Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer Impression

Mass Effect 3 was released recently and of course, I picked it up. I played the first two games and was eager to get into the war against the Reapers. Well, I've had the game for about a week now and I haven't done that yet. Why you ask, simple.... Multiplayer! That's right, multiplayer was finally introduced to Mass Effect and unless you live in a box I'm sure you already know that. What you may not know is that it's awesome. You can play as any of the classes in the regular game plus you can play as different races. Ever want to be an Asari adept or a Krogan soldier? Well now you can be.

I have a friend I play with and we decided that we would try to create characters that compliment each other. I decided to play as an adept and he went with a vanguard. When you start off you can only play as human male or female. After earning credits from completing objectives on your missions you can start buying different equipment packs to unlock new races and weapons. Each race within a class has different abilities. I've been trying to get the Asari adept so I can use Stasis. While I haven't been able to get that yet, my friend managed to get an Asari Vanguard and now our two classes mesh really well and we're able to run through the silver difficulty with just the two of us.

This game lends itself very well to the casual gamer. You don't have to put a massive amount of time into it to have fun. I managed to hit max level on my multiplayer character after only 5-6 hours of playing. Single player is a different story. That should take upwards of 30 hours just for the main story and you can get around 100 hours by doing side quests and DLC. Enough about single player, lets get back on topic here.

The flow of game play in the multiplayer is really nice. It can be extremely intense with enemies flooding through doorways at you but they also give you some much needed down time between waves. I think it's a great balance. You have to fight your way through 10 waves of enemies on each mission with the waves getting more difficult as you go. Just to make sure you don't bunker down in an easily defensible location the whole time, you're given objectives every few waves that will make you get out and move around the map. That is when things can really get intense.

The multiplayer in Mass Effect 3 is a wonderful addition to the game. I've seen a lot of people saying that it "destroyed" the franchise and well, those people people are just plain wrong. You're given a new game type to play with friends and while it does have an effect on your single player game, it's not huge. You're not given special abilities or super weapons. You're given galactic readiness. That means that in the final battle against the Reapers your forces will do better. If you don't like that, then just don't play multiplayer until you've finished your war. The galactic readiness goes down over time and after awhile you'll be right back to normal with no advantage. I know that I'll be taking that advantage, I want those Reapers dead!