Imagination unlimited....almost
I will get the minuses out of the way:
1. The key "space" is being used for everything: for sprinting, for rolling, for taking cover, for picking up objects, for getting out of cover. Sometimes that will get frustrating because you have to face and item you are picking up directly, otherwise you will either roll or take cover for no reason. If they did not have enough buttons for a controller, then they certainly could have given the PC gamers and opportunity to use another key for "action".
2. The flawed Paragon/Renegade system; they still haven't fixed it from ME 1. Basically if you want to vary your choices between Paragon/Renegade you have to be aware that you may not have enough of either type of points to have access to more extremely important choices later on (like saving both races instead of only one). I would say that most people gravitate towards the Paragon choice but sometimes you want to be a Renegade, however if you do that, you split your Par/Reg points and end up coming short and thus end up alienating some people/races.
3. No blind-fire. That kinda sucks because if you play on Insane you kinda need that ability.
4. The pistols and the SMG types are kind of useless. I can count on fingers how many times I had to use those in the entire game. And you now can carry 5 weapons easily! although because of the weapon weight, your ability recharge is going to be hampered. As for the upgrades, well they are so no numerous now that you will sometimes find two of them laying together on the ground. They are not hidden as well and you don't need to spend your hard earned resources to attach the upgrades to your weapons, now you just use credits.
5. Bad PC optimization STILL. I don't get it. Dragon Age 1 and 2 had great PC optimization when it came to graphic options. Here however, the only thing they give you is anti-aliasing which DOESN'T EVEN WORK. I tried overriding my anti-aliasing option in the Nvidia control panel and nothing helped. The anti-aliasing is nonexistent in this game, thanks, Xbox. Also, the water is horrible to look at too. Graphically, I didn't see any improvement in this game, at all.
6. You can't partner up with Grunt again and a couple of ME2 characters only make a brief appearance. James Vega is also a pompous prick that I didn't use a single time in the entire game. Same goes for Ashley. Humans are so generic in the Mass Effect franchise. Garrus for the win!
7. Frequent crashes when Alt-tabbing the game and going to desktop. If I spent 5 minutes outside of the game at desktop, the game would crash, stupid Origin. Also, a few times my level 3 or 6 character would revert back to Level 1 without any Alliance Funds! As a result I had to start the game all over again. Then I found that your internet connection better not be interrupted with Bioware services or your character will be lost. That is completely retarded that your character stats depend on connectivity to Bioware services. Try launching the game in the offline mode, good luck. There are no automatic saves. Just the one and only autosave that gets rewritten. So I had to save manually CONSTANTLY, just in case I lost my character again. BUT, there is only enough room for 50 saves AGAIN, so some of the older saves eventually had to go.
8. Just about the only place that you can visit anymore regularly is the citadel. You can't go to Omega for upgrades or to the Quarian Fleet.
9. Last but not least, I felt that the second half of the game or maybe the last quarter of the game is kind of lazy. Half of the known galaxy gets overrun by Reapers pretty fast and there isn't much to do in the overrun areas except scanning solar systems for resources and evading reapers in the process (that gets annoying pretty fast). I remember ME 2 having a mission in every other system but not in ME3. I constantly expected new missions to open up in the many overrun areas and only relatively few popped up. On the other hand, perhaps Bioware felt that since you have played many missions in ME2, it made no sense to create new missions in the same locations.
----Not only that, the so many dialogue options that open up with characters every time you completely the mission become less scarce. I don't get it. Upon completing a mission in ME2, you just wanted to run around the ship and talk to everyone. Well, in the last quarter of the game it seems like every last one of your crew members ran out of things to say.
Also, the scanning of planets for resources is gone, thankfully. However now you can scan planets for war materials and forces that may join your alliance cause.
Well, for better or for worse, the hacking system is no longer present.
One of the highlights of the game for me was conversing with ED-I. The absence of free will, the determinism, the organic programing, the question of sentience and consciousness - all were very interesting subjects to discuss.
The gameplay itself, well I was never really that much into it. In fact, every time the battle started I just wished it would soon end so I could get to interact with the characters. That is why I sometimes played the game on easiest difficulty.
Another cool thing is that your specter status actually matters now. You can now set certain administrative policies around the citatel by using your specter status. Bioware should have came up with this in ME1 and ME2.
The multiplayer is okay. I'm not going to say it's bad, it's just not my thing. You and your three online buddies advance through a 11 increasingly difficult waves. Almost each wave has a specific mission. It gets really tough after the 5th mission or so, the 11th wave is extraction. You unlock new alien species and pick your classes. You unlock new weapons and new abilities. It's a neat addition to the franchise but I personally had no use for it.
I also strongly recommend playing the game with the "From the Ashes" DLC. I myself got a collector's edition and let me tell you, that DLC is pretty interesting and it will add at least an hour to your game as well as a Jamaican speaking (pun intended) new character.
The daft punk music is still great. It's very soothing and therapeutic, except when the battle music kicks in. I wish I could turn it off and enjoy the general music, instead I had to constantly turn off music during battle and then turn it back on when the battle is done fore.
I was also able to import my character and a whopping 58 level points to spend plus some money!
As for weapons, well unlike in ME2, where you REALLY had to work for your weapons and upgrades, you now have access to about 30 weapons and many more upgrades. Not sure if that's a good or bad thing objectively speaking, but I didn't get to use all of the weapons because by the time I fully upgraded half of them the game ended. That probably means that for full completion of the game Bioware expected us to earn extra credits by playing the MP. But I just didn't have that strong attachment to my weapons anymore. Surprisingly enough, some of the strongest weapons are geth-made.
The gameplay is little more fluid but at the same time more awkward (when you accidentally take cover at at a bad location even though you were trying to spring because of "SPACE" being used for everything). However the enemies are pretty smart. They take cover, they try to flank you, they take turns when shooting out of the cover.
In the end, I ended up signing the petition to change the endings and ended up donating a couple of bucks to that Child's Play thing or whatever in the process. It's a long shot. The three endings themselves feel "lazy" and same-ish. It seems like whatever you did in the first two games does not have an effect on the ending. Even your alliance readiness (that you increase by playing the MP) to face the reapers only gives you a couple more minutes of the final cinematic battle movie. So spare yourself the multiplayer if you're not into it.
However, I am also convinced that the endings you are presented with are not the real endings and that a DLC will introduce us to the real one. I'm not going to spoil anything but I will say two words: "Inception. Fisher".
In any case, I am thankful to Bioware for creating a playable universe that we will never see in our lifetime. They have given us the opportunity to play around in the fictional future and be able to traverse the Milky Way.
The Dragons, the magic, the elfs - none of that will ever happen, however experiencing the science fiction behind Mass Effect was one of the best gaming experiences in my life.