Mass Effect 3 Preview

Should you find yourself looking for another Mass Effect 3 fix, you’ll be happy to hear that AtomicGamer has cranked out their own E3-based preview of BioWare’s sci-fi threequel.

The action this time is a little less wooden and more fluid, with scripted setpieces raging around you often. Shepard is more limber and moves around in cover easily, while fights are structured to give you more opportunities for flanking – we saw a preview of this in the way fights were structured in the later ME2 DLC packs, which are very challenging on Insanity difficulty. Additionally, Shepard can now turn the Omni-tool into a rather sharp blade for up-close impalements – Arbiter/Prophet of Truth-style. Nice! And hey, they even brought back frag grenades, which are thrown and bounce like they do in most military games.

Beyond that, we’ve got an indoctrinated Cerberus out for Shepard’s blood, Reapers in huge rail shooter-type gun battles, and Wrex yelling at Shepard from a nearby ship about a fertile Krogan female (which we did see!). Ashley’s back (and looking hotter than ever), along with Garrus, Wrex, Mordin, Legion, Liara, and good ol’ Captain/Ambassador Anderson. Certainly we’ll see more of the cast, too, but that’s just a quick list of who we definitely we saw or heard at E3.

All of this content is from the very beginning of the game, as we understand it, so we know little of how Shepard will rally support from each important race in the series, or how things go down in the final battle. One nice part is that while BioWare felt the need to explain a lot of things about ME2’s ending before the game was actually released (after all, people wanted to know specifics about taking their Shepard on into the third game), they won’t have to do the same thing here since it’s the end of the trilogy. It’ll be nicer if we just find out on our own!