Mass Effect 3

One on-rails, turret-based set piece features a towering Reaper looking like it's strayed in straight from Gears of War as it's hosed with gunfire. So does a Cerberus Atlas power suit placed at Shepard's disposal.

Such excesses can be excused, though, when the fate of the galaxy is hanging in the balance. Shepard is unlikely to be able to fight the Reapers off with harsh language alone. BioWare succeeds in placing its bombastic action on a fittingly grand scale: Earth, in its death throes as the Reapers invade, looks particularly impressive.

Here the cityscape is dense, the horizon stretching far and lined with tall, clinical skyscrapers. They're eclipsed by the Reaper ships, towering monstrosities which spit out laser beams as they tear through the sky.

A press of a button will snap the camera to critical set pieces, as BioWare wants to ensure players don't miss the lavish spectacle it's laid on. Which is fair enough; this is a vision pulled from War of the Worlds as seen through the studio's future-perfect filter, and the end result is brilliantly effective.

While Mass Effect may have drifted further and further towards shooter territory, the classic sci-fi setting has bedded in well. The third game's locations are rich with the influence of airbrushed pulp cover art. A Geth base is brooding and industrial, while the Salarian home world is a deep Martian red seen through wonderfully excessive lens flare.

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Attribution

Beneath the combat there's still BioWare's cause and effect dialogue and a story that is increasingly becoming the player's own. Choices made in the previous games will come to a head. Some seemingly insignificant ones will have extreme consequences.

This is shown in microcosm by one Earth-bound scene where Shepard comes across a child scurrying through air-vents in fear of the on-going invasion. Two dialogue options are offered: either get the child to come with you or tell them to flee.

Only the latter choice is explored in the E3 demo, with Shepard going on to fight alongside a seriously tooled-up Anderson as they try to flee the crumbling city.

Several minutes and many explosions later, the two make their escape. Shepard turns to survey the destruction and witnesses the child crawl onto a transport ship, only to then see it disintegrate under fire from a Reaper ship. It's explicitly sombre, a little melodramatic, and an interesting indication of this third instalment's darker tone.

With the game's release pushed back to March next year, it's likely Mass Effect 3's calmer moments will reveal themselves in due course. But for now it seems only right BioWare is bringing out the big guns as it prepares to conclude one of this generation's most successful series.