SPOILER CITY FROM HERE ON IN, CHIEF.

The trilogy is complete. Mass Effect 1 was clunky in its execution (the controls were a bit iffy on the PC, the motherfucking Citadel took fucking hours of my life I want back, and my hatred of lifts developed because of this game), but it had story and characters that were fairly fucking awesome. Mass Effect 2 was a lot less clunky (apart from the soul-crushing planet scanning), a lot more polished, and rolled up the set up from the first game into a sci-fi Magnificent Seven, which was fucking awesome. Mass Effect 3 is where the choices and the story you’ve made along the way pay off, whether for bad or good.

Confession time – I had to cheat a bit. Between Mass Effect 1 and 2, my PC died, so I had to rebuild it. Lost all my save games. So I actually went back and finished the first game again, twice to get a Paragon and Renegade character, ready for Mass Effect 2. In between Mass Effect 2 and 3, my PC died, and I bought a new one, and the old hard drive died along the way. Could I be bothered finishing either of the previous two games again? Could I fuck. So I went online and downloaded a Paragon save game as near as possible to my original story choices from the first playthrough (only major difference being that Ashley “Space Racist” Williams was alive instead of Kaidan “Carth Onassi” Alenko.

Mass Effect 3 is sad. Right from the off. There’s the odd bit of comedy throughout the game (although I’m sure your mileage may vary due to the very different ways the story sections can play out depending on what you did in the previous games), but for the other 99% of the game, you’ll be getting battered over the head with the “we’re all gonna die, war is hell” stick. Fuck it, I’ll mention the gameplay here – apart from a beefed-up melee attack that you’ll learn to build into your repertoire fairly quickly, it’s exactly the same as in Mass Effect 2. Did I just use the word “repertoire”? Jesus H. Fuck, that’ll be a sign of the wankery to come, I guess. My apologies in advance.

Going into the third game, I knew I’d have to make some difficult choices, and that some characters would die. What I didn’t expect was which of these would affect me the most. When I played ME2, just like I did with ME3, I did my best to avoid any spoilers off the internet. And I mean “any”. I was so determined, I pretty much avoided every games site ever until it was finished. So when I was playing ME2, I was so surprised when Mordin, mid-conversation, burst into a bit of Gilbert & Sullivan. It was a brilliant bit of writing (I mean the dialogue; I guess Gilbert & Sullivan were good writers too), and  an excellent way of making you forgive the guy who helped condemn a whole species to possible extinction. And it was optional! I’d guess a lot of players didn’t see it. Don’t get me wrong, I liked all the characters pretty much equally, but that bit of song really brought Mordin to life, and salved any judgement of his character with affection.

So when Mordin decided to go on a one way trip to cure the genophage, giving the Krogans a future, I was moved. A bit. But when he knew he was about to die and started trying to sing Gilbert & Sullivan one last time, that set me right off. I bawled my eyeballs out.

In my playthrough, Thane died too. So did Miranda. But Mordin? Mordin was the one that really made me start to give a shit.

Bioware is currently being nagged to death by fourteen year old internet fuckwits to change the ending (which is weird, cos Mass Effect 3 is one big ending, but they mean the ending to the ending, I guess). I sincerely hope that Bioware kindly tells them all to fuck off. I mean sure, the game has the readiness meter that Fable 3 had (although Fable 3 outright lied to the player to goad you into getting the shitty ending, which is a cunt’s trick; at least ME3 plays fair with the rating and the time you have left to do it). It also has the “choose your own ending machine” at the end, like in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, which was a bit shit in DE:HR (but it’s not as shit here, and I’ll tell you why in a sec). No, the reason why I want Bioware to stick with the game as it is is that it makes sense. Narratively, it’s a solid ending. Sure, it blindsides you with a twist (the Citadel plays host to a behemoth AI that runs the Reapers, and it can’t go on exterminating life every 50,000 years cos the current cycle has proven that it won’t work), but it totally works. The Reapers controlled the Geth, so the Catalyst controls the Reapers. The Catalyst chooses the form of the young boy who Shepard has nightmares about because the boy was someone Shepard couldn’t save; the Catalyst is trying to make him save itself. Shepard is given three choices at the end, and they all tie in to the beliefs of certain characters in the story (as it points out to you). And I don’t know about the other endings, but I chose to go with the assimilate option; synthetics bonded to organics, and everyone lived happily ever after. OK, so they lived without mass relays any more, but they lived!

For all these reasons and more, I loved the ending (to the ending that is ME3). It was a bitter-sweet ending, and with what went on in the rest of the game, it was the best I could have hoped for. The sweet part comes after the credits; the old man’s voiceover is a bit forced, but then I realised it was Buzz Aldrin doing the speaking, and I loved it.

And so it ends.

Something that worried me before I played the game was the news that, to increase your chances at getting a better ending in single player, you have to play the new multiplayer game. I was hoping for a complement to the main game, and I was expecting a hastily slapped-together bug fest, but what I got was kinda neither. I’ve only had a few matches up to now, and the only bug I’ve personally found is that when you drop out before you can connect to a match, you get a nondescript error message that people who haven’t been playing PC games online for years might misinterpret as meaning their game is hideously broken, when really it means “try again, the internet went a bit shit for a second there”.

As for multiplayer being a complement to the main game, it kinda is. The settings for each map are taken from events that are mentioned in the main game, and when you make your character (who is different to your single player Shep), you can choose from the same classes as before. You can choose between the five gun types like in single player, but in multiplayer you can only equip two. The enemies you face are all taken from the single player side of things.

That’s where the similarities with single player end, really. Multiplayer Mass Effect 3 most resembles Horde mode in the Gears of War games (which was awesome). You and up to three other players are dropped into a map and you have to survive ten waves of enemies. Each wave is bigger and stronger than the last, and you’ll soon find that you’ll need to always be near to at least one team mate at all times to stand a chance of winning. Some of the waves come with bonus missions; for example, one of them is for all of you to “hack” a terminal by standing within a certain radius of the terminal. This makes life more difficult as you soon end up all jammed near one window with no cover shooting everything.

When you complete a round, you are given XP that corresponds to how many kills you got, how many assists, etc. You are also given credits, and you spend these credits on lucky dip boxes that give you one-use-only upgrades and a new weapon. These lucky dip boxes are utterly random, so you may get a weapon you already had, you may not. The more expensive boxes are listed as giving out at least one Uncommon item, but I’ve not bought one yet, so fuck knows what’s in ‘em. I hope it’s a rocket launcher for them fucking brutes.

So far, so Horde mode blended with Call of Duty. Where it differs slightly, and where ElectronicBiowareArts has been crafty as fuck, is that the lucky dip boxes can also be bought with real life proper money. You know, pounds, dollars, stuff like that. The boxes themselves don’t increase your “war readiness” level in the single player, so you can’t buy your way to happiness; you still have to grind the multiplayer stuff for that. However, buying them boxes means you get more temporary upgrades and more weapons sooner, which will make it easier to level up, which will make it easier to kill things, which will make it easier to level up, etc etc. BioEAWare must be making a metric fuckton of cash every second out of muppets wasting their money on these things.

So what’s the multiplayer like to play? Here’s the good / bad thing, depending on your point of view. It’s pretty much the same as the single player shooting gameplay. You take cover, you shoot, you move, you occasionally run to a team mate to revive them, and that’s pretty much it. It’s a bit more tense due to the other players being there, and the waves getting a lot harder than the average single player mission very quickly in each match. But the controls and shooting is exactly the same as in single player. There’s a good reason for this, too; EBioWareA have wisely decided to keep the controls identical between game modes. If you change your mouse sensitivity in single player, it’ll be increased in multiplayer, and vice versa. This isn’t something I’ve noticed other single / multiplayer games do, but I wish they would. It’s an awesome idea, and means that players who wouldn’t be playing multiplayer if they didn’t have to will be eased into it that little bit easier. That totally works as a sentence. I’m keeping it. So anyway, the controls and “feel” of the run ‘n’ gun shooty are identical between single player and multiplayer. And ultimately, the multiplayer is really good fun. Matches tend to last 15 minutes (if you complete them). If you die, then you start bleeding out; if a team member can’t get to you in time, you’ll die until the next wave begins, or your team dies. Short match times and regular revivals mean that you are rarely out of a match for more than a minute or two, and you get a fair chunk of shooting done even if you’re hopelessly shit like me. And did I mention that multiplayer is fun? It really is!

Grinding in a multiplayer mode to affect single player stuff sounds like a pain in the ass to some people. Fair enough. If you’re an idiot like me and you have an iPhone or iPad or iPod or iPud, then you have two more options available to you. One is the Datapad; a free app that lets you “play” a little “game” that lets you increase your galactic readiness levels. I say increase, but the pace is glacial. You are given the same galactic map as in single / multiplayer, and each section of the map has “missions” on it. You tap on a “mission”, and one of your two ships goes to do the “mission”. Each “mission” takes a set number of real life hours to complete, and you’ll get something like a half a percent boost to your readiness score for that map sector. Better than nothing, but only fucking just. The free app also lets you look at the ME3 twitter feed, and has a spoof email inbox where characters in single player will send you messages after you do the missions. If you’re a big sap like me, this can be entertaining.

The other app is a game called Infiltrator. This costs £7, and is pretty much a port of the single player shootiness onto a phone. Left thumb makes you walk / run, right thumb aims, you’ll snap into cover when you get near it, you tap on an enemy to begin firing, and you adjust your aim with your right thumb to headshot everything. Honestly, it’s nowhere near as fiddly as that write-up makes out, and you do get into a flow within minutes. Where this game helps your ME3 readiness stuff is that certain enemies drop little intel packages, and these add to your score. Can’t remember how much by, but it wasn’t that much. The game itself is a pretty good stab at getting a cover shooter working on a phone or pad, and it is fully voiced and looks gorgeous.

So there you go! All bases covered, and you now know what you have to do to get the single player ending you want. All of the above.

One thing to mention – the galactic readiness level reduces over time, so if you have to put the game on the back-burner for a while, you might have to go grinding multiplayer again to get your readiness back up. You can also go round the galaxy scanning planets and finding shit in single player to add to your score, but that sucks balls, so don’t bother.

The map in this game sucks. It’ll show your immediate environment, but it won’t pull out to show an overall map of the planet you’re on.

The quest tracking is broken. Even when I track only one quest, the shuttle routes still get confused as to which way I should be going.

These points aren’t enough to sour the whole experience, but they’re enough to make me “grrrr” a lot.

However, I have just hit level 25, so I can use a mount. Two actually. I got two mounts. One looks like the front of a sit-down lawnmower, the other looks like a massive Flymo. They both look like lawnmowers. They’re awesome.

(I’ve also made an alt, a Sith Warrior, who is the tiniest dude in the galaxy, but he’s got a cyborg eye and a mullet, and he’s happy to rip the tits off anyone in his way. Good times!)

Nous is a free PC game, takes 15 minutes to play through completely, and it is well worth your time. Get it here.

Best played with an Xbox 360 controller, but it can be played with the keyboard too.

If anyone else but me reads this shit, and you do actually play it through, feel free to comment here with your thoughts on it. I’d love to see them.

So I bit the bullet and joined Star Wars: The Old Republic. Playing as a Sith Assassin, cos the Sith are awesome. Also – WoW’s evil characters were too cuddly or cute. Old Republic’s Sith are fucking evil, and my Darth Maul wannabe looks it, too.

The unique selling point for SWTOR is the fact that it is the first fully-voiced MMORPG. There’s no quest text like in other MMOs; each and every quest giver will launch into a little cinematic with your character, and true to Bioware standards, you get a choice of good or evil responses that you get get your character to reply with. As I begun my game, I was eagerly listening to every single word in each cutscene, amazed that the Bioware system works so well in an MMO. However many hours later, I don’t give a shit what they say – I’m waiting for the response wheel to come up so I can pick the nastiest option and giggle as my character says something awesome. Having said that, I doubt I could go back to the WoW quest text method. At least you’ve got something to look forward to when you pick up a new quest here, as you don’t know what the next cutscene will have in store for you.

As for how different it is to play compared to WoW, you’ll have to ask someone else, cos I’ve gone with the rogue class. If you really want to know what my character plays like, fire up WoW and play a rogue. What I can tell you is that the world Bioware have created is both better and worse than Azeroth. It’s better cos I like lightsabers. And blasters. And little shoebox robots that wheel across the floor making cute beeps. And using Force Lightning. It is worse than Azeroth because Bioware have added a few frustrations to their world that aren’t really present in WoW’s world.

For example – WoW  runs in a pretty seamless  fashion. You get a loading screen when you log in, when you use your hearthstone, and when you enter an instance. That’s pretty much it; for the rest of the time, it’s one mahoosive constant world. Star Wars: The Old Republic will give you fucking loads of loading screens and interruptions to go from one place to another. For example; in order to get to the equivalent of one of WoW’s major cities, you need to get back to the start of the play area (you can either run back through it, use the equivalent of a griff in WoW, or use your quick travel power), run into the spaceport, run through the spaceport to get to the elevator, use the elevator to get to your spaceship hangar (loading screen), run through the spaceship hangar to get to the door of your ship, use the door (loading screen), run through your ship to get to the captain’s seat, use the seat to bring up the galaxy map, find the Imperial Fleet marker, click on that (loading screen), get out of the captain’s seat, run through your ship to get to the door, open the door (loading screen), run through the hangar to get to the elevator, use the elevator (loading screen), and BOOM! You’re where you wanted to be. To be fair, I’m running the game on a SSD drive so the loading screens are gone in 5 seconds, but before that I was running the game off a hard drive and it sucked.

And it’s a damn shame, cos the flow of the quests is miles better than WoW’s. There’s the usual “kill 5 of these and bring me back their balls” quests, and in some areas you get bonus quests for killing 30 of something or whatever, but the quests are spaced out. You’ll get a couple of quests here, which lead you to a few there, which then lead you to a few more over there, which leads you to an instance, a boss character, an “ending” to the current planet, and then the next quest directs you to the next one. You’re never stuck in one place for long (fucking Nessingwary and that whole Stranglethorn Vale can fuck right off), and the “ooh new shiny!” eye candy keeps on coming.

Something else it most definitely does better than WoW is PvP. It doesn’t necessarily have better game modes or anything (although it might well have; I’ve only tried it twice), but what it does do is make people from all levels play in the same match. “That doesn’t sound like fun!” you may be thinking to yourself. “Lower level players must be getting ganked on repeat, surely?!” Nope. SWTOR (cos I can’t be arsed typing it out all the time) does something awesome. It gives all levels the same health and equivalent damage outputs for their moves. So I can play PvP at level 12 and kill someone at level 50. Which I did. A lot. Bear in mind that you’ll only be able to play with the moves you’ve learned already; level 50 characters will have access to all their character’s talents and moves, while you’ll be stuck with whatever you had when you went in. The whole damage / health buff thing though means that you’ll still be able to take much higher level players on.

So that’s it, really. It almost makes you give a shit about quests with the dialogue thing. It feels like a slog when you have to leave a play area for something other than quests cos the other areas are so segregated. The quests are fairly quick, and you never get stuck in one place for long. The PvP is hugely entertaining if you concentrate on killing level 50 characters when you’re level 12 like I did.

Up to now – like it a lot.