You can't "win" Mass Effect 3 without playing an online game. Either you have to play many, many bouts of ME3 multiplayer, or play many, many bouts of Infiltrator, or play Datapad. Datapad is the free iPhone/iPad app that Bioware is releasing so no one can say you have to pay extra in order to win ME3.
Datapad is a Farmville-style app, where you send space fleets on "missions" to raise galactic readiness. You quickly find out that in any of the five quadrants there are 3 missions that never change. Yep, same star systems, same description, same rewards. You have to send your fleets to do those missions over and over to get galactic readiness points. And when I say over and over, I mean literally dozens and dozens of times to get your galactic readiness to where you can get the best ME3 ending.
Which means, of course, that you have to check your iPad or iPhone constantly in order to make sure fleets aren't sitting still. Just like Farmville, the game intrudes into daily life. It will take days of playing Datapad constantly to get your readiness up. I've been playing constantly for two days and I've improved my galactic readiness by 5%.
This is not a game. No one would actually play Datapad if they weren't trying to avoid having to play Infiltrator or ME3 multiplayer. Datapad is a chore.
It could have been given a little flavor with trivial effort. Just write different missions for different star systems. And with a tiny bit more effort, there could have been jeopardy. (Your starfleets can be "crippled" but they fix themselves in an hour, which is tedious but hardly alarming.) But they didn't want to. Bioware/EA don't really want you to play Datapad. They want you to buy Infiltrator for $7, or play ME3 multiplayer (which requires an Xbox LIVE Gold membership). But they want to pretend that they're not forcing you to buy something.
So Datapad is free. And it's worth every penny you pay.
PS Aside from the Galaxy at War "game" on Datapad, you can also access the game's codex, in case you didn't read it in-game, and you can check a Mass Effect twitter feed.
PPS The programming itself is terrible. It keeps losing login information. It keeps claiming that my iPhone is not connected to the Internet. You have to hit the touchscreen repeatedly to get it to respond. No pinch-to-zoom. Incredibly slow to reload. It is a badly, badly made app. .
PPPS It's only free if you're playing the game on your first profile. You'll need to buy a second online pass if you're playing the game on a second profile.
PPPPS: Increasing "bonus readiness" seems to be the fastest way to increase readiness.
0 comments