Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer - Why is this shit so much fun?

Gunshots echo all over the battlefield, and explosions rock the firebase, as four soldiers in heavy, futuristic armors run for their lives, guns blazing. They're surrounded by grossly mutated monsters, their heads exploding in the gunfire and splattering all over the walls and floors around them. A missile rips one of them to shreds, chunks of flesh raining down everywhere in the aftermath. They're shouting at each other, running as fast as they can, gunning down wave after wave of enemies. Every moment could be their last, every second counts. They focus their fire on one target after another, working like a well-oiled machine, operating at lightning speed. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, one of the mutants gently floats up in the air, hovers around the battlefield in slow motion like a meaty balloon, not a care in the world. Everything seems to stand still for a moment, there's just that surreal, floating monster, completely ignoring all the frenzied action around him, eager to sit among the clouds and hug the stars. That's biotic powers for ya.

It's weird shit like that, which keeps me coming back for more. Imagine one of your friends is cornered and asking for help in voice chat, you look him up on your HUD, race towards him and seemingly out of nowhere an enemy just rockets through your screen from left to right. The whole thing happens so fast, you're not even sure whether that really just happened, whether it was just lag or a fucked up bug, until you hear your biotic buddy laughing his ass off on voice chat.

At its core, the multiplayer mode in Mass Effect 3 is really just your basic horde-mode team shooter. You know, four guys fighting back ever-stronger waves of enemies until yall either kick the bucket or survive the final wave and make it out of there alive. They had that sort of thing ages ago, back in one of the later patches for Unreal Tournament and possibly even before that. And let's be honest here for a while: Did you play those games for that kinda thing or did you play them for their CTF, Domination and all the countless competitive modes, which aren't even included in ME3? I never gave a fuck about horde until now.

One awesome thing about playing this game with friends is how every player has their own unique abilities and a slightly different play style. We have the aforementioned pro-biotics (badum-tish!), your average soldier-type, who likes to shoot things with assault rifles, a pistol-wielding gunslinger and even some huge-ass space alien, who only carries a shotgun to beat baddies to pudding with it. That is, if headbutting the living shit out of them won't do the trick. I'm sure you can figure out where I fit in.

The real fun begins when you add all the abuse on voice chat. "You got four testicles and all of them are shooting blanks!" "Dude, you can't be a Salarian! You're too fucking ugly! Look... no! No! Shut up! It's not okay. Look at you! Fuck off!" "Stop headbutting my kills, you asshole!" "Banshee... Marauder... Brute... Kitten... Ravager..." "He's down! Don't heal him! Now's our chance to get some points! Kick him! Kick him hard!" "Nice. Piss off the Banshee, then run back to the rest of us."

The damn game features about five different maps and three types of baddies. There's also three difficulty levels: 'Pretty tough', 'You're not gonna survive' and 'You're completely fucked'. Seriously, there's practically no actual content worth mentioning and two out of the three difficulty settings are so fucking hard, one of them is close to unplayable, the other one is ten times harder than that. You also get a few credits for your efforts, which can be spent on special upgrade packs, which contain random items, 90% of which are entirely useless for your class and play style of choice.

Really. I should hate this game. Every aspect about it. But right now, for some reason which makes absolutely zero sense, I'm having a great time. Even with the limited features and relatively simplistic gameplay, the game leaves me and my friends enough room to be unique. I get to scream, grunt and punch stuff in the face. My buddies get to turn monsters into party balloons. We compete for points, we collect weapon upgrades and unlock new skills and... well, looks like that's all we need to have fun. Thinking this is gonna last for a long time wouldn't be realistic. You couldn't play Mario Kart or Smash Brothers non-stop for a month straight. And a friendly multiplayer session falls more or less into that category. With extra blood and gore, but you get the idea. But for what it's worth, I think this one's gonna last us for a while in short sessions. I wonder if we'll ever be able to tackle the highest difficulty level.

So yeah. For a couple hours every night, I AM KROGAN!

-Cat