slugnutt

* After Combat Overhaul Update 1.13 * I absolutely love this game and have had so much fun with it. It definitely has been having technical/performance issues/flaws that do take it down a notch. However..... The combat is so much fun once you get a feel for it. It's brutal and unbelievably satisfying. Limbs flying everywhere, heads rolling, blood spray, and carnage galore. It never got old for me. It can be pretty challenging at times. Just pay attention and use the tools you're given. Once it all clicks, you'll never look back. The campy dialog and cutscenes were hilarious imo. Mini games and activities between missions were an unexpected and enjoyable change up. I love it. I just love it.

I just can't get over the fact that it's such a downgrade in far too many ways from the Arkham series. Arkham Knight came out in 2015 and has vastly better visuals and performance (not counting pc release here). "Next-Gen" game with mid tier last gen visuals and performance. Great gameplay can negate flawed visuals and even performance, for sure. But for me, the gameplayisn't doing it here. It certainly had potential. But seemingly mid to low effort for a game with low-end visuals & performance, and mid-tier gameplay holds it back on every level. Such a shame.

I know this game was released in an unacceptable state. It has a lot of shortcomings in storytelling compared to the other Mass Effect games. But, I still had a great time playing it. I really enjoyed the gameplay, exploring with the ND1 Nomad (yeah, I said it! living that Mako life.), combat, crafting and augmenting gear, and trying all the different classes and different builds. Dumbing down your squad commands was an epic failure. However, in my opinion, there are a lot of great features in this game. Carrying the Mass Effect name probably hurt this game a lot. It was never going to live up to the trilogy before it. Instead of judging it for what it is, people judged it for what they thought it should be (with the exception of the launch state). That's usually a recipe for disaster.

I love the Mass Effect series. It's by far my favorite gaming series. Even though the RPG elements were neutered after the first game, I still love the following entries. What really, really got to me was the ending of Mass Effect 3. Specifically, it's 20 minutes or so. It's not that it boiled down to choose your own ending 1, 2, 3, 4, (red, blue, green, shoot the space kid), it's that it was absolutely awful in my opinion. The free extended ending DLC missed the point entirely. I didn't need an explanation orthem to expand on the meaning of each ending. To me, it was obvious without the extended ending DLC. I needed a great ending to an amazing series of games. I don't feel like there needed to be 100 different endings depending on the choices you made along the way. 1 amazing ending could have been enough for me. 3 or 4 different amazing endings, even better. Easy for me to say, I know. But 4 trashy throw-away endings in a game so rich with story & lore. Maybe I'm being dramatic, but at the time, it was heartbreaking. And in the moment, it nearly ruined the series for me. A long time ago, I just compartmentalized the whole thing. There is Mass Effect 1, 2 & 3 over here in this box, & the last 20 minutes over here in this box. However, to me, it's still a stain on an otherwise amazing series. A skid mark on the tidy-whities of gaming. In my opinion.