Mass Effect 3

Mass Effect 3 from 2012 concluded BioWare's trilogy about Commander Shepard and his desperate fight against the mechanical Reapers, who, after two entries' worth of warnings, finally arrived in the galaxy and launched a massive invasion of Earth and other inhabited worlds. The game balanced third-person action shooting elements, this time more refined and smoother than in previous entries, with a deep RPG decision-making system, in which the player's choices from the previous two games were reflected, affecting the fates of allies, the fragile political relations among the galaxy's various races, and the ultimate outcome of the entire story.

On PC, the game offered the smoothest and graphically most detailed version across all available platforms, with support for higher resolution, sharper textures, and generally more stable performance than the console versions. Besides the extensive single-player campaign, full of emotional conversations, the return of long-time companions, and difficult moral dilemmas, a four-player cooperative multiplayer was also added, in which teams faced waves of enemies across various planets of the galaxy – a surprisingly popular addition that also influenced the story's development in single-player and became a lasting part of the experience.

Contemporary reviews praised the epic scope of the story, the emotional culmination of individual characters' arcs, and the overall technical execution, but the game's ending itself sparked the greatest controversy, with a large part of the player community considering it unsatisfying and poorly connected to the thousands of previous decisions made across the entire trilogy – BioWare later responded to this unprecedented wave of criticism with a free extended ending that partially eased some of the complaints without fundamentally changing the ending's structure.

Despite this dispute, Mass Effect 3 is still considered one of the top RPGs of the past decade and a dignified, if debated, conclusion to one of the most ambitious sci-fi sagas in video game history. On PC, it remains to this day among the titles recommended as an example of how player decisions can be carried across several separate games released over the course of years.

Why play it: For fans of sci-fi RPGs who appreciate how decisions from previous entries carry over into the trilogy's conclusion, it remains, despite its debated ending, one of the finest RPGs of its era.