Mass Effect 3, BioWare’s recently released sci-fi RPG for PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360, is already a hit, but it’s way too big to accompany you during your everyday life. To fill the gaps between your opportunities to play the real thing, Electronic Arts has released a mobile tie-in game based on the same universe: Mass Effect Infiltrator. Designed by IronMonkey and available for $6.99 from the iTunes App Store, it’s a combat-themed companion game that closely resembles the genuine article. It’s basically fun, and players of Mass Effect 3 will get some additional benefit from the time they spend with it, but questionable controls and an absence of the detail and originality the series is known for keep it from being a must-download for everyone.

The iOS-based game, which is designed exclusively for iPod touch, iPhone, and iPad (sorry, users of everything else), doesn’t follow the adventures of the hero of the main Mass Effect series, Commander Shepard. While he’s off battling the Reapers, you take on the persona of Randall Enzo, a longtime Cerberus agent who falls afoul of the techniques of the paramilitary organization and begins fighting back. Set mostly in and around a Cerberus base where experiments are performed on various species, you’ll battle dozens of Cerberus agents, prisoners, mechs, and mutants as you try to take down the facility from the inside out. You have at your disposal many of the tools seen in the main series: weapons, abilities, and biotics, and you’ll need to use them all across the game's nine stages, as you’re outnumbered and outgunned at almost every turn.

Tricky Controls
It’s an intriguing premise, and it starts off exciting enough, but the thrill of playing wears off quickly. The biggest reason for this is the touch controls. Controlling Randall isn’t too hard: You move your thumbs around the lower corners of the screen, the left to cause him to walk or run forward and the right to change his direction. But because the extremely useful Cloak ability is permanently anchored in the lower-right corner, you can easily turn yourself invisible when you intend to move the camera—and the ability’s long recharge time means you may pay for your mistake with Randall’s life. Other interactions are flawed as well: Biotics are located in the upper-left corner and weapons in the upper-right, not exactly convenient much of the time (especially if you're playing on an iPad), and require dragging your thumb to select the option you want. Because combat doesn’t pause for this (as it does in Mass Effect 3), quick weapon and skill changes are tough, especially early on.

Basic movements are easy to screw up, too. The motions for crouching into cover and jumping over a barrier in front of you are almost identical; more than once (okay, more than ten times) I found myself diving into a firefight I had been scrupulously trying to avoid. Cover presents its own issues—dashing between locations is awkward when it works, and your inability to easily edge around corners complicates the process of avoiding incoming enemy attacks. Because the game requires you to tap enemies to target them (though this works only when they’re in range of your active weapon), if one moves in front of your target, you don’t do any damage to him, a glitch that is as ridiculous as it is frustrating.

Repetition Rankles
A more pervasive problem is that there’s a real sense of sameness to the fighting. Though you occasionally fight different-looking adversaries (you go up against Krogan and Asari prisoners at one point, and a giant mutant provides one of the tougher “boss” battles), they’re drawn from a smallish pool and don’t demand much creativity or advanced tactics to defeat. Once you know you need a shotgun to most easily take down a Geth Juggernaut, for example (which the game tells you in the first level), there’s not much mystery when you see them later. And the flood of riot troopers is always solved the same way: by using the Pull biotic to separate them from their shields then mowing them down. Mass Effect 3 does this, too, to an extent, but there more and more types of bad guys, which keeps the fighting fresher than it seems here. The limited span of weapons and biotics (four of each), all of which are centered on standard-issue combat chores, do little to alleviate the drudgery.

In fairness, you can't expect the copious detail from an app that you can from a full game. But it's hard to not miss the role-playing aspects that have always been among the most fascinating parts of the Mass Effect series, but are nowhere to be found in Infiltrator. At a few points you do make some elementary “Paragon or Renegade” choices, but the rest of the dialogue is all prefabricated, and you don’t get the chance to define Randall as a character much beyond that. He's a highly one-dimensional protagonist, which more than anything else brands this as a Mass Effect game in name and action scenes only.

Gritty Fun
All this aside, Mass Effect Infiltrator is a decent enough game. It generally looks good, with the visuals conveying the properly gritty, makeshift feel. (The most recent version, as of this writing, also includes graphical enhancements for the high-resolution Retina display on the new iPad.) Dispatching enemies gives you credits, which are used for purchasing weapon and ability upgrades, and “style points,” based on how creative you are with your use of weapons and biotics, determine how many you earn. You can also buy up to 200,000 credits at a time using real-world money, though you can still easily complete the game without doing so.

Some enemies also drop “intel.” Pick up these yellow packets and either trade them in for credits or upload them (assuming you have your Origin account linked to the game) to improve your Galactic Readiness Rating in Mass Effect 3’s Galaxy at War subsystem—the higher your number, the likelier your success when the Reapers reach Earth in the game’s finale. Completing Infiltrator, which will probably take relatively experienced players five or six hours, rewards you with bonus War Assets that improve your odds still more.

Diehards Only
This all means that Mass Effect Infiltrator will appeal most to players of Mass Effect 3, who either want to keep their trigger finger engaged offline, want to speed up game play with Galaxy at War, or both. And certainly, there’s more to do here than with EA’s other (free) tie-in app, Mass Effect 3 Datapad. But in style it’s a such a departure from the “real” Mass Effect games, and the disappointing control system and lack of variety make it seem less vibrant and immersive than other iOS games like Dead Space and Mirror's Edge (both of which also linked to larger video games and were also designed by Iron Monkey), that it won't be a solid sell for anyone else.

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