Mass Effect 3 Demo Impressions

The Mass Effect 3 demo came out today and, although I really should have not bothered, I went ahead and played through it anyways. Just thought I'd give my basic impressions.

The first thing I noticed upon playing the demo was how much more cinematic the game is, especially during active gameplay. The Mass Effect games have always had a film-like quality to the but that was mostly in cutscenes. Now, they are doing things in-game that remind me of a Call of Duty game.

I'm not quite sure how I feel about this. I may just need to get used to it but it barely seems to resemble a Mass Effect game anymore. That special VGA trailer where all that happened was running from one side of the area to another comes to mind and makes me slightly worried.

Something seems a little off about the shooting. The demo is short and I am used to playing on the PC but something just felt stiff about it. You walk extremely slowly when not running and everything seems to move just a bit too slowly. I couldn't quite tell if it was just me or if the game was actually that stiff in my brief time with it.

The dialogue choices seemed a little stripped of options but I'm guessing that's just because it's a demo; those options probably exist in the full game.

The upgrade system seemed interesting. At first glance, it looks EXACTLY like the screen from the first Mass Effect, but you can expand each ability for more option. Each tick of progress down the tree seems to have a choice of two upgrades, usually a power versus cooldown type thing, with the final values clearly shown at the bottom. It seems like a nice mix of the first game and the second game's upgrade systems.

I didn't bother with the multiplayer and probably won't in the main game. That doesn't interest me much at all. I don't play Mass Effect for the combat, I play it for the story.

There really isn't much more to say about it. You get the basic idea of the story from the demo (recruit all the other species to fight back against the Reapers) but don't see any of it really play out. There isn't much character interaction, which I feel is the main point of these games. I guess we will have to wait and see in a few weeks how the final product has turned out.