Mass Effect 3 Demo Impressions

I am sure you're all probably wondering What? Aku? home on Valentine's day? As I mentioned before PUAs avoid Valentine's day like the plague, We usually make up some excuse like 'away on business' etc. but I digress....

The demo gave me the impression that the core Mass Effect features remained intact. What I did like was the leveling up features have somewhat gone back to the way they were in Mass Effect 1. Skills for individual characters as opposed to all characters (my biggest complaint about mass effect 2). That being said, they still insist on keeping different types of ammo as a skill (this also started in ME2, where as ME1 it was simply a different type of ammo that you can switch). Combat is the same as previous installments for the most part, taking cover is a little smoother than before, it even took a page out of GoW, where you can slip from cover to cover. Seems like they took the best of ME1 and ME2 and combined them and added a few teaks.

I found the Kinect features pretty useless for non combat situations, for example saying "open" to open a door or saying the conversation option seemed a little retarted to me. I found it much more useful to just to point and click the dialog option or action rather than using Kinect but that is me. However, for combat, it made the experience fun, I was able to switch weapons and ammo by just mentioning the name of them. Issuing squad commands consisted of saying character name and the command you want them to perform. Overall, the reponse to the commands was pretty good. One thing I discovered you will need to turn down the music volume or you will find yourself yelling like a moron at your TV.

As a side note, if you quit the demo you will start over from the beginning (this was irritating to find out). I found this out when I quit the single player to try the multiplayer. Even worse was finding out that multiplayer appears to be unavailable until you finish the single player game, irritating.

I am not going to rate the demo because it is a demo. But if the demo is any indication of what the full game will be. March 6th can't come soon enough. I hope I get sick again.