Mass Effect 3 Preview
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Mass Effect 2 was a major overhaul in terms of gameplay from the first game, but this time around Bioware is content with the core mechanics they introduced in Mass Effect 2 and has iterated on them, rather than reinvent them. It's still fundamentally a third person shooter with RPG trappings, but now they have improved the RPG elements of the game. Character skill progression has been expanded, and there is a lot more choice within the skills themselves. I played through the demo as the Soldier class, and I had around 36 points to spend on skills. I unlocked Concussive Shot a knockdown ability and there was further progression within the skill itself. Spending more points allowed me to reduce the cooldown of the ability, increase the damage and knockback effect and then the tree branched out, with each level having two possible options, I could choose to widen the knockback radius or increase the force further and so on and so on. It's a welcome change as Mass Effect 2'²s progression system was a little bare bones in places.
The combat feels much the same, though it has been augmented by further improvements to the cover system you can now roll from one cover to the next, for example, to avoid those stretches of open ground a little easier. You can also perform these rolls outside of cover, giving Shepard another means to avoid damage aside from constantly being glued to a wall. The melee system has been improved, with multiple strikes causing a combo. You now have several skills that augment your melee damage and execution moves will be possible by using the omni-tool as a blade, though I was unable to do this in the demo itself.
Another new feature is the ability to customise your weapons. I was kitted out with an assault rifle, an SMG and a heavy pistol. I upgraded the barrel and magazine size on my rifle, to increase the damage and ammo capacity and attached a grip and magazine extension to the SMG as well to lower recoil.The pistol recieved the same mods as the rifle, to give it that extra punch. We only had access to a limited amount of weapon mods, so I presume there are more and this is a feature I can see myself putting to good use, switching weapons up to cope with different enemy types and scenarios.
