Mass Effect 3: Better with Kinect?

When Mass Effect 3 announced that they were adding Kinect functionality, gamers kind of freaked out. The popular series has quite a following and Bioware had already messed with the formula, so the idea of adding motion gestures didn’t sit too well with them. As I’ve said before, there aren’t too many people who want to get a full body work out ducking behind couches, throwing grenades and crawling across the rug of the living room, after a day of work. They just want to sit down and play, even if the scenarios aren’t the most relaxing. Fortunately, the developers took that into consideration and only added voice commands, which oddly enough was sort of disappointing.

So how does talking to the game improve things? Well let’s start with the good. You are able to change weapons on the fly by just requesting of the Kinect what you want. This is a big time advantage because it’s sometimes a pain in the heat of battle to have to interrupt what you are doing to swap out that shotgun when the enemy is bearing down on you.


But unfortunately, for our review team, it kind of ended there. That is because the commands are very specific and not intuitive to natural language. This means you really have to study the manual (or in our case information cards) and get the proper phrasing in your head to be able to use the voice commands correctly and when stressed. Otherwise it doesn’t understand and forces you to repeat the order which can be life threatening in certain situations. So you can’t say “Liara, get your butt over there.” And expect her to respond. Although in real life, she probably wouldn’t either, but anyway. The point is that you have to say “Liara, move” if you want her to go where the crosshair is pointing.


Dialog is also a big part of the game, conversing with non-playable characters, and this is another one where you have to be pretty specific given what dialog options are available, although I will say that it was a bit more tolerant in this portion as far as knowing what you want. Here you are presented with a tree of options with what you can say. The problem lies in timing. The gameplay is certainly fast paced and we, as humans, are an impatient lot. Ever call your bank and they want you to say your account number, so you jump right in only to find out that two or three numbers into it, the system wants you to begin? This is the same thing. We kept jumping the gun on the dialog because it’s a bit unnatural to just pause for a few seconds and then talk, especially with the pacing, which gave the game a hard time understanding what we were saying.

For the most part, the voice recognition isn’t that bad, although our poor Indian friend had a bit of trouble because of his very thick accent. But given that we have some trouble understanding him in the office without a Kinect, we can’t really fault the game or the hardware. But it was frustrating for him and he wound up using the controller for almost all of the game.


But that’s the beauty of their Better with Kinect implementation. They didn’t force it upon the player. You have the option at anytime to use or not use any or all of the commands. Otherwise, the game will still play as if you didn’t have the device at all. This is especially welcome in the whole yelling at doors to get them to open. I felt kind of stupid screaming at the screen to open a door, before realizing you could just hit the button and not bother. So if you just want to switch weapons and forego the other things, it will do it.

All in all, the game is certain to delight the hardcore fans and those with Kinects will benefit from the added functionality, but it’s probably not a game that will make people run to their store to pay $150 for the extra features. But if you have the device, just using it for weapon selection is worth it.