Calm Shepard and Angry Shepard both end up making the same desperate suicidal charge to the Reaper transport beam – getting his nice hot pink armor blackened, upsettingly – meets the Reaper babysitter or whoever it was on the orbiting mothership and is given one last choice – again, unaffected by anything done previously – to pick the method by which the Reapers are pacified. And I guess the reasonable objection is that there’s very little that changes depending on how you’ve built your character or what major decisions and side quests you’ve made throughout the game and the series up to this point.

I’ve always thought it’d be interesting if there was a Mass Effect spin-off in which you play a scrappy, street-smart freelance mercenary type who’s looking after himself just to offer some juxtaposition to this bland, lofty galactic superhero out to save all organic life.Īnyway, the ending. I like my sci fi a bit dirtier and full of characters with interesting flaws, and Shepard struck me as a boring emotionless ponce, even for a Bioware game. I have heard it said that the disappointment factor of the ending increases the more into the series you were, and it’s true that I’m not crazy about it. Mainly it’s the fanbase up in arms about this one. But even a man with his head trapped in an octopus would have found it impossible to avoid hearing the internet buzz around the Mass Effect 3 ending, which has been busily doing the adult equivalent of raping childhoods among its fanbase, and I felt I had to pay it some kind of service. Also it gives me a great excuse to spend most of my time lazing around not doing research or reading the gaming press.

One of my policies that I consider most important is to avoid reading other people’s reviews or getting a feel of popular opinion before I do my own review, ‘cos they might make me misremember my own opinion. If my mention of Mass Effect 3‘s ending in my ZP review felt a little brief, as if it were crowbarred in late in the writing stage, it’s because it bloody well was. ( Mass Effect 3 spoilers in this article, inevitably)

Mass effect 3 different endings