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Postcards from Mass Effect 3

One of my favourite things about the Mass Effect games, particularly the third, is the gorgeous sci-fi vista of a new alien world as you swoop in to land. I screenshotted my favourites as I played through for our review, and I’ll embed them here for your approval. Click through to the 1920×1080 versions for a nice wallpaper. No plot spoilers – there’s one location you’ll recognise, but I don’t think it’ll surprise anyone that you go back there.

Mass Effect 3 Narrative Mode and Action Mode explained

When you start Mass Effect 3, you don’t pick a difficulty, but you do pick a mode: Action, Role-playing or Narrative. Role-playing is how we’ve played both previous games. But the other two are radically different.

Narrative mode makes all combat trivially easy. You can’t skip it, exactly, but even standing in direct fire of multiple enemies, your shield is barely hurt and regenerates quicker than they can hurt you. Even the AI is different – enemies amble idly rather than trying to flush you out or surround you.

Action mode rips out the other half of the game: the combat stays the same, but you don’t get to create a character, you have to play with the default male Shepard, you don’t get to choose a class, you can’t choose how you level up, and you can’t even choose dialogue options – every conversation is just a pre-scripted cut-scene.

Is Mass Effect 3 everything we wanted? Well, we can check

Just over a year ago, we wrote up a list of 15 things we wanted from the third and final Mass Effect game. When I visited BioWare to preview the game last year, project lead Casey Hudson mentioned he’d read the list and that they were doing ‘pretty much’ everything on it.

Now it’s out, it’s brilliant, but how does it compare to our wishlist? Let’s give it a score card, point by point.

Mass Effect 3 War Assets and Readiness: how multiplayer affects your ending

Tom has also created a selection of Postcards from Mass Effect 3, along with an explanation of the Narrative and Action modes.

Mass Effect 3 is about a war with the Reapers, and as you play the single player game, the people and armies whose help you earn count as War Assets. The game’s still story-driven, and it doesn’t end until you’ve completed the main series of missions. But when you do, what happens in the final cut-scene depends on how many War Assets you have accumulated.

That part is kind of cool. But the balance is incredibly harsh: I did every proper quest I could find in Mass Effect 3, made sensible decisions that didn’t conflict with my choices in the previous games, and brought people together. But I still got a gallingly bleak ending.

That’s because I’d never played the multiplayer.

Mass Effect 3 review

Mass Effect was a space RPG about killing a flying robot god – a Reaper. Mass Effect 2 was about stopping one from being built. In Mass Effect 3, they’ve warped in from darkspace in their hundreds.

And that’s all I’ll say about the plot. This review will be spoiler-free even for those of you who’ve avoided the trailers and the demo.

In all three games, your time is split evenly between persuading people to help you and shooting people who won’t. The original’s strength was its main quest: a chase that felt both personally motivated and galactically important. Mass Effect 2′s plot was muddled and brief, but livened up by an exotic cast of new characters with interesting side stories.

Mass Effect 3 tries for the best of both worlds: an urgent and galaxy-critical plot that directly involves the entire crowd of oddball personalities the series has built up. And it works.

Have some nice but incredibly stagey Far Cry 3 screenshots

Remember Far Cry? It was all crystal seas, rusty wrecks and winding jungle paths. So is Far Cry 3!

A few shots in this batch could be from a prettier version of the original, which is actually rather exciting. A few others look like they were painstakingly posed with dev tools to tick seven different marketing boxes, then carefully post-processed to blend the explosions and muzzle flashes just so. We’ll never know, of course, but it’d be cool to see more that look like someone actually playing the game (above) and less like box art.

Graphing Double Fine’s Kickstarter adventure at $1.6 million

When Double Fine’s campaign to fund a new point-and-click adventure game reached its funding goal in record time, I did a little graph of how all the donation options contributed to the enormous sum they ended up with. Four days later, it’s nearly quadrupled that amount.

So now that they’ve passed 1.6 million dollars, do the contributions break down differently? Yes! The graph above shows how much money each donation option made – blue bars are from last week, red bars are today’s figures. Now for some interesting stats, and what they mean.