the 'wrong' ones. For the 'perfect' ending, I needed over 5000.