It’s almost time to face off with the reapers; prepare yourself with the latest action-packed trailer. The story of the trilogy defies simplification, not least because it unfolds differently depending on player choice. Governments fall, friends and enemies are made, whole races live or die by your decisions, so that by the third game, loading a save from the first two radically changes the world you wake up to in ME3.

The plot varies from player to player but, in a nutshell: the year is 2183, and you are Commander Shepard (male or female, depending on your preference), a military leader and reluctant messiah not just to mankind but all the many alien races of the galaxy. Said galaxy, naturally, is under threat of annihilation. In this case by the Reapers – a race of vast, space-faring sentient machines that look a bit like shrimp and swing by every few millennia to say hi, chillax for a while and then destroy all life as we know it.