When I sat down to play all three original Mass Effect trilogy games 3 years ago, I did not expect EA to join on the idea of remasters, especially for such a complex series made on Unreal Engine 3, at the tail end of the previous console generation. They seemed perfectly content with selling original releases and all of the DLCs separately for a juicy price, without even attempting to fix any serious issues that plagued the PC releases for years. So the announcement of Mass Effect Legendary Edition came as a complete surprise to me.
After having spent another 90 hours, playing through the trilogy with a fresh new Shepard, I’m happy to say that while it’s not exactly perfect and definitely not as thorough as some might’ve wanted, Legendary Edition is the best way to play the original Mass Effect trilogy. And play it you must.
I won’t focus too much on the games themselves, since I’ve spent so long talking about each one of them separately 3 years ago and my opinion on them hasn’t changed since. But to refresh your memory, Mass Effect is a series of story driven third person shooter action RPGs with a sci-fi setting and strong choice-consequence systems going across all three games of the original trilogy. All of them were slightly different. Mass Effect was ambitious in scope and is all about space exploration, mysteries of the universe and being a good or a bad space cop. Mass Effect 2 is all about cinematic action adventuring with varied missions and extremely charismatic companions. And Mass Effect 3 is a fun third person shooter/action RPG in which the stories from 1 and 2 get concluded, while the game feels the closest to a more typical military shooter in tone.
Mass Effect Legendary Edition doesn’t change what the games were. All of the singleplayer DLCs, including the cross-promotion ones, are included and sprinkled out throughout the game in a balanced way, with the exception of the Pinnacle Station DLC for Mass Effect. That one had its source code lost and while it did have some unique content and voice acting, it was an obnoxiously unfun DLC that I’ve personally completed only once across my many playthroughs of the game, because I can’t stand it. And all of the good ideas from it were recreated in a far better way in the Citadel DLC for ME3 anyway. Additionally, all of the games now have a more unified look and have gained some extra visual flair that wasn’t available in the original games, most notably the depth of field and nicer global illumination.
And for Mass Effect 2 and 3 the changes more or less end here. They look nicer and have been turned into the ultimate versions of themselves. But otherwise, apart from some ammo/thermal clips rebalancing in favor of the players (which was needed), they feel and play exactly the same as they did with the original versions. For Mass Effect 1, however, changes go a bit deeper than that.
For one, the visual updates look most drastic with this game, as the original title was a very early Unreal Engine 3 game and relied on a super stylized heavy film grain look. Now the game looks cleaner, with finer film grain, less cold colour grading and more dynamic range (oh yeah, all games support HDR). Apart from the film grain that I personally liked in the original a bit more, I would say that this change is a pure improvement. Not only it makes the look of all three games more consistent, but also because it does look straight up better. A few locations had their background and even geometry tweaked, all of the infamously long (even on PC) elevator rides can be skipped with a button press.
The gameplay had tweaks too. Combat feels much nicer, as the weapons, skills and damage model has been updated to make for a far less bullet spongey encounters. It’s still nowhere near as fun as ME2 or especially 3, as the basic systems and skills are the same, but it’s much more fun to play anyways. Mako controls have been updated and some of the enemies and enemy AI tweaked. Speaking of, encounters no longer consist of the constant “I will destroy you” or “Enemies everywhere”, as the enemy barks are far less frequent, while Shepard’s own combat barks, which I didn’t even know existed, now play appropriately.
Also for the first time on the PC ports of all games, you can seamlessly switch between mouse and keyboard and controller, and the UI dynamically switches according to the control scheme. And the rebalancing of the levels from 60 max to 30 max, while optional (you can switch it to Classic), feels better. Curiously, the achievements still unlock permanent bonuses in the first game, but at least a lot of them have been reconsidered and things that were originally locked behind them or New Game Plus are now available on your first playthrough.
Not everything is perfect, however. While the games run far better than any of the original releases do even with helpful mods, some of the bugs present in the original games can still pop up. More importantly, completely new bugs can appear as well. Player position can sometimes glitch out, especially after using biotic skills. There were several instances where Shepard got stuck looking in one direction and moved unnaturally. The system for character head looking at interactive objects and people seems more aggressive, with consistently broken necks. Cutscenes sometimes have a frame or two of player spawning in the location before the cutscene starts, which wasn’t the case with the original release. And sometimes, especially in 3, enemies could get stuck outside the arena and wouldn’t die, requiring a restart.
Additionally, some of the poor or questionable decisions from the original games were left as is. Some of those were easier to excuse when they were parts of DLCs, but as they’re part of the whole package now, it’s strange they weren’t treated as such. Plus, some of the quality of life improvements seem poorly implemented. You can finally run in Mass Effect 1 even outside combat, but unlike ME3 it works only in short bursts and uses Shepard’s stamina bar, like in the second game. The game is also tied to Origin on PC, so even in this ultimate package, Mass Effect trilogy is still not DRM-free and can become unavailable without servers. Despite the fact that the surprisingly good multiplayer was completely cut from ME3 (which, thankfully, meant rebalancing the war resources to work as they should in a singleplayer game, so those are improved now).
There are more things to complain about and more things to praise. But ultimately, Mass Effect Legendary Edition is the version of the original three Mass Effect games you should be playing. If you haven’t played the games before, now is your chance to experience some of the best story-driven action RPGs of all time. And if you’ve been itching to return to Normandy, Citadel or Omega, this is the perfect excuse to re-expereince this amazing adventure.