Mass Effect 3 hits stores 9th March. We got a preview of the first hour cinematics and gameplay.

Obviously, as finale of a major game series, its going to be business as usual. You can import your Mass Effect 1 & 2 save files and make this a trilogy featuring your Commander Shepard.

The other option is to do a quick character generation, with customisable appearance, gender (“FemShep” now appears in the Marketing alongside “BroShep”) and skill focus to create a backstory with options like street orphan or born off world. There are 3 modes available; Action Mode (Automatic social interaction, normal combat), Story Mode (player controlled social interaction, light combat), and RPG Mode (Player controlled social interaction, normal combat). You're then free to explore the detailed and massive galaxy. Well, once you get past the starting cinematic and then get roped into the plot. This being Mass Effect 3, you are dropped straight into the plot, involving ancient alien robots bent on genocide called the Reapers. In fact, you're not even out of the cinematic when the Reapers arrive on Earth and start up their merry campaign of murderising every human being.

This focus on plot is a little bit of a drawback. The first opening cinematic takes too long to get through, and even when you do get control, it doesn't really take off the training wheels for quite some time. Mass Effect games are huge, 30+ hours of gameplay, and for Mass Effect 3 there's some 82 minutes of cut-scenes. 

Gameplaywise, its fun, but that's to be expected. Its been a long time since I played Mass Effect, and I was a little rusty, but after a few embarrassing deaths at the hands of an auto turret, I was getting into the Shepard swing of things. The controls are pretty standard, and the cover/jump/do stuff button makes it quite hard to accidentally wander in the way of gunfire.

Its a little linear, but clearly its because Bioware are focused on closing the final act of their space-opera saga with some spectacle, and wandering off to mine or do a planetary survey doesn't make sense when you're saving the world. If you're a fan of Mass Effect (and lots of people are) you're going to want to finish the series for completeness. For new players, it might seem like a lot to start with, but for the size and depth of the game you're getting, and from a company with a standard of quality, its probably going to be worth those 40 hours.