You Can Beat Mass Effect Without Guns

In a third person shooter, you wouldn’t think there’s be a quasi-“pacificism” option, and really, there isn’t. You can beat Mass Effect without firing a shot, but you’ll be forced to tear enemies apart using your biotic abilities alone.

Here’s the full story via Kotaku:

“I’d always assumed this would be a huge challenge, as the game looks like it’s set up primarily as a shooter (95% of the upgrades you get are for guns, characters constantly get out guns during cutscenes, 90% of the inventory in shops is guns), but instead, I had the easiest time by the end of the game.

Instead, it was the early missions that were a nightmare, as then my cooldown times were huge, so the thugs of Chora’s Den, and the two assassins outside it, were a big challenge.

Saren’s elite Krogan Battlemaster shock troops were simple. By the time I was facing them, I had warp specialisation, lift specialisation, and master throw. The final fight against Saren himself was the easiest of all. As he’s the only enemy in the room, you can just keep him indefinitely in the air with a chain of lifts from Shepard and your companions. He barely got an attack off before the warps killed him. So I suppose the most surprising thing is that playing without guns completely inverts the difficulty curve.”

You can check out the effort made in the video above to see just how much work this kind of playthrough is. I assume they’ll now do this for the rest of the games too. Good luck!