The huge new aspect to the realm of the Mass Effect trilogy is the fact that BioWare and EA has listened to the people and gave the new game Mass Effect multiplayer. Now, when I heard about this I thought “OK, they are probably just going to have a couple of missions from single player, maybe add a little more difficulty to the levels, and that would be it.”
WRONG!
Gameplay
The multiplayer feature in Mass Effect 3 reminds me of Call of Duty Zombies or Horde mode. There are four slots opened, one for you and three of your friends or three randomly selected players from the pool of players. You and those three participants will go 11 waves with either the Geth, Cerberus, or the Reapers.
Each round with the exception of four (3 collecting data of some sort or eliminating three “top targets” and one final timed standoff with a horde), the hordes will get more and more difficult as their weapons increase and become more deadly for you and your crew (and I am already dreading facing the Cerberus horde because I know I’m about to get a horde of just very annoying Cerberus ninjas).
Character Class and Selection
I must say when I heard of the multiplayer was coming to Mass Effect 3, I thought that it was just going to be the main cast and crew that is on the Normandy (and, maybe, the ability to play as Jack or Thane). That is not the case as you get your selection of a Human Male or a Human Female in the categories of Adept, Engineer, Infiltrator, Sentinel, Solider and Vanguard. You are able to customize you Human’s armor and the powers that he or she has. However, you are able to earn more races in your arsenal. Here are the classes and the races that are associated with these classes.
Soldier: This is the generic soldier. They rather have bullets and (in the case of the Krogan) brute force to stop their opponents than just biotics or tech stuff.
- Human Male
- Human Female
- Krogan*
- Turian*
Adept: PURE EFFIN’ BIOTICS! If you want to know how Biotics work, the Adept class is for you. Biotics use the Mass Effect fields to throw, pull, warp, and other cool things their opponents to their demise.
- Human Male
- Human Female
- Asari*
- Drell*
Engineer – This is the “Nerd” of the groups. They don’t really have much armor and use their technical mastery to confuse and damage their opponents. Highly effective against the Geth.
- Human Male
- Human Female
- Quarian*
- Salarian*
Infiltrator – AWESOME against the Geth, the Infiltrator class uses tech to win. Cloaking, Overload, and other techniques are used against enemies to easily confuse and, then, obliterate their enemies.
- Human Male
- Human Female
- Quarian*
- Salarian*
Sentinel – The Sentinel class combines tech and biotic power. Usually Sentinels are used more as a support system than they are a fighter. They are the ones that protect themselves and the others in their groups. Their Tech Armor protects the body and, once damaged, it will send an Overload shock a short distance and stun the opponents near the zone.
- Human Male
- Human Female
- Krogan*
- Turian*
Vanguard - The Vanguard is one of the deadliest forms of classes. It combines the biotic powers of the Adept class as well as the weapons and armor that the Soldier class has. (This is the one I use)
- Human Male
- Human Female
- Asari*
- Drell*
*Unlockable
When you start playing in any class with any race they ask you to create a catchy name for your soldier. There’s a reason for this. Just like the Prestige mode in Call of Duty when you reach Level 20 with your character, you can “promote” your created ball of awesomeness and have him/her battle with Shepard and the rest of the gang in the battle to take back Earth, which is pretty doggawn cool.
Overall: This is a pretty cool thing that BioWare is doing. Instead of having just a generic co-op multiplayer, they are incorporating the multiplayer to the single player game. It does get repetitious at times and you do get strange partnerships (I was a Level 1, my partners were in the range of 50-70) BUT it’s still a fairly good multiplayer experience and you should, at least, try it out and…
…Assume direct control.
