It’s not always easy for a trilogy to stick the landing with its final entry. All the build-up of the first two entries has been working towards the conclusion and it’s on that singular title to wrap up the plot as satisfyingly as possible. It’s a monumental task, with even the best trilogies of all time often sputtering out or failing to meet the standards set by the rest of the series. While I cannot say that Mass Effect 3 is the perfect conclusion to the Mass Effect trilogy, I can most assuredly say it is still a wonderful title that continues the series’s high mark of excellence.

Mass Effect 3 is the culmination of the the threat that had only been present in small amounts in the previous two titles. The ancient evil known as the Reapers have finally returned to the Milky Way Galaxy and one of their first targets is none other than Earth itself. Commander Shepard’s work against the Reaper’s forward forces in the previous titles make them want to strike right for the home world of humanity, and immediately the stakes are personal for the Commander Shepard you’ve created, whether or not you’ve imported them from a previous Mass Effect title. The entire galaxy is quickly roped into a war with these spaceship sized monstrosities, and in this time of galactic strife, everything is thrown into chaos, alien races holing up for self-preservation or doing whatever little they can to weakly strike back at the Reapers. Commander Shepard has previous experience with this foe though, so it falls on them to plan a counterattack that can truly put a dent in this seemingly insurmountable adversary.

Mass Effect 3’s plot is primarily about gathering the forces for an all out strike on the Reapers, with every plot event working towards uniting as many species, militaries, and people against the Reapers as possible. Shepard has to work against prejudices, misguided politicians, and the overall bleakness of the situation to try and bring everyone together in a force that can stand a chance of saving the galaxy. Due to how complicated things are during this war, Shepard will be called upon to make choices with enormous gravity. Sacrifice is a huge theme in the game, with the player called on to make decisions both big and small that can help or hurt the war effort. At times Shepard might have to pick between one ally or another, try to balance the morality of their actions with the importance of having a strong fighting force, watch their words carefully to ensure that people do not lose hope, and of course have to cope with people who must pay with their lives to try and assure peace in the galaxy. These are certainly the most monumental decisions in the series, with the fate of entire races coming down to how you choose to help or hinder them. There are even people trying to hinder your efforts against the Reapers as they try to find their own solutions to the problem, adding another layer of complexity to this enormous war. The war is an enormous presence in the game, the player constantly coming across its effects as they travel about, but it’s not so oppressive that it becomes overbearing.

Not everything is so enormously important, but they all do play to a magnificent contextualization of your military strength: war readiness. Every ally you make, every alien race you help, and every person you talk to could potentially add to a number that helps quantify how prepared your forces are to take on the Reapers. It could be possible to just assume your words have meaning based on context and reactions, and the game certainly has many actions show immediate and dramatic results, but even your small actions in Mass Effect 3 can help bolster your power for the final fight. Things as simple as giving an inspiring speech on the news can lead to an uptick in the amount of people enlisting in the military, or you might help increase a specific race’s morale by recovering cultural artifacts from a warzone. Even if it’s just a slowly climbing number, it helps nail in that every choice matters, and unlike some rising numbers in other video games, the context is present enough to motivate you but the tasks are usually not so dry as to feel like grinding.

Bioware’s famous dialog wheel is back, but it feels a little less refined than in the past. During a conversation, Shepard might be prompted to pick statements from a wheel of sentences that will direct the course of the dialog, your choices here building up your morality to being a good Paragon or bad Renegade, with your character ultimately able to be a mix of both but with more pronounced leans as you develop them over time. There can also be triggers that appear during a conversation for a brief moment, letting you make a compassionate or aggressive decision to twist discussion down a different path. Things are definitely not so clear cut as good or bad, and there are many difficult choices that can swing either way based on how they could help the war effort or affect the person you’re talking to. The issue with the dialog wheel this time around is it feels more imprecise than usual. First of all, Shepard tends to say a lot more things without being prompted by your choices. It helps with the game flow, but it does mean at times Shepard might not quite adhere to the personality you’ve developed for them. It’s the cost paid for some more fun and smartly written dialog, but even when you do get a choice, the words on the wheel almost never come up in what Shepard actually says. The sentence gives you an idea what they will say, but sometimes the option isn’t even addressed when Shepard speaks, making for a disconnect that makes it a little hard to predict what will happen next. Thankfully, Paragon options are still towards the top of the wheel, Renegade near the bottom, and the neutral options float in the middle area.

Mass Effect 3 seems to be resting on its laurels a bit when it comes to world-building this time around. While the Codex is still packed to the gills with interesting information on alien races and cultures, most of it comes over from the first two games and Mass Effect 3 does little to build on it. Almost all of its additions come in the form of minor cultural history on alien races or developing the lore behind the Reapers and their ground troops, which isn’t bad necessarily, but it does mean there’s less of a sense of exploration this time around. You do get to visit some new planets, including many home worlds of alien races that were previously just footnotes in the Codex. Characters will offer up important details during chats so that context isn’t absent if you aren’t interested in sitting down and reading the history of the series. Despite that, Mass Effect 3 certainly feels like less of a standalone title than 2. Constant references to the events of the previous titles crop up in conversations and as inspirations for events in this game, but Mass Effect is best enjoyed as a trilogy rather than individual games anyway. For returning players they can expect to see many callbacks, a lot of plot threads resolved, and plenty of familiar faces.

In fact, things can be a bit too familiar at times. Shepard’s crew this time around is primarily made of returning faces and has been whittled down to a more tightly packed team. There are some interesting new faces both on the team and in the plot in general, but Mass Effect 3 tried to keep its focus on preexisting creatures and characters to better ensure they are resolved properly by the end. Romance options are still alive and well, the game embracing both homosexual and alien relationships a bit more while still giving plenty of humans as options as well. While crew members don’t have specific missions like they did in Mass Effect 2, keeping the crew size small allows them to shine a lot more and there are some missions where one is required that give them a bit of a spotlight. There are many opportunities to talk with them on the ship, but the real treat comes in the form of what might be one of my favorite pieces of DLC of all time: the Citadel DLC. While not part of the base product, the Citadel DLC is a marvelous addition to the game, rewarding the player for the emotional investment they have towards the characters they’ve met and worked with along the way during the series. It’s hilarious and heart-warming, managing to wrap-up the characters since the main plot has so many huge subjects it must work on that and didn’t have the time to do so. That’s not to say it skimps on having emotional moments though, and Mass Effect 3 joins a very small group of games that have actually brought me to tears. Sure, I can feel the emotional weight of moments in other games, even empathize with incredibly sad moments, but Mass Effect 3, as part of the longer trilogy, can have moments that are so heavily emotional with all the work that has gone into them that they push that pathos over the edge. It does try to force it sometimes sadly, but it has many more moments where it resonates properly, all of it made more profound for knowing it was your actual choices that lead to that result, with just as many bittersweet and heart-wrenching moments as there are triumphant and happy ones.

The main appeal of the Mass Effect trilogy continues to be the amazing writing for its characters, plot, and worlds, but Mass Effect 3 manages to impress with its gameplay as well. The third-person cover shooting mechanics of the previous title finally feel like they’ve pushed beyond being a good supplement to the game and now can be fun on their own, most of this coming down to one very simple change: enemy variety. Previous Mass Effect games had very few enemy types and most of them could be dealt with in the same manner, but the foes you face in Mass Effect 3 have a wide range of weaknesses and strengths. You can’t just bull rush in with a single weapon and expect to take down every foe, which is good because Mass Effect 3’s ammo is so abundant that you usually will only run out of it for your powerful weapons with small ammo clips. There is technically nothing mandating you to switch your weapons, but the enemies have different tactics and resistances that will heavily suggest that you should try a new approach unless you want to get killed for being obstinate.

Shepard’s weapons are a fairly simple set of shooting staples, with automatics, pistols, shotguns, and sniper rifles being the core and a few heavy weapons functioning as temporary pickups, but Mass Effect’s RPG roots spring up again to add depth to this seemingly straightforward arsenal. During your adventure you’ll find or buy new versions of each weapon type with their own style of shooting and stats. You can use mods to augment the abilities of each gun and buy upgrades for both the weapons and the mods. The power gained from these upgrades is tangible albeit slow to grow, but there’s a level up system for characters as well that leads to a more personal form of growth. Leveling up involves upgrading your abilities, with many of them helping increase your strength and capability in combat or giving you new skills to respond to battle with. Biotic abilities give you psychic powers, tech upgrades give characters unique gizmos, and everyone has stat buffs tied to certain skill ups. More interesting is the addition of branching upgrade paths, allowing you to choose which skills you think are best for a particular character. Your squadmates all level up in line with you, and they are thankfully quite helpful in battle. You certainly carry your team by doing most of the damage to enemies, but you can direct your allies to perform certain helpful skills or just let them do their own thing and they’ll usually contribute in battle by whittling enemy health bars or keeping some of the focus off of you. The combat doesn’t need a story backing it up to be enjoyable, and the game even seems to recognize this fact, adding a multiplayer mode where you and two other players can take on hordes of enemies just for fun.

While combat has certainly improved in the third title, the side quests can’t match the strength of Mass Effect 2’s. This is mainly a saturation problem. There are certainly some well-written side quests in Mass Effect 3, to the point I almost forget that some aren’t part of the main storyline, and they do carry the same heavy consequences and tense situations the main plot has, but those aren’t the most common type of side quest. One of the more common types of side quest involves just sorting out a situation on some colony world, often existing as an excuse for an action setpiece, but the good combat means these aren’t too bad. The most common type though has to be the planet scanning subquests. The Citadel now exists as the only real hub world in the game, meaning if you go anywhere else it’s all about action and plot but the Citadel has stores to go to, people to talk with, and most importantly: tons of sidequests that will spring up from listening to ambient conversations. Some of these are as simple as hearing an argument and choosing a side in it, but most involve a character wishing they had some lost cultural artifact or military resource from a planet the Reapers have taken over. To complete these tasks involves flying around the galaxy, scanning for worlds of interest, and then launching probes onto the planet to recover items. It’s too simple to really grate against the player, but it’s also too simple to be very interesting. Its main purpose is to add to your war resources and it doesn’t hurt to tour the galaxy a bit to find the objects, but it’s not very engaging in a game that usually knows how to keep its hooks in you. It’s not really helped by a mechanic where your scans will alert Reapers to your presence in the area. I understand it helps cement the fact that Reapers are a threat, but it turns an otherwise negligibly basic task into one that can get annoying as you evade Reaper forces. If they do catch you, the penalty is just taking whatever resources you grabbed recently and making you do it again.

Mass Effect 3 has also been given a huge graphical kick forward compared to the previous titles, with a lot more detail on every model and character. Areas have some amazing visuals and explosive setpieces that play into Mass Effect’s continued courtship with being a cinematic experience, but a few things still plague the series. Animation errors during conversations still crop up, but the glitches seem far less present than the previous two titles, making 3 the most stable game in the series. A few faces look weird in the new graphical style though, especially for returning characters who got their faces redone to match, but on the whole Mass Effect has certainly taken a step up when it comes to graphical fidelity and animation quality.

I can’t write a review on Mass Effect 3 without addressing the controversy surrounding the game’s ending though. While I will not give any spoilers about it, I will note that I certainly benefited from playing the game years after release and having the free Extended Cut DLC installed that helps fix some of peoples’ issues with the ending. While it’s hard to tell where the Extended Cut additions begin and end, I will say I can see some of the contentious elements that soured many players but still think the game on the whole works excellently. I can see what the ending is going for and don’t think it’s a flawed concept, just that the execution isn’t the best and it hinges a little too hard on some of its newer ideas rather than the series’s built up elements. When it comes to resolving the plot threads and conflicts of the series as a whole though, Mass Effect 3 provides a deeply satisfying conclusion, although some of those resolutions only get their final note through the free DLC’s additions.

THE VERDICT: While Mass Effect 3 certainly has a few narrative troubles and a bad infection of vapid side quests, the majority of the experience is the refinement of the Mass Effect series’s elements. It continues the trend of a strong emotional core and choices of galactic consequence, but the gunplay has finally achieved a level where it could carry a game on its own and the resolution of an entire galaxy of interesting worlds, characters, and experience provides an incredibly satisfying conclusion to an altogether amazing video game trilogy.

And so, I give Mass Effect 3 for PS3…

A FANTASTIC rating. While the ending does make for a strange note to end the series on, it cannot undo the countless things Mass Effect 3 does that make it a marvelous video game experience. Every action you take in this game can have consequences thanks to the war readiness system, leading to already weighty emotional choices being amplified and making you have to choose between morality and practicality. Mass Effect has refined its shooting system to be more complex and varied as well, with enemies requiring more strategy to overcome. And of course, Mass Effect continues to reward players for all their time invested in the series with wonderful callbacks, emotional conclusions to story arcs, and a resolution to the whole affair that, while not sticking the landing, still manages to resolve most of its plot threads and characters in a rewarding manner.

Mass Effect 3 is a wonderful conclusion to an amazing trilogy of games. It falls short in some areas that prevent it from being the perfect ending, but it nails the important parts when they count and helps make Mass Effect one of the best video game series of all time as well as one that exemplifies the video game medium’s ability to truly integrate the player and their choices into a story.