Mass Effect is an awesome series. Finally a sci-fi game done right! However, the main draw has always been the single player campaign, at least for me. When I heard Mass Effect 3 was getting multiplayer, I thought "please let it be campaign co-op." But when I heard it didn't involve the campaign at all really, I pretty much thought it would stink :\ I just didn't see how Mass Effect could pull off a multiplayer mode.
Then the demo, came out, and all of those fears were put to rest. It wasn't a campaign-centered co-op mode like I wanted, but what it did have was extreeeemely addictive and fun. And now that the full game has arrived with more maps, characters, abilities, items, and enemies, it's even better.
In a nutshell, this is like hoard mode in Gears of War. You have continual waves of ever-increasingly difficult enemies coming at you, and believe me the game puts up a decent challenge even on bronze difficulty, the lowest of 3, with silver and gold being higher.
In multiplayer, you earn points and credits for types of attacks, successful kills, assists, streaks, power usage, etc. After the match is over you can use points to upgrade your skills, and use credits to purchase item packs. These mechanics are key factors in making the multiplayer feel fresh because of the breadth of skills, character types, and weapons that exist.
The skills are a limited set of the standard powers you get in the campaign. Different character types have different skills in different combinations, which actually adds to the incentive to keep playing. Once you've upgraded one character type to its fullest, you'll want to see how play-style would have been affected with a different combination of skills, or different characters altogether.
Item packs come in different varieties depending on how much you want to spend. Each more expensive pack has better items, weapons, upgrades, and characters, with some randomness thrown in to the equation as far as what you get each time.
If you're a Mass Effect fan, or even just a co-op multiplayer junkie, I'd highly recommend you check out ME3's multiplayer mode. I talked with several other people who have been playing, and it seems to have surprised everyone. I think we all had the same idea. We've been so hooked on the single-player experience that we assumed anything not campaign-centric would be a colossal flop. I'm very happy to report that I was wrong... so, so wrong.
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