I personally attended the first day of Eurogamer to get a hands-on of Mass Effect 3. Unfortunately the booth was quite small, with decent but not huge Samsung monitors (especially compared with the giant LED TVs inside the Battlefield 3 section) and the kiosks were very uncomfortable to stand at. The demo was the same Sur'Kesh one seen at E3 and Gamescom and here are my impressions:
The demo was a decent length and included the "boss" battle against the Cerberus Atlus mech, however even playing on hardcore it didn't feel all that difficult - which makes me believe that a "god" mode was on - despite that i only came near death once or twice the whole time anyway. The best thing was the feel of the game - if you like mass effect 2 you are going to be very comfortable playing this game - it's feels just right and exactly the same as the last one - just with better-designed levels and more enemies, so it's all good.
I didn't really notice much improvement in being able to take cover tbh - it's a much vaunted improvement supposedly, and although it could have been the unusual circumstances, i could swear that several times i could not pin to various parts of the environment/cover and definitely not "swat-turn"/roll between various parts of it (even with the little hologram icon telling me to).
I played as a soldier class, and buffed up incendiary ammo a little as one of my powers, again like mass effect 2, this makes a massive difference to the effectiveness of your weapons, but the bane of mass effect 2 still rears it's ugly head: ammo clips. once again you get a set amount of ammo, distributed equally when collecting clips from dropped enemies, however this hugely limits you from just sticking with a preferred weapon sometimes - i was using the mattock and during the boss fight i simply ran out of ammo and had to finish with a handgun - why oh why we are still having arbitrary limits on what the player wishes to do in this day and age is beyond me - especially given the ammo-less system employed by mass effect 1 to such great effect. As an artificial difficulty-spiker it's pointless as it doesn't empower the player and just covers deficiencies in either level design/enemies/weapon effectiveness instead.
One nice element Bioware have borrowed from Gears of War is at set times you can press Y to focus the camera on something interesting happening in the level (spaceships flying past etc) which nicely increases some of the dynamism of the levels. Another new aspect really played up is multi-tiering - ladders and stairs really open up some of the combat environments, which still follow the rather narrow-corridor feel of these types of games sometimes.
Another nice things is the increased visual fidelity of the graphics - weapon effect, level textures, draw distance - everything has had a noticeable bump from even Mass effect 2 in beauty - i can only imagine what earth and other levels will looklike on my 40" LED TV in the comfort of my own home...
Finally i guess, whilst i got in early and most people made a beeline for either the '18' section and Battlefield3/COD or even Batman: AC (in the centre of the auditorium), by midday there was quite a nice queue forming to play the game - so hopefully the interest is there and the critical/commercial sucess of ME1/2 will translate to an even better game and more success for Mass Effect 3.
