Got through this game by now, and it's left me a little confused. At some points it has some truly brilliant storytelling, while at other points it's facepalm-worthy. Some points of the story were well enough put together that I was impressed, while other parts were so poorly constructed that it's like they put no effort into it at all.
While they failed to give 'player choice' any
meaningful impact upon how the story evolved, or everything turns out in the end, the difference between a "did everything perfectly" imported from ME1/ME2 playthrough, and a medicore/bad import, or the default playthrough, is pretty significant for the player.
It's kind of sad, though. I played it both on my "perfect" import and on the default, and...
Practically in every instance where something tragic, and 'realistic', would've happened in the default playthrough, in the "perfect" one things work out just fine, and I just sort of cruised through the game with the feeling that it was impossible to fail and that everything would work out in the end, while in the default playthrough it felt like everything was going to turn into shit after the endgame, even if the reapers were defeated.
It's kind of strange. On one hand the "perfect" playthrough gets rewarded by making everything go better, and gives some extra story, but it is also punished, in a way, by receiving a less emotionally engaging story.
Regarding the gameplay, I've see lots of people saying that it feels "better"/"tighter"/whatever than ME2 did, but I didn't really get that impression. I've lost count on the number of times where I died because the MAGIC BUTTON FOR EVERYTHING made me do something other than what I wanted it to do. When one button does 'activate item', run, take cover, get out of cover, dodge, jump over obstacles, and whatever else I may be forgetting, it's incredibly easy to do the wrong thing in situations where precision is required. Trying to run away from somebody shooting at you, only to take cover on a wall instead of running past it, and then, instead of moving out of cover, pointlessly rolling over to the other side of the wall, followed by you panicking because now you're almost dead so you just mash the button again, which just makes the character roll over to the side it came from, and then you're dead... I've literally lost count of how many times something like that killed me, but it must've been in the dozens.
As a side note, the multiplayer was surprisingly engaging, though it's really lacking in BASIC features for the PC... such as text chat.
Oh, and it has some weird bugs too with the storytelling. One I found particularily amusing was...
Romanced Tali in ME2. Revived romance in ME3, but because I sided with the geth she killed herself... but still appeared to sex me up before the final battle. That was weird.
