I'm not gonna review this game in the traditional sense. It's easy enough to figure out: it's a *huge* game. The end to a very successful franchise. The production value and hard cash that has gone into it makes it virtually impossible for this to be a bad game. There's been some improvements. It's more action-packed, for one. There's some flaws in there as well, but nothing too major. By all measures, this is a great game: it looks good, it sounds good, it plays well and it's fun.
With that out of the way, there's a but: it has three relevant issues.
The first one is that the canon the game assumes if you don't import a save is absolutely terrible. A fresh game assumes poor decisions that don't correlate with each other. These decisions involve somewhat major elements in the narrative, such as important characters and whether they're still alive and kicking or not. On top of that, a fresh save also assumes as canon that you haven't met certain characters that were in the previous games' DLC and even some that were in the vanilla game. Lastly, some characters (again, DLC and vanilla alike) won't even show up in this game unless you specifically import a save. These choices the game makes for you often seem completely arbitrary and nonsensical.
If you're gonna play ME3 as a shooter, go ahead and enjoy.
If you're gonna play ME3 as an RPG sequel, I strongly advise that you take your character through ME1 with DLC, ME2 with ALL the DLC and then play this one. The difference in narrative is significant.
My second gripe with the game is the butchery it's gone through to enable DLC later on. From day one, the game was released with a somewhat small DLC package that was actually to be included in the game. But, hey, why not cut that out and charge an extra 10 bucks for it? Expect many more DLC packages down the road. While this is not uncommon in games today, I oppose this unconditionally. It's cheap and petty. Enough for me to advise against buying the game.
Last but not least, the game as it released is plagued with bugs and glitches that render a bunch of side-missions undoable. Some other glitches are just annoying, like characters getting stuck in terrain, animation-seizuring and so forth. They're not so consistent that turn the game unplayable, but they're frequent enough that makes me disgusted with how poorly this game was QA'd before release. Coming from BioWare, it's a pretty sad state of affairs.
Rent it or borrow it, beat it and forget about it.
As a final note, the ending blows. You can read all about that in countless sites if you're interested.
With that out of the way, there's a but: it has three relevant issues.
The first one is that the canon the game assumes if you don't import a save is absolutely terrible. A fresh game assumes poor decisions that don't correlate with each other. These decisions involve somewhat major elements in the narrative, such as important characters and whether they're still alive and kicking or not. On top of that, a fresh save also assumes as canon that you haven't met certain characters that were in the previous games' DLC and even some that were in the vanilla game. Lastly, some characters (again, DLC and vanilla alike) won't even show up in this game unless you specifically import a save. These choices the game makes for you often seem completely arbitrary and nonsensical.
If you're gonna play ME3 as a shooter, go ahead and enjoy.
If you're gonna play ME3 as an RPG sequel, I strongly advise that you take your character through ME1 with DLC, ME2 with ALL the DLC and then play this one. The difference in narrative is significant.
My second gripe with the game is the butchery it's gone through to enable DLC later on. From day one, the game was released with a somewhat small DLC package that was actually to be included in the game. But, hey, why not cut that out and charge an extra 10 bucks for it? Expect many more DLC packages down the road. While this is not uncommon in games today, I oppose this unconditionally. It's cheap and petty. Enough for me to advise against buying the game.
Last but not least, the game as it released is plagued with bugs and glitches that render a bunch of side-missions undoable. Some other glitches are just annoying, like characters getting stuck in terrain, animation-seizuring and so forth. They're not so consistent that turn the game unplayable, but they're frequent enough that makes me disgusted with how poorly this game was QA'd before release. Coming from BioWare, it's a pretty sad state of affairs.
Rent it or borrow it, beat it and forget about it.
As a final note, the ending blows. You can read all about that in countless sites if you're interested.