The players take control of Randall Ezno, a Cerberus Operative that ends up at odds with Cerberus's plans for himself and his coworkers. Much shooting and backstabbery ensues.
The game also ties into the metagame of "Galaxy at War", allowing the players to secure intel drops (which can either be redeemed in-game for extra credits or converted to Galactic Readiness boosts for the metagame), and score Cerberus Defectors, which, like the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer soldiers, also boost the overall Galactic Readiness.
It was removed from the iOS/Android stores in April 2018.
Mass Effect: Infiltrator provides examples of the following tropes:
- Bribing Your Way to Victory: Traditional iOS RPG Elements game scheme - you buy new equipment with in-game currency, which, if necessary, you can get more of for real money.
- Checkpoint Starvation: Some firefights are over after one wave of easily-dispatched mooks. Some require you to kill several waves in one location, move to another and survive some more. Good luck if you get a phone call somewhere along the way.
- Critical Existence Failure: Just like in the original games.
- Cut and Paste Environments: Most of the Cerberus base is essentially the same building blocks rearranged in different orders. Granted, this should be expected of a secret base built of prefab elements.
- Do Not Run with a Gun: One of the main complaints about the original game was that you cannot move and shoot at the same time, while some of the battles (particularly the bosses) were clearly designed with you being able to do this in mind. Your enemies do not have that limitation. This was, thankfully, patched as of version 1.03. You can now toggle between the original system and the aiming mode from Dead Space Mobile, which finally lets you walk while aiming, walk while shooting, circle-strafe and more! The boss battles suddenly became a lot easier, too.
- Elites Are More Glamorous: You're a very special operative, and not only because your face has glowy things in it.
- Expy: Randall Ezno is a heavily augmented super-agent working for a shadowy paramilitary organization who eventually turns against his employers when he discovers their true agenda. If you think this sounds more than a bit like JC Denton, you're literally right, since both characters are also voiced by Jay Anthony Franke. They both even have the same nano-aug markings.
- Flash of Pain: While averted for enemies, it is used for boss battles to mark whenever you hit the weak points.
- Gameplay and Story Segregation: The bonus mission has the turian from the first mission who managed to put up a fight against Randall, fight his way through mooks with less equipment than Randall, kills at least 6 krogans, waves of Cerberus troops, an OGRE mech and dozens of ORCUS mechs and, then gets locked in a room with a turret, not unlike the one you have to fight less than two waves ago, and fades out as he is about to get mowed down against a weak turret that by now any player could have beaten.
- Hero of Another Story: The 1.03 update introduced a section devoted to "Bonus Missions", the first of which treats us to the fate of the turian infiltrator that brings in in the tutorial level.
- Jack of All Stats: Randall can use biotics, a stealth generator, four out of Mass Effect 2's six weapon types (assault rifles, shotguns, sniper rifles and heavy weapons) and therefore is less of an Infiltrator in the terms of the original games and more like a cross between a Vanguard and an Infiltrator.
- Multi-Mook Melee: All of the gameplay can be summed up as exactly this.
- Overheating: The game uses the ME1 overheat/cooldown mechanic instead of ammo.
- Quick Melee: If an enemy is close to you, tapping him to enter attack mode will make Randall biotically punch him instead. The detection on this sometimes makes him attack thin air, because it switches modes farther out than the attack can actually reach.
- Regenerating Health: Done following the Mass Effect 2 scheme; both your shields and your health regenerate if you stay out of danger long enough.
- RPG Elements: As you earn money, you can buy better abilities and equipment as necessary.
- Save Scumming: The game doesn't really track those Intel Points outside of itself. Amass a lot, back up your saves through whatever means you can think of, spend them on Galactic Readiness, restore the backup. Voila, that intel is back while your Readiness is now higher! Rinse, lather, repeat.
- Scenery Porn: It may not be based on the Unreal engine, but some of those locations are downright spectacularly gorgeous, especially on the iPad.
- Scoring Points: You gain money based on how much "combo points" you earned and how swiftly you completed a section. You gain points for chain-killing enemies, making each next kill with a different weapon than the previous one and extra points for One Hit Kills.
- Shout-Out
- After Randall leaves the Cerberus base, his first stop is a planet known only as LV426.
- The subtitles name two Cerberus mooks Biggs and Wedge.
- The base AI during the "Medbay" mission threatens your volus ally with "I'll find you, hacker-r-r...". So that's where Shodan ended up.
- Temporary Online Content: The game's delisting from digital storefronts took its War Assets for Mass Effect 3 with it.
- Voice with an Internet Connection: The volus that guides Randall on his path of defection.
